If you care for an experience out of the usual in this smiling island, stop on the Bagheria road at the church of San Giovanni dei Lebrosi or, as some Americans call it, “The Leprosy,” in the midst ofa settlement of tanners. Here you are attended by three women, each flourishing a large key, all dirty and unkempt, and a barking, snapping, currish crowd of begging children. One of the three women unlocks the door of the alley at whose inner end the church stands. The stench is almost stupefying, the air thick with vapors. The second woman opens the door of the church, one of the oldest Norman structures in the island, now painfully restored with obtrusive brick and whitewash, and the third proves to be the keeper of the sacristy. Still another huge key now appears—this time in the hands of a surly man, who insists on showing you out another way, through an orange grove, though your carriage is in plain sight at the foot of the lane. These evil-looking children and caretakers are the most pertinacious and insolent you will encounter anywhere in the island. Has the fetid atmosphere anything to do with their crabbed humor?
In this plain of ancient Panormos, as both city and district were once known, there comes vividly to mind a curious battle scene. To-day we experiment with automobiles and aeroplanes as instruments of war: more than two thousand years ago disaster overtook the arms of Carthage because General Asdrubal placed his reliance in the then new-fangled elephant auxiliaries. Rome, for all she was conquering the world, trembled before these “great gray oxen,” as the legionaries called them.
However, the Consul Metellus, who commanded inside the city, directed his attention effectually first of all to these splendid targets moving ponderously and disdainfully up against him. Pain-maddened by a ceaseless shower of darts and arrows, the great beasts shook off their helpless drivers and charged furiously to and fro, trumpeting, goring, trampling, wild engines of destruction which did more mischief to the Carthaginians than to Rome; and before night fell over the field of slaughter, the Romans led captive more than half of the hundred and twenty once dreaded Titans that had been Asdrubal’s reliance, but which had cost him the battle.
Continuing toward the city along the road called the Corso dei Mille, over which Garibaldi and his immortal Thousand marched to victory, we pass close beside the old Ponte d’Ammiraglio, built some eight hundred years ago by King Roger’s Grand Admiral Giorgios Antiochenos. In those days it spanned the swift Fiume Oreto, but now the fickle water has chosen another bed, leaving the massive stone bridge high and dry, and looking very useless and absurd in an open field.
Entering the town by the Garibaldi Gate—the liberator is even more frequently honored than the first King—we follow Garibaldi Street to the Piazza della Rivoluzione, in which a queer, old, bent, apparently half-intoxicated figure of the crowned Genius of Palermo marks the spot where the firstrevolutionists gathered twelve years before the Thousand captured the city. Near by in the Piazza della Croce dei Vespri is the monument in memory of the French massacred in 1282, and buried here beneath a single marble column surmounted by a cross and surrounded by a railing of lances and halberds. At the corner of the square, built in a housewall, is a single fifteenth century column, marking the site of the palace in which Governor St. Remy, who was the lieutenant of Charles of Anjou at the time of the massacre, lived and is said to have been besieged.
From the railroad station a broad street, the Via Lincoln, leads to the bay. Gualterio volunteered the information that the street, “la Via Lin-col-ni,” was named for a “great Sicilian patriot who was shot long before we were born!” It would have been a pity to disillusion him and rob Sicily of so great a figure, so we kept a smiling silence.
Beside the bay is an exquisite little park with broad lawns, splendid trees and paths laid out like the spokes of a huge floral wheel; one of the most perfect gardens in Sicily. It is called Villa Giulia, in honor of Donna Giulia Guevara, wife of the viceroy, Marcantonio Colonna, who founded it in 1777. The gardener’s little boy, a cherub of soft black eyes and winsome smile, afforded another striking proof of the beneficent effects of education upon the children. Announcing proudly that he was learningto be a gardener himself, he flitted from flower to flower like an amorous bee, fondling, smelling, praising each burgeon in turn, and naming the plants with a perfect flood of Latin botanical terminology.
“The ‘Poor Man’s Promenade’ stretches away toward Mte Zaffarano, dim and misty.”“The ‘Poor Man’s Promenade’ stretches away toward Mte Zaffarano, dim and misty.”
It was in this lovely park that Goethe spent a great deal of time during a Sicilian sojourn in 1789, reading Homer and seeing the Villa’s beauties with so sympathetic an eye, he wrote of it that it looked like fairyland and transported him into ancient times. HisItalienische Reiseis particularly enthusiastic on Sicily, and he sums up the island’s importance with a glowing tribute: “Italy without Sicily leaves no image in the soul—Sicily is the key to all.”
In clear weather a large raised terrace at the southeast corner of the Villa affords a peep at distant Ætna’s hoary crown. But if the weather be too hazy to see the Titan, the nearer view compensates in great measure for the invisible volcano. To the southeast the “poor man’s promenade” stretches away in a misty vista toward Monte Zaffarano. The fishing boats tie up here, and the fishermen and their families make merry over their early suppers at open-air tables in the dusty, unpaved square that extends inland from the broad and level beach. In the other direction the broad Foro Italico or Marina, a handsome, tree-lined esplanade circumscribing the edge of the bay, with Monte Pellegrinorising massive and dominant at the other end of the town, miles away, affords a striking contrast. This is the “rich man’s promenade,” and here, in summer, Fashion makes its eveningcorso. Half Palermo sits in its iron-bottomed chairs sipping at the ices and cool drinks for which the cafés are noted, and smoking countlesssigaretti, while the other half rolls lazily by in its carriages of state.
From the Villa Giulia a line of old palaces marks the landward side of the Marina all the way down to the foot of the Corso, at its other extremity. Many of them belong to nobles whose names are woven deep into some of Sicily’s most important history. Down near the Porta Felice—the Happy Gate—a little wooden pavilion juts boldly out into the sea, a combination library and tearoom, whose presiding genius is an English gentlewoman, charming of speech and manners. No pleasanter way of resting after a hard day’s work sightseeing can be found than to sit here over cups of steaming Ceylon, while the sea shimmers an iridescent opal, ruffled with streaky little ripples of protest for the approaching night. And afterward what more fitting than to reënter Eden by the Happy Gate—the Porta Felice—named as a memorial of the Lady Felice Orsini, wife of the Viceroy who built it. Happy Lady Felice, to have such a monument—andporta felicein truth, looking one way out over the sparkling sea and the other upon the city beautiful.
FASCINATION and Palermo are synonymous; the subtle charm of the city works into one’s very blood. Day after day and week after week roll by, until with a start of surprise that is akin to consternation one realizes that unless he has a year to devote to the island he must seek fresh vistas soon or leave Sicily, having seen nothing but the capital. Regretting is as vain as it is foolish. The only thing to do is to go!
