NEVER make the blunder of trying to study the Greater City when any of the big “tourist yachts” are in port. You will know soon enough when they are—cloop! cloop! cloop! go the hoofs under your windows long before you have thought of breakfast. An endless string of carriages plods out of the island full of gesticulating, noisy, Baedekering enthusiasts who make up in cheery adjectives what they lack in knowledge. When they are back at evening, white with dust and happily weary, and the launches have taken them all on board the white floating palaces, Syracuse sighs and sleeps again. Once more it is safe to venture out. Once more cabs can be had at decent rates. And once more the timid ghosts of Greek and Roman days come to the gentle call.

Ortygia, the island, was once connected with the mainland by a mole of cut stone, and afterward separated and attached and separated again as the whims and dangers of the different periods dictated. Now it is both connected and detached. Between island and shore is the citadel, separated from both by little canals crossed by stout bridges, and capable of defense in time of necessity. All the dust of a whole rainless season seems to concentrate upon the dusty road leading from the island across the bridges, by the citadel, past the rows of shipping that fill the docks on either side of the mole, and so on through the deserted square which was once the Agora of Syracuse.

Every Greek city had its agora, or marketplace, as every Roman city had its forum. Besides being the market, where food and commodities of every other sort were sold the agora was the assembling place of the city, the central exchange for news and views. You must use your imagination to-day to reconstruct the agora, to people it again with the dark faces and flowing robes of the Greeks of old, to hear the clank of weapons and armor as a Tyrant’s bodyguard passes through the unsmiling crowd: for the agora, now, is only a bare, open square, through the middle of which a naked red column thrusts upward. A kindlier fate has overtaken the Roman PalÆstra near by—a gymnasium and auditorium where the youth of Latinized Syracuse used to polish their muscles and wits alike. One exquisite bit of it remains—the little semi-circular lecture hall, in which clear water covers the pit, and mirrors back the delicate maidenhair peeping from the cracks and joints between the marble seats in its gleaming horseshoe. What schoolboy debating societies met here, and who were the “exchange professors” who held forth in this choice hall where now waterbugs and tiny lizards alone give sign of life?

Not far from town the road runs into pleasant farming country, followed by orchards of almonds, lemons, and citrons. Farther up the slopes of Neapolis and Epipolai straggle great rocky groves of uncanny, fantastically shaped old olives, the most disreputable-looking tenants of the soil imaginable. They are whorled like an oak, knobbed like an apple tree, split full of holes, leaning at all angles; and, most curious of all, some appear to be nothing but half-shells of bark, only half of each half-shell having any visible contact with the roots. How they live and bear fruit at all in such astonishingly rocky fields is a mystery, yet they are proverbially prolific. They seem ghosts of dead Syracuse, phantoms of the citizens who once, in the pride of their strength and glory, trod the streets of the great pentapolis of Epipolai, Neapolis, Tyche, Achradina and Ortygia—Syracuse all.

Fewer than thirty-two thousand inhabitants exist now in the city, where more than half a million once looked down upon the great argosies afloat in their twin harbors. And the hills where Gelon and the Hierons, Agathocles and Timoleon flourished, where Theocritus and Archimedes were born and toiled, lie apart, dotted with scattered limestone ruins where hawk and bat, tourist and guide are the only living things to disturb this city of silence.

About the Outer City, as the four mainland boroughs were called, Dionysius I—a brilliant soldier who by treachery and intrigue succeeded in raising himself to the tyranny early in the fifth century—spent seventeen years in constructing an enormous wall. Sixty thousand workmen with six thousand yoke of oxen constructed nearly three and a half miles in twenty days, a task whose herculean labor cannot be appreciated until the enormous blocks and the difficult formation of the country have been studied. Of the sixteen miles originally built, rather more than ten are still standing to testify to the solidity of the tyrant’s work.

On the westernmost point of Epipolai, the highest part of the city, Dionysius built his great fort of Euryelus, now completely ruined. Words cannot make clear the fort’s size and strength. It is only at Syracuse, standing among the crumbling piles, that one can grasp the value and vastness of Dionysius’s greatest work. Its five massive towers and deep moats, carved out of the living rock, make it hard to understand how it was ever captured. Nevertheless, two hundred years later the Romans under Marcellus did it, though not so much by storm as by treason. This siege was the work of an army, the brilliant defense of the city the triumph of a single engineer—brave old Archimedes, who worked such marvels that not a man could be seen upon the walls. Away back in the good old King Hieron’s time, he had pierced them for both near and distant shooting, and brought to perfection every imaginable weapon and military engine. Plutarch says he had huge claws with which he picked up galleys bodily and smashed them like eggs against the walls; ballistas and catapults and crossbows for heavy and light artillery; hooks like cranes’ bills; and certain devices for picking up ships and whirling them around in the air like huge pinwheels till their crews were all spilled out or dead. So greatly did the Romans come to dread his uncanny machines that they finally refused to approach those silent, apparently unoccupied walls at all, and the city had to be taken some other way than by storm.

