business with Arethusa, some of it not
very straight business; for Ctesius, the king of the place, had a
woman-servant, very tall and comely, who was from their own country; they
cajoled her in ways that no woman can resist and, partly by means of "a
necklace of gold with amber beads strung among it," induced her to go
away with them one evening, and she took with her out of the palace three
cups and the king's son, a child just able to run about. She may have
thought of taking the boy because she had herself been kidnapped from
Sidon, brought to Ortigia and sold to Ctesius. Before they had been a
week on the voyage, Diana struck the woman dead and the traders threw her
body overboard to the seals and fishes. We should never have known her
tragic end but for the fact that the _Odyssey_ was written by a woman
jealous for the honour of her sex. The boy was afterwards sold to
Laertes, the father of Ulysses, in whose service he put on immortality as
the swineherd Eumaeus. {294}

Early Greeks also did business with Arethusa and left with her vases,
gold rings, glass beads, ivory combs and other objects which she still
preserves in her museum. Later on, in quite modern days, about the time
that Rome was being founded, less than eight centuries before Christ,
other Greeks came from Corinth, turned out the Sikels and established a
colony of their own in Ortigia.

After this Arethusa was no longer among those who have no history in any
sense of the word. The records become less scanty, even voluminous, and
they are more legible. The books are full of the great names of her
visitors and of those native to her island. We read of the Tyrants, of
AEschylus and Pindar, of Theocritus and Archimedes; of the great siege
when the Athenians failed to take the city; of Cicero coming to view the
locality when preparing his speeches against Verres; of the five parts
into which ancient Siracusa was divided, namely, Ortigia, on the island,
and those four others with the beautiful names on the mainland,
Achradina, Tyche, Neapolis, Epipolae, the memory of whose former
splendour still trembles among their ruins.

I do not know whether Ptolemy Philadelphos actually visited the nymph,
but I have read somewhere that the papyrus which now grows where she
rises was originally a present from him. It does not look so healthy as
that which grows in the Fontana Cyane up the river Anapo across the
harbour, and which he also sent to her.

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