Until you do, you have no idea of what thetessere—those amazing little bargain books—do for the Sicilians. Not only do they bring foreigners with money to spend, but natives of every class and station, unable to travel at other seasons of the year, flock to the ticket window with thetesserein their hands; and many of them who ordinarily would travel third class make afestaof their trips by buying first-class accommodations with the aid of the rebate.
There is no Pullman system in Sicily. The first arrivals at the station take the best seats, and hold them against all comers. If you do not like cheaptobacco, and do like air, it is a good plan to reach the station early. All this we learned by experience; so we were ready to leave Palermo some time before the train was, and secured a little stateroom called aberlina, in the front of the car, whence an unobstructed view on both sides is to be had.
Scarcely is the capital left behind than it is completely forgotten in the astonishing floral display that flashes past—an unending motion-picture in vivid colors. For miles the track runs close beside the sea between deep floral hedges. Crimson geraniums from five to eight feet in height blazing with color, pink wild roses, sweet-scented white locust blossoms, spiky prickly pear, the yellow striped spears of the agave, and pink and lavender morning glories vining among and over them all give one the impression of being hurled through a giant hot-house. But here is no cultivation. Sicilian Nature, with prodigal lavishness, is alone responsible for the brilliant pageant. At the feet of the taller plants burgeon scarlet poppies, low, earth-nestling lavender cactus blossoms, and legions of dazzling buttercups. More poppies among the grass and grain contrast with whole acres of heavy-headed deep crimson clover, in which the hungry cattle wade to their knees.
On the landward side of the railroad undulate the hills in soft nuances of green, speckled and flecked with ever-changing light and shade. Farmhousesmassively built of rough unshaped stone, because the stone is there and mortar is cheap and the labor costs nothing, stand at long intervals among the golden grain square and squat, each with a heavy Normanesque battlemented tower. The poorer houses barely show their roofs or towers above the dense groves of lemon or orange. Sometimes part of a white wall appears through the bushy tree foliage, which is varied by occasional wide stretches of vines on low, far-reaching trellises, over which stands a slim-bodied palm, an alert, lonely sentinel.
The sea shimmers like glass in the gay sunlight, and even from the rapidly moving train the bottom is visible, sometimes ten or fifteen feet below the surface. White stones and deep purple patches of weed lie like pearls and amethysts imbedded in the heart of the cool emerald. Tiny reefs, far from their islets, and big, jagged rocks show their teeth at the ragged coast line through fringes of snowy foam. Ever shifting car-window prospects float by on the wing, and before you can fairly appreciate one, you pass another.
Around a curve, the train dashes into a big fishing village, a sturdy hamlet of nets and boats, of men in bare legs and knitted caps with tassels, of houses packed together on the side of a steep hill, struggling upward like lame sheep; a town of tiles and whitewash huddled together under the protectionof a dozen stalwart-steepled belfries—Termini Imerese, busiest of Sicily’s provincial towns, famous for its macaroni. Here were the celebrated hot springs of Himera, where, legend says, Hercules bathed after his great wrestling match with King Eryx. It is said that the water from these springs gives the macaroni its characteristic flavor. And here Agathocles, the Peter the Cruel of Greek Sicily, was born.
A few miles east of Termini the railroad leaves the shore, and turning southward enters the valley of the Torto, to begin climbing the rugged backbone of Sicily; the watershed between the ancient African and Tyrrhenian Seas. We might be in another country and clime, so different is the scenery as we puff on southward, the way bordered on either hand by the ruins of medieval castles and by little mountain towns still living in the Bronze Age. Near Lercara, forty-eight miles from Palermo, the sulphur mining district begins, where the mephitic gases from the smelting furnaces have poisoned and stunted vegetation and herbage, giving everything a ghastly mummified look, besides polluting the keen mountain air with an unmistakable brimstone flavor.
At Aragona-Caldare Girgenti first appears, seven miles away, surely “a city set upon a hill that cannot be hid.” Yet to-day it is no more like the ancient Greek Akragas, founded twenty-five centuriesago, than the dried sponge is like the live one. All that is left of this richest and most splendid of Sicilian metropoli is huddled within the confines of its former acropolis, high on the top of the hill. The greater city, which spread clear down to the temples that fringe the abrupt southern edge of the plateau, has vanished completely, and the bright homes of the gods, crumbled into mellow ruin, stand alone beside the shattered wall, in the midst of the everlasting beauty of hill and plain.
In its palmy days—which began after the battle of Himera and lasted until the Carthaginian siege—Akragas was so wealthy and so filled with splendor that the record is almost incredible. The Akragantines’ flasks and body-scrapers, for use in the baths, were of gold and silver, their beds of ivory, their feasts and celebrations magnificent. At the wedding of the daughter of Antisthenes, one of the two leading citizens, there were eight hundred chariots in the wedding procession, every single citizen was feasted, and the whole city seemed ablaze from the smoke and flame of the innumerable bonfires. Even more noted was the hospitality of Gellias. His slaves stood always at every gate of the city, to bid all who came thither welcome as his guests. Once, indeed, he even entertained—clothed, lodged and fed—five hundred cavalrymen and their horses. And, as Freeman says, these men, Antisthenes and Gellias alike, wereneither tyrants nor lords nor oligarchs, but simple citizens of the democracy.
The main source of the city’s wealth was her trade with Carthage, especially in the grape and the olive, neither of which grew in Africa at that time. Evidently, though, the grapes were not all sent to Carthage, for Timæus tells us that a house in the city was nicknamed the “Trireme” because some young men of fashion got very drunk there one night, and imagining they were in a reeling, rolling ship at sea, began throwing the furniture overboard to lighten the laboring craft. When the generals of the Commonwealth came rushing in to quiet things down, the drunken boys mistook them for gods of the raging sea, and prayed them to calm the storm!
Empedocles, one of Akragas’s most famous sons, laments that his fellow townsmen “gave themselves to delights as if they would die to-morrow, while they built their houses as if they were going to live forever.” Little did these luxury-loving folk think that the very barbarians whose trade was so enriching them would at last grow envious and snatch back by force the wealth they had built up for their neighbors. Empedocles, by the way, is one of the most picturesque characters in the whole story of Sicily. A political leader and an engineer who did wonders for the sanitation of the city, he refused supreme control when he might have had it,and proclaimed himself a sort of primitive socialist early in his career. But later in life he seems entirely to have forgotten his previous socialistic theories. Dressed in a purple robe with a golden girdle, brazen shoes, and a Delphic wreath for his thick hair, he wandered from city to city proclaiming himself, in the words of one of his own poems, theKatharmoi, “An immortal god, and no longer a mortal man.”