At last, after a year’s siege, on the night of the Feast of Artemis, a party of Romans scaled the northern walls without resistance from the drunken guards, opened the gate, and the whole army marched in upon Epipolai. With the day, Marcellus stood there upon the heights and looked down over the fair city he had come so far to win. Stern man and able soldier though he was, this Roman had the soul of a poet, and as he looked, and mused upon all Syracuse had gone through before, all she would probably endure before he gained the inner city, he wept.

However, he did not have to fight his way—Ortygia was betrayed by a Spanish mercenary officer. The most tragic of the events that followed was the death of the greatest genius ever given to immortality by Sicily. The accounts differ in details. But it seems certain that Marcellus sent a soldier to summon Archimedes. The legionary found the aged scholar at work upon a mathematical problem, and when he asked for time to finish his demonstration, the blunderer misunderstood and killed him. Whether this be the exact truth or not, we know that Marcellus sincerely mourned his dead adversary.

In spite of the Roman commander’s tears over the sufferings of Syracuse, when first he saw it, he did not scruple to take away all he could of its pictures and statues and other works of art to adorn his triumphal procession at home, while the public funds he seized for Rome. This plundering of unfortunate Syracuse did not by any means stop with Marcellus, but went on through centuries, the worst offender being Verres of infamous fame.

From the shattered walls of Fort Euryelus spreads a magnificent view, bounded only by the mists in the distance. North and south run the scalloped shores, fading into the dancing blue of the Mediterranean; south and eastward lies Ortygia, the sun sparkling upon its thousand facets of white walls and tiled roofs, while in the opposite direction, when the clouds lift, stands majestic Ætna, still wearing his winter nightcap of snow. Straight west tower the hills, peak on peak, and the littoral blossoms with every scented fruit of the field.

Not far from the Fort is a little cottage marked CaffÈ, where the improvident, or those who have perfect digestions, may buy luncheon. But for the average person it is a good deal better to take along the sightseer’s snack the hotel puts up without extra cost—if you are living en pension—and eat it on the back porch. The CaffÈ serves “tea,” if you foolishly ask for it; but ink made from dried willow leaves is even less refreshing than the thin red country wine. Tea making is a fine art Sicily has yet to learn. However, the view from the rear veranda down the steep slope to the Bay of Trogilus more than compensates for the trivial discomforts of poor tea and iron chairs. Evidently the host is determined that his furniture shall not be numbered among the spoils of Sicily by the souvenir-hunting visitor.

How those ancient Greeks did build for futurity! Deep down under the rocky plateau, at the cost of no one knows how many lives or what money, they carved two enormous aqueducts that gave old Syracuse to drink from distant mountain streams. No dynamite helped them tear out the adamantine channel; no greasy rock-drills worked by steam chattered and thumped down there in the dark where now one hears without seeing it, the water which still gurgles contentedly on its way to the sea. It is all hand work, and one is filled with admiration akin to awe as the eye follows the low, square limestone copings that mark the course of one of them across hill and vale and field, over the heights of the Epipolai down toward the harbor.

Though Rome has left us comparatively few monuments in Sicily, they show clearly the difference between Greek and Roman ideals, in life as well as in art. The Greeks reared matchless temples and theaters never equaled for their purity and simplicity; the Romans, baths and amphitheaters whose floridness suggested display and luxury. The amphitheater of Syracuse is like all Roman amphitheaters, a vast elliptical arena—it measures two hundred and thirty-one feet long by one hundred and thirty-two wide—with an enormous cistern in the middle, to provide for flooding the ellipse for naval spectacles. The arena wall forms the side of a vaulted corridor with eight gates to give entrance and exit for fighters and beasts. Above all rise the seats in tiers, and in the arena you can pick out, upon shattered blocks of marble, several names of patricians who were “box-holders” in the grand tier.

Its very size bears witness to the degradation of Syracuse under the Roman rule, when the citizens, no longer satisfied with “stage deaths” in the theater, or with the splendid comedies of Aristophanes, demanded actual death and real blood here in the larger arena, where to-day the peaceful grasses and wild flowers innumerable spread their cloth of green and gold and crimson in a winding sheet of eternal beauty about the sanguinary old ruin. Here we met a young countryman of ours who promptly announced that he was abroad studying languages, and that, since paterfamilias “had a pull,” he was going to be a consul-general as soon as he finished his linguistic labors and decided to which country he wished to go.

