some measure vulgarized it. A geologist might do it in the line of his profession. But one who wishes to keep the Etna of Eschylus and Pindar may do better to gaze with awe from the hill of Syracuse, as they did upon this Greek Sinai. I do not want to overpower a mountain like that.

I want it to overpower me. One may doubt whether Coleridge would or could have written his hymn to Mont Blanc if he had "conquered " it as tourists express it.

Just as the train for Syracuse was coming in we reached Lentini station, and this time the sea that "washes away all human ills" was not available. We here made a resolve to do our work in the future when the sun was nearer to the horizon. There was nothing of interest for us to investigate in the city of Gorgias, the sophist and orator, whose silver tongue, combined with a bold and transparent trick of the Segestans, duped the Athenians, who thought themselves the wisest of men, into the Sicilian expedition. We were accordingly glad to speed along to Priolo, a station between the ruins of Megara and the flat peninsula, Thapsus. Just be

yond the latter, having ridden long enough to get up steam, we washed away our ills for that day with the hill of Syracuse looking down upon us, and then as renewed men passed, when the sun was approaching the horizon, over that historic hill, and looked down on the historic harbor and on little Ortygia, large enough to hold the modern city as it held the first Corinthian colony. What a tide of associations rush over one at this sight. In a sense we were at our goal. Had we closed our journey with that nightfall we should at least have read our Thucydides for the future with different eyes.

In an exaltation of spirit we came to the Casa Politi, almost at the point of Ortygia, looking out upon the sea, where we found a German host and hostess. After our strenuous and partially successful wrestling with Italian, which had generally ended by our falling back on the member who had taken Italian at Harvard to straighten out for us the tangled web of the dialogue, how welcome it was when we asked the question, "Haben Sie vielleicht gutes Bier?" to get straight from the shoulder the honest an

I have never had more full and exhilarating days than those four days in Syracuse, days full of revelation, recollection, reverie, or, to put it more prosaically, days devoted to study in history and topography. The ruins of Syracuse are not to the casual observer very imposing. One might almost say of them, "periere etiamque ruina." But even these ruins have great interest for the archæologist. There is, for example, an old temple near the northern end of Ortygia, for the most part imbedded in the buildings of the modern city, yet with its east end cleared and showing several entire columns with a part of the architrave upon them. And what a surprise here awaits one who thinks of a Doric temple as built on a stereotyped plan. Instead of the thirteen columns on

only over the columns, and not also between them as in all other known cases. Everything about this temple stamps it as the oldest in Sicily. An inscription on the top step, in very archaic letters, much worn and difficult to read, contains the name of Apollo in the ancient form, 'Améλori. The inscription may, of course, be later than the temple; but it is in itself old enough to warrant the supposition that the temple was erected soon after the first Corinthian colonists established themselves in the island. While the inscription makes it reasonably certain that the temple belonged to Apollo, the god under whose guiding hand all these Dorians went out into these western seas, tradition, with strange perversity, has given it the name of Temple of Diana." But it is all in

the family. Whether tradition has also erred in naming the temple on the highest part of the island, into which the cathedral has been so immured that the old temple columns protrude on each side of the church, the "Temple of Minerva," is a question to which archæologists have not yet returned a unanimous answer. Indications point rather to Zeus. This temple owes its preservation, such as it is, to this immuring of the cathedral in it. In fact the temple is nearly all present, although one might almost pass it by in the daytime without seeing it. Another temple-ruin on the edge of the plateau, which begins about two miles south of the city across the Anapos, one might also easily overlook in a casual survey of the city, because it consists only of two columns without capitals and a broad extent of the foundations from which the accumulated earth has been only partially removed. This was the famous temple of Olympian Zeus, built probably in the days of Hiero I., soon after the Persian War, but on the site of a temple still more venerable. One seeks a reason for the location of

this holy place at such a distance from the city. Holm, the German historian of Sicily, argues with some plausibility that this was no mere suburb of Syracuse, but the original Syracuse itself. In the first place the list of the citizens of Syracuse was kept here down at least to the time. of the Athenian invasion. In the second place tradition, which when rightly consulted tells so much, says that Archias, the founder of Syracuse, had two daughters, Ortygia and Syracusa, which may point to two co-ordinate settlements, Ortygia and Syracuse; the latter, which was on this temple plateau, being subsequently merged in the former, but, as sometimes happens in such cases, giving its name to the combined result.