Nearly a sixth of Sicily’s sulphur is exported from Porto Empedocle, Girgenti’s ancient haven, six miles distant. From the station platform one sees all around reddish-yellow and gray hills covered with small dumps and pierced with scores of drives, dotted with little shanties and pricklied over with chimneys where the miners are delving and smelting. On the sidings near the depot scores of flat cars are heaped high with huge pressed cakes of the sickly greenish-yellow sulphur, while the roadway leading to the freight-house is fulvid with powdered brimstone, and the atmosphere faintly suggests things infernal. In the city museum the antiquarian may study the tile stamps of the Roman period—Girgenti was Agrigentum then—for impressing the sulphur cakes before they solidified.
Outside the station every train draws a barking crowd offacchini(porters) and hotel-runners, from whom you escape into an hotel omnibus. We chosea tiny, rickety, low-roofed vehicle, which had developed rheumatism and gout in every complaining spring and joint. Delighted to secure the only first class passengers who had come on that express, the driver whipped up his three emaciated nags and we started on the long, circuitous, heart-breaking climb up the steep hills to the citadel above.
The bus was scarcely moving when a face appeared at the rear door, not of the usual hotel porter who rides behind, but of a Murillo cherub, brown-eyed and dark, with a lurking smile so ingenuous and charming that one must have been stony-hearted indeed not to succumb to the spell of his innocent sorcery.
The hotel on the Via Atenea—the only street in Girgenti worthy the name of a thoroughfare—proved a seedy, disreputable looking establishment, giving upon the narrow way in a black hole into which we plunged, to find a pair of winding, cold stone stairs in the rear up which we stumbled to the second story office. But the drawbacks of this inn—and there are better ones in town—were fortunately most of them on the outside. Our room was really comfortable, and the luncheon considerably better than we dared expect, though the dessert, in a dirty glass cake-dish, consisted of oranges, nespoli, or Japanese medlars, large raw broad-beans, and something that looked like celery but proved to befinocchi, or fennel, one of the staple foods of thepeople, apparently a natural source of concentrated paregoric.
When the porter announced that our landau was waiting after luncheon, we questioned the ability of the three mangy, half-starved horses—the same team which had brought us from the railway station—to drive all the afternoon over the amazingly steep and hilly roads; but assured that these very animals had been doing the same work for “twenty years or more” we started off congratulating ourselves on escaping the guides, unnecessary nuisances.
As we stepped out at the little antique Gothic church of San Niccolà, the cherub suddenly appeared before us.
“Hello! Where did you come from?” I inquired.
The lad only shook his head, but the coachman, whose face was all one broad grin, waved his whip at the rear of the carriage. “A dietro—On behind!”
It was true. For miles that child had clung to the rear axle in the choking dust for the sake of a little silver. With an air of modest assurance he introduced himself—“Alfonso Caratozzo,signore. I am just twelve years old. For six years I have been the best guide in Girgenti, and all the grand foreign gentlemen are much pleased with me. I can show you everything.”
Alfonso’s large claim was fully justified by his conduct of our affairs, his poetic appreciation notonly of the beauties of the scenery but of his own dignity and importance as counselor and pilot of theforestieri americani—and no one who wishes a guide can do better than to inquire for Alfonso the Wise!
Never was the mixed civilization and pagan ancestry of the Sicilians of to-day brought more vividly to our attention than in this little church of San Niccolà. The attractive girl custodian was a perfect young Saracen Sicilian, black-eyed and raven haired, with big gold and coral earrings. Beside her Alfonso, as purely Greek as she was Moorish, looked every inch a faun. The girl knew what stories she had to tell very well. Alfonso, however, evidently bored by the history of ancient Akragas from the day of its founding, whispered: “Pay no attention to her,signore. She tells this to everybody!”
Shades of Diodorus—what should she tell!
Near by stands a little Roman building dating from the second century B. C. Somehow it got the name of Oratory of Phalaris, though it certainly was not in existence in Phalaris’s time. How strange that such a building and such an idea should be associated with this most widely advertised of Greek tyrants! Of all the disputed stories told of him, that of the brazen bull is most widely known; and without his bull, Phalaris would be no more than an hundred obscure tyrants in other Greek cities. Thelegend declares that an artist named Perillos made a monstrous hollow brazen bull in whose shoulder was a door through which the victim could be thrust. When the fire underneath heated the diabolical invention, the cries of the sufferer, issuing through the nostrils, sounded like the roarings of the enraged animal. The tyrant, with a proper sense of humor, immediately tested the efficiency of the image upon its luckless inventor Perillos. In later times apologists denied these stories; but Pindar, writing within a century after the death of Phalaris, summed up Sicilian public opinion of that day very tersely in the lines:
“Phalaris, with blood defiled,His brazen bull, his torturing flame,Hand o’er alike to evil fameIn every clime!”
“Phalaris, with blood defiled,His brazen bull, his torturing flame,Hand o’er alike to evil fameIn every clime!”
Very different indeed are his praises of Theron of Akragas, one of the greatest and best of the Greek tyrants, with whom he was contemporary. The Second Olympian Ode is perhaps the most fulsome. Cary rendered it:
“Theron for his conquering carShall spread a shout of triumph far and wide;True to his friends, the people’s pride;Stay of Akragas and flowerOf many a noble ancestor;They, long toils and perils past,By the rivers built at lastTheir sacred bower, and were an eyeTo light the land of Sicily.And I will swearThat city none, though she enrollA century past her radiant scroll,Hath brought a mortal man to lightWhose heart with love more genial glows,Whose hand with larger bounty flows,Than Theron’s.”
“Theron for his conquering carShall spread a shout of triumph far and wide;True to his friends, the people’s pride;Stay of Akragas and flowerOf many a noble ancestor;They, long toils and perils past,By the rivers built at lastTheir sacred bower, and were an eyeTo light the land of Sicily.And I will swearThat city none, though she enrollA century past her radiant scroll,Hath brought a mortal man to lightWhose heart with love more genial glows,Whose hand with larger bounty flows,Than Theron’s.”
