rminian land. Shall I add, from the few relics of that
age, that Pythagoras, on the journey he undertook to establish the
governments of the Sicilian cities, wrought miracles here, curing a mad
lover of his frenzy by music, and being present on this hill and at
Metaponto the same day--a thing not to be done without magic? But at
last we see plainly Alcibiades coasting along below, and the ill-fated
Athenians wintering in the port, and horsemen going out from Naxos
toward Etna on the side of Athens in the death-struggle of her glory.
And then, suddenly, after the second three hundred years, all is over,
the Greek city betrayed, sacked, destroyed, Naxos trodden out under the
foot of Dionysius the tyrant.

Other fortune awaited him a few years later when he came again, and our
city (which, one knows not when, had been walled and fortified) stood
its first historic siege. Dionysius arrived in the dead of winter. Snow
and ice--I can hardly credit it--whitened and roughened these ravines, a
new ally to the besieged; but the tyrant thought to betray them by a
false security in such a season. On a bitter night, when clouds hooded
the hilltop, and mists rolled low about its flanks, he climbed
unobserved, with his forces, up these precipices, and gained two outer
forts which gave footways to the walls; but the town roused at the sound
of arms and the cries of the guards, and came down to the fray, and
fought until six hundred of the foe fell dead, others with wounds
surrendered, and the rest fled headlong, with Dionysius among them, hard
pressed, and staining the snow with his blood as he went. This was the
city's first triumph.

Not only with brave deeds did Taormina begin, but, as a city should,
with a great man. He was really great, this Andromachus. Do you not
remember him out of Plutarch, and the noble words that have been his
immortal memory among men? "This man was incomparably the best of all
those that bore sway in Sicily at that time, governing his citizens
according to law and justice, and openly professing an aversion and
enmity to all tyrants." Was the defeat of Dionysius the first of his
youthful exploits, as some say? I cannot determine; but it is certain
that he gathered the surviving exiles of Naxos, and gave them this
plateau to dwell upon, and it was no longer called Mount Taurus, as had
been the wont, but Tauromenium, or the Abiding-place of the Bull. A few
years later Andromachus performed the signal action