Besides these temple - ruins there are many more foundations that tell a more or less interesting story. Then there are remains of the ancient city that can never be ruined, for instance the great stone quarries, pits over a hundred feet deep and acres broad, in some of which the Athenian prisoners were penned up to waste away under the gaze of the pit

iless captors; the Greek theatre, cut out of the solid rock; the great altar of Hiero II., six hundred feet long and about half as broad, also of solid rock. Then there is the mighty Hexapylon, which closed the fortifications of Dionysius at the northwest at the point where they challenged attack from the land side. With its sally ports and rock-hewn passages, some capacious enough to quarter regiments of cavalry, showing holes cut in the projecting corners of rock, through which the hitch-reins of the horses were wont to be passed, and its great magazines, it stands a lasting memorial to the energy of a tyrant. But while this fortress is practically indestructible, an impregnable fortress is a dream incapable of realization. Marcellus and his stout Romans came in through these fortifications, not entirely, it is true, by their own might, but by the aid of traitors, against whom no walls are proof.

One of the stone quarries, the Latomia del Paradiso, has an added interest from its association with the tyrant who made himself hated as well as feared, while

Gelon was only feared without being hated. An inner recess of the quarry is called the "Ear of Dionysius," and tradition says that at the inner end of this recess either he or his creatures sat and listened to the murmurs that the people uttered against him, and that these murmurs were requited with swift and fatal punishment. Certain it is that a whisper in this cave produces a wonderful resonance, and a pistol-shot is like the roar of a cannon; but that people who had anything to say against the butcher should come up within ear-shot of him to utter it is not very likely. Historians are not quite sure that the connection of Dionysius with this recess is altogether mythical, but that he shaped it with the fell purpose above mentioned is not to be thought of, as the whole quarry is older than his time, and was probably, with the Latomia dei Cappuccini, a prison for the Athenians.

No object is more frequently mentioned in connection with Syracuse than Arethusa, the nymph changed into a fountain when pursued across the sea by the river Al

pheius. The water of this fountain, much praised in antiquity, has in recent times become brackish by the letting in of salt water through earthquakes. But what it has lost in real excellence it has gained in stylish appearance. For the sake of its ancient renown washwomen have recently been excluded from it, a fine wall put about it, and papyrus plants added to make it look picturesque. Enveloped in a more natural beauty lies the rival fountain Kyane, the source of the southern branch of the Anapos some distance south of the Olympieum. The nymph Cyane was turned into a fountain by Pluto because she told Demeter of the rape of Persephone. We gave half a day to Cyane, and had ourselves pushed up a stream lined with reeds and papyrus, the latter a reminder of Saracen occupation, to this spring, from which the stream comes forth with a rush. It is difficult to decide which is more beautiful, the clear, deep, broad spring or the stream through which one approaches it. The whole journey is like an excursion into fairyland, the outside

world being shut out by the reeds and papyrus.

But if the monuments of Syracuse are on the whole comparatively unimpressive, what a history is crowded into the less than three centuries between Gelon, the second founder of the city, in that he made it great, and Marcellus.

This history is far from being a mere record of slaughter and sieges and sack of cities. The time of Hiero I. is memorable for the appearance at Syracuse, in familiar if not always friendly converse, of Pindar, Simonides, Bacchylides, Eschylus, Epicharmus and Xenophanes. One must not think of the poetry of this Hieronian circle as exotic because most of the poets were transplanted: to the Greek poets any place in the Greek world where they were appreciated and cared for was home. Anacreon sang as well and as naturally at Samos and Athens as at his native Teos; Simonides's muse was apparently equally happy in Athens, Thessaly, and Sicily; and even the Theban eagle suffered no relaxation of his wings at the Syracusan