It was during the reign of Theron that the city, approaching the height of its prosperity and pride, joined forces with Gelon and the Syracusans in defeating Hamilcar’s Carthaginians in a tremendous battle at Himera. The victors took an immense number of the defeated soldiers captive, and Theron began to rush forward epoch making municipal improvements. The slaves, being only human, could not last forever, and they were worked hard while their strength endured, toiling in the stone quarries, building the city wall, excavating a huge fishpond, and commencing the construction of the magnificent temples along the southern rampart.
“Tyrant,” by the way, in that age of civilization, did not necessarily mean a brutal, oppressive or fire-breathing monster. Indeed, some of the tyrants were among the best rulers Greek Sicily ever had. As Freeman says, “tyrant” meant a forcefulusurper, a man who raised himself to the supreme authority when kings and kingship were not only unlawful but were not even the fashion.
Of the six glorious temples—among the most brilliant achievements of the most brilliant period of Greek freedom in Sicily—only two remain standing, at the verge of the hill, limned in all their marvelous Greek severity and simplicity against the tender landscape. Overhead burns the cobalt sky of Sicily; around them burgeon crimson poppies, delicate buttercups and spurge, and other flowers innumerable. Flute-voiced birds swing and sing in among the olives, in air languid with the perfume of the almond in bloom.—And in the clear sunlight of the South, the temples themselves glow with a golden radiance that must surely be a faint reflection of the fires of the immortal gods.
Models of Doric simplicity, these temples consisted only of a windowless shrine for the god, surrounded by an open colonnade, the whole covered by a gabled roof. Their design was at once the result of the climate and of Greek civilization. The religion was intimately connected with devotion to the State; hence the homes of the gods, who were both the patrons and companions of the people, were public buildings, their porticoes open to the daily life and commerce, the intercourse of the citizens.
The Greek religion was beautiful, rarely beautiful. But exclusive, mysterious? No! Its rites weresimple—choral hymns, rhythmic dances, ceremonies executed by the citizens themselves. And the priests guarded no occult sciences, as did the Egyptians; kept to themselves no written hieroglyph unintelligible except to the initiate. They were laymen, married men with families, soldiers, merchants, men engaged in every walk of life.
Marvelous architects, those old fifth century Greeks! To give their low and heavy buildings greater charm than was possible with mere straight lines, they made their columns gently swelling; smaller at the top than at the bottom. At the corners of the edifice they even sloped them slightly inward. They bent the foundation upward a little in the middle, and did the same thing with the long line of the entablature above. Yet it would seem that they were given to gilding the lily. They covered the rich golden travertine of which the edifices were built with a thin coat of white stucco or mortar, upon which were painted striking ornaments in many brilliant colors. It is hard to believe that the temples when painted could have been as magnificent as they are to-day; yet they must have been—who are we to impugn Greek taste!
The Temple of Concord “was used in the Middle Ages as the Church of St. Gregory of the Turnips.”The Temple of Concord “was used in the Middle Ages as the Church of St. Gregory of the Turnips.”
The Temple of Concord, because of its use in the Middle Ages as the church of Saint Gregory of the Turnips, is one of the best preserved pagan buildings in existence, all of its thirty-four giant columns still standing. It makes a picture of beautiful andserene old age that loses nothing by comparison with the eternal youth of its surroundings. House of peace it has been called, and house of peace it still is, after the storms and wars of more than fourteen centuries have ebbed and flowed about its massive base.
Thecustode, a garrulous old soldier, insists on your instantly taking the view from the architrave above the cella, which really is magnificent. But you are not ready for that just yet. Why must these caretakers always tease you to do something when you don’t want to! Glimpsing the fat little red book in your pocket, he smiles sardonically. “Ha! You wish to be let alone?” he exclaims. “Ha! You believe the book of a German, not the word of a Sicilian. But does the book tell you the Christians who turned this temple into a church were the first Sicilians to embrace the Faith? No,signore—but you believe your German book. Very good, believe it!” and he stalks away, secure in his precious tradition.
From the Temple of Concord the road ascends gently, parallel to the ancient wall, until it reaches the southeastern angle of the precipitous plateau, occupied by the so-called Temple of Juno. Below it on the east flows the San Biagio, zigzagging in a southwesterly direction to join the Drago torrent, with which it enters the Mediterranean at the old harbor of Emporio. Perched upon this lofty cliff,nearly four hundred feet above the sea, the temple commands a wonderful view.
This structure is in far less perfect condition than the Temple of Concord, only twenty-five whole columns standing, while everywhere the mellow golden stonework is marked with peculiar dull, bloody stains supposed to be traces of the fire set by the Carthaginians in 406 B. C., in their endeavor to burn the city. The tradition seems to have little foundation in fact, for on other ruins, parts of the old Greek wall, and even on some of the rocks of the vicinity, the same strange stains are frequently visible, and appear to be a natural property of the stone, possibly due to its exposure to the weather.
Here I sent Alfonso away on an errand, and another small boy guide hung about us until we entered the holy of holies. Springing upon a shattered block of marble which he said had been the altar where the huge statue of Juno had once stood, he took an absurdly constrained position, and cried: “Look,signore—Juno stood here—just like me!”
One of the most alluring ruins is the fragment, called for want of a better name presumably, the Temple of Castor and Pollux. Embayed in a grove of olive and almond, resting upon a veritable carpet of flowers among which climb tangled vines, rise four stately columns, silhouetted sharply against the dazzling sky, and supporting a honey-coloredfragment of entablature. And though the archæologists declare the columns to have been taken from two different edifices and arbitrarily joined, this detracts not a whit from the grace and beauty of the restoration and its surroundings.
Olympian Jupiter it was who had—as befitted the king of the gods—the largest temple. Indeed, after the vast temple of Diana at Ephesus, this was the largest Greek shrine ever built. Now all there is to be seen is a vast formless heap of cut stones in a living sea of brilliant yellow bloom. Unafraid, these star-eyed flowerets lovingly enfold shattered column and pediment, creep up into the sacred close of the cella or sanctuary, and kiss the huge prone figure of one of the thirty-eight titanic Atlantides or caryatides, about twenty-five feet in height, which are believed to have supported the entablature. The colossal edifice measured about three hundred and seventy-two feet long, at least one hundred and eight-two wide, and probably about one hundred twenty high.
And these are not all, by any means. There are more ruins of temples, within and without the walls, more interesting to explore than to read about; there are Christian catacombs and tombs; the megalithic wall, and the Porta Aurea, the Golden Gate that looks straight out over the golden southern sea. And there are also some very interesting antiquities on view in the Museum—but beware thespecious vendors of relics who hang around the temples and the hotels. The Greeks of twenty centuries ago did not stamp their products, “Made in Germany!”
All along the way are vast numbers of peculiar white lumps on grass and leaves and walls, clinging like burrs to even the fruit and treetrunks.
“They are snails, Excellency,” explained Alfonso, “and very good to eat. After it rains they grow big and fat. Then they are very sweet.”
Springing down from the box, the child tore a fat snail from the wall, and hopping up again, cracked it open skillfully with his teeth, drew out and ate the quivering mollusc. Waving his hand toward some more large specimens on the wall, he asked: “Excellency would like some too?”
“Excellency has just had his luncheon,” opportunely interposed the driver. “Snails are not good for dessert.”
Within the acropolis again, we dismissed the landau out of pity for the wretched horses, and rambled about on foot. Before reaching the Cathedral we passed Alfonso’s home, where he introduced us to his family with all the éclat of a noble presenting friends at court; and poor as these Sicilians were, we found among them all—father, mother, aunt, cousin, three sisters and a brother—no lack of that inborn courtesy which distinguishes the Latin peasant.
Collectively the family showed us the church of Santa Maria dei Greci, in which are supposed to be incorporated the scanty remains of the principal sanctuary of either Zeus Atabyrius or Minerva, while some urchin, locked out and so deprived of all opportunity for tips, playfully stoned the church door. The Cathedral is more interesting, though the apse is over richly stuccoed, covered with scrolls and cherubs in gold and white. One of its chief treasures is a madonna, painted by Guido Reni, though not comparable to his best work. In the sacristy is a really fine old white marble sarcophagus of the Roman period, bearing reliefs of the myth of Hippolytus and Phædra.
But nothing within is comparable to the view from one of the windows at the sunset hour. It recalls the Biblical prophecies of Canaan with the chalky roads for the milk, and the gold of the daisies, mustard and marigolds for the honey of this Promised Land. The chief charm of the scene as the hills lie weltering under the fading glory of the sinking sun are these same milky roads, flowing through the verdant swards and vales. In the background the ugly, prosaic sulphur pits, dumps and chimneys make splashes of harsh modern color in this world-old landscape. It is a scene unforgettable. Slowly, gently, the soft rosy-bluish evening haze creeps up the hillside; bit by bit the purple shadows deepen, the soft harmonies of tender green melt into theblur of the background, and only the creamy highways stand out distinct.
Not so very many years ago this entire region was unsafe because of the brigands. Now one may go anywhere about Girgenti with perfect security. Nevertheless, a pair of Carabinieri—they always travel in pairs, by the way—gorgeous in all their glory of black and scarlet, with cockaded cocked hats, were always somewhere within range when we were outside the city proper. They seemed to take as keen an interest in the ruins as we did, though temples must have been an old story to them.
Alfonso spoke to one of these kindly familiars whom we passed, struggling to make his greeting as careless as the familiar “Hello!” of the American streets. Good humoredly the Carabiniero answered him, and as we went on, the boy remarked with innocent egotism:“You saw him,signore? He is my friend. You are with me, and he would let nothing happen to you. It is good to know the police—as I do!”
TO the northwest of Girgenti the country is honeycombed with sulphur pits and it is not very hard to credit the ancient myth that the gates of Hades opened here. After the train leaves the trunkline of the railway at Aragona-Caldare, tunnels and sulphur mines make up most of the scenery. This entire district has a smitten look, and on the bleak rolling plains and rugged hills are dreary towns whose chief charm, as they flit past in a continuous gray motion picture, lies in their historical suggestions. The most important and flourishing city we pass is Caltanisetta, the center of the sulphur industry, which produces more than half a million tons annually. The mines are most of them primitive in the extreme, and machinery is practically unknown, while in many of them fuel is so scarce and costly that the operators burn the raw sulphur itself in theircalcaronior smelters.
Shortly before reaching Santa Catarina Xirbi, the junction town where the tracks join the Palermo line, we have our first glimpse of Mt. Ætna, its snowy cap hanging in the distance like a low whitecloud. Small gorges and tunnels follow in rapid succession, and the train pants upward in tortuous curves through the barren valleys, until we look up at Castrogiovanni, the Enna of the ancients. It lies in an almost perfect horseshoe on a precipitous rock, and so surrounded by nearly perpendicular approaches, so walled in by Nature with beetling crags, that none of its innumerable ancient besiegers was ever able to storm it. Treachery—and once starvation—did for it what armed assault never could. Livy rightly called it “a city inexpugnable,” and it probably is so yet, for it has recently been strongly fortified after the most approved modern style. The ascent is by a road which—well, try it for yourself. But the town, once reached, pays for the climb in its magnificent views. It is the navel (umbilicus Siciliæ) of Sicily, and from the loftiest tower of the former citadel there sweeps away a mountain cyclorama such as not even Switzerland can excel—Ætna, peaks without number, range on range and tier on tier, melting into the haze of heaven. Towns, thousands of feet in the air, cling desperately to the steep, unfriendly sides, or perch precariously on the tops of needle-pointed mountains. And on the South, beyond hills and plain, dimples the ultramarine of the African sea.
For centuries before the adventurous Greeks colonized the hill, Enna was the principal home of aSicilian goddess, the patron of natural fertility and of the harvest, whom the Greeks identified with their own Demeter, and the later Romans with Ceres. Not a stone of her temple is left, and we can do little more than speculate upon its site, said to have been where the old citadel now stands. About two hours to the south by carriage is that once lovely little lake of Pergusa, where Pluto met and straight-way stole the lovely Proserpina to be the queen of his dark realm. It was then a district so fair that Diodorus said the hounds often lost the scent of their quarry, so rich was the fragrance of the flowers. But alas! the spot is blasted now. Gone are the splendid shade trees in whose branches the singing messengers of spring carolled; gone all the beauty of Pergusa, now but a dirty little pond, where peasants steep their flax. But at least we can think of it still in Ovid’s words: “A spot at the bottom of a shady vale, watered by the plenteous spray of a stream that falls from wooded heights; where Nature decks herself in all her varied hues, where the ground is beauteous, carpeted with flowers of many tints.”
Ætna appears again soon after the entrance to the valley of the Dittaino is passed, and beckons with such insistence that the train hesitates only a moment—at the station for Valguarnera Assoro—right before the railway restaurant. It is a tumbledown little shack with a big sign:RistoranteG. Galliano. If you are on good enough terms with the Signor Conductor, he may wait long enough for you to have a sip of the excellent country wine and a taste of the “beautiful goat” the redoubtable Galliano purveys to such as can pay his very modest price. A few miles farther on is the station for Agira, which occupies the site of one of the very oldest Sikelian cities, lying back from the railroad, up in the hills. Later it was the birthplace of the historian Diodorus, who gives a picturesque account of his native village.
Half an hour later the railway emerges from the hills upon the plain of Catania—so productive of grain that from the very beginnings of local history it has been known as the granary of Sicily—and leaving the main line at Bicocca, puts Catania and the great volcano behind, heading southward for Syracuse. Fine crops appear around the famous Lake Lentini, Sicily’s largest inland body of water, varying from about nine to twelve miles in circumference, according to the season. It is a dreary tarn, looking so like a big mud puddle or a meadow overflowed by stagnant salt water that it is easy to credit the tales of the mephitic vapors and exhalations and fevers which have made it the scourge of the neighborhood.
Evidently the Sicilian railroads provide no drinking water for the employés in wayside stations, for as we stopped the combination telegraph operator,baggage smasher, ticket agent and general utility man ran out to the locomotive and tapped the brass faucet in the tender for a drink. There is a big water-wheel a few miles farther on, arranged exactly like an Egyptiansakiyeh, and no doubt a survival of the Moorish wheel installed in that very well centuries ago. The apparatus is very simple. A horizontal wheel is geared loosely into a vertical one by big, clumsy wooden teeth. Over it projects an arm to which some patient draft animal is hitched. A long grass rope carrying an endless series of pottery jars or buckets completes the outfit by running over the vertical wheel, and all the water that does not splash back into the well flows into an irrigating pool and the ditches. The mule who worked this particular wheel acted as if he too were a Moorish survival, unaccustomed to modern inventions. Anyway, he tried to bolt when the engine shrieked. His plunging blindfold gallop sent the water flying in all directions, giving his peasant master a much-needed bath and earning the poor beast a beating, the blows of which could be distinctly heard as the train sped on. Around a curve Mt. Ætna appears again in all its majesty, filling up the entire background, looming more than twice as large as familiar Vesuvius. Its lower slopes are green and the upper reaches snow covered, split like a sore lip, with dark curves, queer bumps and sharp little corners of uplifted skin. Above them poises the soft black,slightly indented cone, canopied by a ridiculous tuft of cottony smoke no bigger than a handful at such a distance.
Agnone is a hedge of yellow daisies, a deep pasture full of reddish brown kine, a farmhouse of stone with thatched shelters for the animals in the midst of rich cultivated lands. A mile away gleams the sea, a dull turquoise green flecked with windy ripples and dotted here and yon with white—“Silver sails come out of the west.” The tall timothy on both sides of the track, and other fields planted with oats and spiky cactus, seem mere picturesque settings for countless fiery poppies. Sheep by the hundred bolt in terror from the wild shrieks of the locomotive, preferring to run straight ahead on the track as long as they can possibly keep out of the way of the engine. Bold headlands here and there lower their stubborn crests for a few yards to give the flying train instantaneous vistas of wet sand gleaming far below, like blades of golden sickles edged with silver filigree.
In rapid succession these rugged scenes slip behind, and we run along the shore past salt farms and their windmills; then a boldly jutting island, brave with forts and churches, rising out of the sea like Venice—Augusta the picturesque, modern survivor of Xiphonia, scene of many a fierce battle and bloody conquest.
Augusta was founded in a most picturesque wayby Emperor Frederick II. The town of Centuripe up in the hills, having roused the imperial ire by its sedition, was effectually razed. Then Frederick punished its people still further by driving them all into this spot and commanding them to stay there and be good. Perhaps its stormy birth in a measure accounts for Augusta’s stormy history. The most spectacular affair it ever witnessed was the tremendous naval duel between the fleets of France and Holland in 1676, when Admiral Duquesne defeated the Dutch Admiral De Ruyter, who afterward died of his wounds in nearby Syracuse. Following the coast closely, we flit swiftly past the Hyblæan Hills, eager to stop for some of their historic honey, but relentlessly carried onward by the insensate iron horse, that knows not nor cares for the sweets that rival the product of Hymettus.
All the way from Augusta the track borders the shore of the Bay of Megara, where anchored Nicias, Alcibiades and Lamachus, the Athenian generals who came to attack Syracuse in 415 B. C. with a fleet so vast that men paled merely to see it whiten the horizon. But to-day, instead of the tents and sails of invading hosts, you see evaporating-tanks and windmills, and snowy piles of salt dotting the rugged shore in serried ranks. Rushing across the neck of the promontory of Thapsus—now called Magnisi—we skirt Trogilus Bay, where the conquering fleet of Marcellus the Roman lay two centuriesafter the Atheniandébâcle, cross the old Dionysian wall, sweep around the bold headland, and stop at Syracuse.
Don’t be disappointed in Syracuse by what you see of the dirty little provincial town that yawns sleepily at you between the railroad station and your hotel. Suspend judgment until you reach the Greek Theater, and from the top row of seats carven into the eternal rock, look out over the gracious panorama below. Beyond the sparsely settled vineyards and groves covering what was once the Greater Syracuse, lies the city of to-day on Ortygia, an oyster-shell full-heaped with pearls, in a sapphire setting of twin harbors and glittering sands. The alchemy of golden sunshine transmutes whitewashed tenements into Greek palaces, fishing luggers into stately galleys of war, and prosaic modern peasants into the soldiers and citizens of a happier and more stirring day. And as you stand breathless with the wonder of it, history unfolds itself in memory, with something at every step to drive that history home, be it Sikel, Greek, Roman, Saracen or Norman. The ruins of the mighty fortress atop the inland hill breathe of the Age of Tyrants, and to follow the herculean walls of Dionysius around the deserted plateau fills one with awe and wonder anew, for the work seemingly has been performed by a race of giants. Below, yawning in the seacoast of Achradina, dim caverns invite the explorer’s rowboat. There are the Street of Tombs to search for relics—though most likely you will find only a few scattered bones; the Castello Maniaces on the tip of Ortygia, full of Byzantine memories; charming walks to and through the quarries, the famousLatomie; the astonishing catacombs and the Anapo trip. A score of other delightful excursions the visitor can take, providing he is not driven forward by the exigencies of a cut-and-dried itinerary, that wickedest and most specious of all excuses for not seeing enough of a country really to enjoy it!
“From the top row of seats in the Greek Theater look out over the gracious panorama below”—Syracuse.“From the top row of seats in the Greek Theater look out over the gracious panorama below”—Syracuse.
The mother colony was founded in 734 B. C. on the little island of Ortygia, named for the quail the Greeks found there in great coveys. From its very beginning the benignant gods smiled upon Syracuse, and it prospered so rapidly that within seventy years it was founding colonies of its own. Under the tyrant Gelon, son-in-law of the great and good Theron of Akragas, and later practically co-ruler with him of all Greek Sicily, the era of Hellenic supremacy began, with Syracuse in the van of progress. Indeed, Syracuse was of such paramount importance that sometimes its history is mistaken for the history of Sicily. Tyrants good and bad rose and fell; democracy overthrew tyranny, and tyranny overthrew democracy. Demagogues—the word means literally “popular leaders”—rose to stir the people to action against the government or thetyrant—and sometimes threatened to become tyrants themselves. Seeing how easy it was to sway the rabble with hot words, men of every class began to practice public speaking; no young man’s education was complete without it; and oratory first became an art in Sicily.
From the island of Ortygia the city spread up the hilly mainland in four new boroughs—Achradina, Tyche, Neapolis and Epipolai—making a mighty pentapolis; a community which was not only the foremost of all the Greek cities in the island, but much the greatest in physical extent of all the Greek cities in the world, and for a time the greatest city of Europe as well as of Greece. This naturally made Athens jealous, and in 415 B. C. the pent up force of Attic wrath loosed itself in a tremendous blast against Syracuse. But Athens’ traditional enemy, Sparta, sent the island city help, and the Athenian arms went down in one of the most appalling defeats of all history. After this vivid chapter, governments and tyrants rose and fell again as before, deliverers came and conquered in the name of the people, and passed, and at last the young giant Rome stepped in with brazen legionaries and put a period to the brilliant story.
To-day, as in the beginning, the city is on Ortygia, the houses crowding together behind the old walls like birds on a roost, and you wonder why, when there was such ample space on the shore,the people huddled together so. The streets, moreover, are amazingly shifty. On foot you set out to explore the town and encircle it by keeping as close to the walls as possible—a matter of a mere hour and a half, with plenty of time to idle by the way. According to the maps this should be no great feat, but try as you may, it seems impossible to lay a true course, and becoming discouraged after slipping off one street four or five times, you abandon yourself to the vagaries of these astonishing high and byways—they fade into one another without sign or signal, they vanish on front doorsteps, end after half a block in blind alleys, terminate in bastions which lead one to suppose that the sea must be below on the other side, only to turn up somewhere else in most mysterious fashion, and not always running in the same direction as their beginning.
There is little that is up-to-date about Syracuse. To a great extent it lives in medieval seclusion and its people are simple, genial folk so wholly out of touch with the world that whatever is essential for comfort or convenience is proper in public. On one street, for instance, I saw the economical wife of a small shopkeeper wash her baby’s only frock—a slim little red calico—and button it to dry over the bulgy part of a lamppost, which looked choked and uneasy as the tiny slip fluttered in the wind. Meantime thepiccola signoritadisported herself amiably in the street—and all herfrolicking in the dust could not hurt what she wore.
Near the center of the city stands the Cathedral, a queer combination of battlemented Moorish castle, ancient Greek temple and modern Christian structure. Nearly thirteen centuries ago Bishop Zosimus of Syracuse began the work of turning the ruined temple—built early in the sixth century B. C.—into a Christian church, filling in the peristyle with a solid wall in which some of the Doric columns are still visible. The Saracen invaders turned it into a mosque in the year 878, and for two centuriesmuezzinschanted the names of Allah and Muhammad from its walls. With the Norman conquest in the eleventh century the building again became a Christian house of worship, and though the earthquake of 1693 destroyed a part of it, the damage was soon repaired and it has ever since remained the diocesan church of Syracuse. Like many of the often restored cathedrals of Meridional Italy, its interior is barren and uninteresting, but its exterior, with Greek entablature and columns, Saracenic frieze and battlements, and hideous Renaissance façade and portico is unique among Christian churches.
There seems some doubt among the archæologists as to the deity worshiped here in pagan days. It was formerly ascribed to Diana, but the authorities now generally believe it was the shrine of Minerva,though Cicero’s glowing description of the Temple of Minerva (Athena) places that structure in a location apparently different from the site of the present Duomo. The orator says he saw a temple on whose apex was “...a great brazen shield overlaid with gold, which served as a landmark to sailors on entering the port. The folding doors of ivory and gold were also adorned with a marvelous golden head of Medusa.” Most of these magnificent treasures were stolen. The Roman prætor Gaius Verres, a gentleman with a highly cultivated taste in works of art, stripped Syracuse—and all Sicily, in fact—absolutely bare of everything the Roman armies had overlooked. And when at last he was brought to book for his crimes, he fled into voluntary exile with his plunder rather than face the scathing invective of Cicero.
The archæologists’ dubiety regarding the name of the temple has no room in the minds of the street arabs, however, who vociferously proclaim it the “Tempio di Diana,” and will not suffer you to leave until you have paid for this volunteered information.
Diagonally across the Piazza Duomo is the externally unimposing Museum. Its collection, however, is both interesting and intelligently arranged. It covers the civilization of Sicily from the bone and flint implements of the extinct prehistoric Sikels, through the transitional Greek period of themetopes from Selinus, to the splendid coins and vases of the city’s supremacy as an Hellenic center of culture and art. In fact, the profile of Arethusa, on coins signed by Evanetus and Kimon, is considered the most exquisite Greek head known to us. In those days coin-makers were artists of the foremost rank, accustomed to signing their work, like painters and sculptors, and these two, Evanetus and Kimon, have left us a noble set of coins in which the Greek conception of divinity appears at its best. The most beautiful marble is a Venus Anadyomene, discovered in 1804, and preserved almost intact save for the head and one arm.
Not very far away there are ruins of another and very remarkable Greek temple, formerly called for Diana, but now generally considered to have been dedicated to Apollo—the archæologists seem to have a grudge against the virgin huntress! There is not much else that is Greek, but as you wander through the narrow streets, scattered bits of mediæval architecture appear in the most unexpected places, like the splendid Sicilian-Gothic and Saracenic windows of the Montalto and Lanza palaces, all the richer and more wonderful because of the surroundings from which they look down upon the squalid streets and out-at-heel people. The later Palazzo Municipale, or City Hall, is a fine example of the architectural spirit of the seventeenth century, its type that of a private palace, a baronialmansion rather than a public building. During this period great attention was paid to ornamental ironwork for decorative purposes upon the façades of buildings; and all about us are delicate and satisfying window balconies, some of which plainly testify to their Spanish origin.
“In those days coin-makers were artists of the foremost rank, and signed their works.”“In those days coin-makers were artists of the foremost rank, and signed their works.”
The first of the Greek settlers brought their home legends with them to Sicily, where they found a friendly soil, attaining their fullest perfection in the sympathetic hands of the Latin poets. Some of the most beautiful weave through the story of Syracuse, and the most delightful walk in the city—one you will want to take often—leads you straight along the edge of the Great Harbor, on a wide, tamarind-bordered esplanade, with the town wall rising behind, to the picturesque, papyrus-fringed little pool accounted for by one especially gracious tale, and called the Fountain of Arethusa.
Long centuries ago—so runs this immemorial fable—there bubbled up out of the beach of the Great Harbor a crystal spring. And close by, in the briny waters themselves, another little fount gushed forth, pure and sweet. The airy Greek fancy could not pass by so remarkable a coincidence, and the Syracusans quickly came to believe that the twin springs were the gentle nymph Arethusa, the well-beloved of Artemis (Diana), and her river-god lover Alpheus; that Arethusa, too impetuously wooed by Alpheus on the island of Ortygia in OldGreece, had been graciously changed by Artemis into a spring, and taking the long, dark journey under the Ionian Sea, had escaped to the sunlight again in the newer Ortygia in Sicily; that Alpheus, not faint-hearted, had changed himself to her own watery shape, and following hard and fast, had missed her by the merest trifle only, bubbling up in a second spring in the waters of the harbor close beside his beloved. But Poseidon of the sea was mightier than nymph or river-god. Shaking his mighty bed one day, he burst open the wall about fair Arethusa.—To-day her water is salt, not sweet, and no more does her lover Alpheus bubble up beside her in the Bay.
ANOTHER of the beautiful legends with which the history of Syracuse is deeply interwoven is the story of Kyana—Cyane—and Aidoneus or Pluto. To run it to earth take a stout green and blue rowboat across the Porto Grande, about two kilometers wide, to the river Anapo. The snapping breeze blows briskly, and the boat tumbles about in lively fashion upon the sparkling sapphire, past the big motionless yachts at anchor and the slow-curtseying sailing craft coming into the docks from thesalineor saltworks in the marsh below the river.
What a contrast between the harbor of to-day and that of twenty-three or four centuries ago, when not another city in the world could boast so great a port, so populous a harbor! Here swam the merchant fleets of all Sicily, of Greece, of Phœnicia, the navy of haughty Syracuse, the innumerable small boats that darted about between ship and shore—and remember, too, that these were sailing craft,—every one sea spiders with oars for legs in windless weather. Around the curving line of theshore for three miles the ships docked, from island tip to rivermouth. Fringing the bay were sloping beaches where they careened and calked and tarred their galleys with slave labor. Shipyards, arsenals, and merchants’ warehouses lined its shores. All the activities of a great maritime people hummed about this bay with its margin of city. And all the city’s splendor, all her power, sprang from the harbor, and from her control of the waters, exactly as England, two thousand years later, began to rise to her present eminence by virtue of her position and her skill in deep waters.
Only a little imagination is required to picture the salt-boats of the twentieth century as the short, clumsy triremes which on that memorable September 1, 413 B. C., brought about the dramatic climax of the war between Athens and Syracuse. The Athenians’ fleet bottled up in the Great Harbor by a line of chained-together galleys and merchant hulks anchored from the tip of Ortygia to the promontory of Plemmyrion a mile south, prepared to force its way out.
All Syracuse and both armies lined the shores, stood up on the seats of the distant Theater, crowded the housetops to encourage the fighters with their cheering and shouts. The rival commanders made their usual orations, exhorting the crews to acquit themselves as men and patriots. Out into the Bay rowed the fleets—Grote tells the story vividly:“Inside this narrow basin, rather more than five English miles in circuit, one hundred and eighty-six ships of war, each manned by more than two hundred men, were about to join battle—in the presence of countless masses around, near enough both to see and to hear; the most picturesque battle probably in history, without smoke or other impediments to vision, and in the clear atmosphere of Sicily.”
At the first onset the impetuous Athenian attack, headed for the barrier, broke through the Syracusan defense, and the Athenians were shouting with triumph as they began to cut the hawsers fastening together the blockading hulks, when the Syracusan triremes closed in on them from all sides, and the action at once became general and desperate. Ship crashed against ship, and vessels once lashed together rarely separated. Though Syracuse could throw only seventy-six triremes of the line against the hundred and ten heavy Athenians, she reinforced her vessels with a perfect cloud of mosquito craft that hovered, stinging and galling, about the equal antagonists. In a measure the action demonstrated the efficiency and value of the small, swift cruiser or torpedoboat of later times, to which the light craft may be considered analogous, never daring to do more than shoot and run, and shoot and run again.
Thucydides makes the peaceful harbor ring and echo again with the surging of the dramatic chorusof citizens and armies urging on the fight:
“And the great noises of many triremes fallen foul of one another both amazed the seamen and prevented them from hearing what their leaders directed; for they directed thick and loud on both sides, not only as naval art required, but also from sheer eagerness, the Athenians crying out to their fleet to force the passage ... and the Syracusans to theirs how honorable a thing it would be to hinder their escape, and by this victory to improve every man the honor of his country.... While the conflict raged on the water, the land forces had a struggle and sided with them in their affections.... For the fight being near, and not all of them looking upon one and the same part, he that saw his own side prevail took heart and fell to calling upon the gods that they deprive them not of safety; and they that saw their friends have the worse, not only lamented but shrieked outright.... And one might hear in one and the same army, as long as the fight upon the water was doubtful, at one and the same time, lamentations, shouts that they won, that they lost, and whatever else a people in great danger is forced differently to utter.”
Every one of the Athenian fleet and twenty-six Syracusans had gone ashore or foundered, only fifty vessels being left afloat, when the fight ended. Vainly did the Athenian generals plead with theirmen to fight again next day with those ships which could be hauled off the beach and made seaworthy; but so terrific had been the chaos, so utterly broken was the spirit of the Attic fleet, that the men refused to go aboard again, and the retreat was soon begun.
Forty thousand men, “like the emigrant population of a city, wandered laden with their baggage away from the coast into a country hostile to them, without any definite goal for the journey, without sufficient supplies of food, without confidence in their ultimate preservation, tortured by fear, lost in speechless or stolid despair, or raging in savage fury against men and gods; ... but most terrible of all was it to leave on the desolate shore the many wounded and sick, who raised their voices in loud lamentation as their relatives and tent-fellows departed, or clung to the skirts of their garments, and let themselves be dragged along for a brief distance, till they sank prostrate to the ground.”[A]