A short distance beyond the amphitheater is the biggest altar in the world—six hundred and six feet long, seventy-five feet wide, and six feet high. King Hieron built it so that Syracuse might be able to celebrate its Independence Day properly—its Fourth of July, if you choose. When the last usurper had been gotten rid of, in what the historians call the First Age of Tyrants, the festival of the Eleutheria was instituted in honor of Zeus Eleutherios, the god of liberty; and it is rather remarkable that Syracuse kept right on celebrating after the democracy had ceased and the meaning of the festival had vanished. On Hieron’s altar was made a sacrifice every year as big as the altar itself. Think of butchering and partly burning up four hundred and fifty oxen at once to make a holiday! But then, in those old days they were open-handed devotees of their gods, and the whole city had a glorious spree on such a gala occasion as the Eleutherian Feasts.

Across the road is the Latomia del Paradiso, one of the vast quarries from which the stone that built Syracuse was hewn. Carved out of the solid rock to a depth of perhaps an hundred and twenty-five feet, the dripping, barren stonepit has mellowed with time; and Sicilian Nature, with her usual prodigality, has transformed it into a riot of warm wild color. Tradition makes Dionysius a suspicious monarch who constructed cavern-prisons to find out what was going on among his political prisoners. In the western wall of the Latomia is an S-shaped grotto which has been capriciously chosen as one of these strange houses of detention, and called the Ear of Dionysius. Whether it was really part of the tyrant’s original plan or an accident in the quarrying, the fact remains that a person at the upper end can hear even whispers from below.

Alongside the Paradiso is another quarry, the Latomia di Santa VenerÀ, a cultivated garden filled with even more profuse and brilliantly colored vegetation than its beautiful neighbor. All through the quarries are great columns, ledges, pinnacles and turrets, evidently harder portions of the rock left by the quarrymen when they were taking out the stone.

Immediately to the west of the quarries is the Greek Theater, a vast open playhouse, the largest in existence after those at Miletus and Megalopolis. Though the superstructure of fifteen tiers of seats and the stage have vanished, the auditorium is in very fair condition despite its age, about twenty-four hundred years. In the greatest days of Greece relatively little care was bestowed upon the design and decoration of private dwellings, and not a sign remains of most of them. But the theaters, the social centers of Greek-Sicilian life, remain; in part because they were hewn out of the everlasting rock of the hills, and partly because the Romans kept them in use and repair.

Here in the Syracusan Theater it was that the illustrious Pindar, laureate of princes, sang his most fulsome odes to the glory of that cruel and suspicious tyrant, the first Hieron, who is supposed to have founded it. We wonder at the poet’s mood. Was it simply a question of so much flattery for so much patronage, or what—? Two hundred years later the second Hieron, the good king, restored and embellished the theater; and upon fragments of the marble plating which covered the royal seats, we find his name with the names of his wife, the Queen Philistis, and Nereis, his daughter-in-law.

Philistis, with whom Hieron fell in love when he was only a rising young army officer, has left us her portrait upon striking coins. And certainly, if she was as sweet-faced and gentle as the artists have pictured her in precious metal, we cannot wonder that her royal lover-husband wished to perpetuate her beauty forever. Like the tyrant Hieron, the King was a patron of the arts, and in his day Theocritus invented and developed his pastoral odes and bucolics, which marked the period in an artistic sense as clearly as Pindar’s poems marked the earlier rÉgime.

The theater saw more than one drama not of the pure stage, for here eager multitudes watched the glorious combat in the Great Harbor, and here later the “purest hero in the whole tale of Sicily” appeared before his adopted countrymen. Noble by birth and nobler by deed, Timoleon of Corinth, sent in 344 B. C. with an army in response to the plea of Syracuse for aid against tyrants at home and barbarians from abroad, reËstablished the republic, sent for his wife and children, and retiring from public life, settled down to enjoy his later years near the people he had liberated. But though sudden blindness smote the grand old soldier-statesman, his faculties were unclouded to the last. Whenever Syracuse had need of the cunning of his brain, the citizens brought him in state, in a carriage, and led him to the stage of the theater, where out of the fullness of his experience he advised them for the welfare of Syracuse. Eight years only elapsed from his coming to his silent departure across the Styx; and “So died and so was honored,” Freeman tells us, “the man of the worthiest fame in the whole story of Sicily, the man who thought it enough to deliver others and who sought nothing for himself.”

And Timoleon was not only great—he was fortunate! To deliver a whole people quickly and well, to be smitten with the black affliction of blindness while still in the very zenith of his popularity—and so to add the people’s pity and love to their admiration—and then soon to die a beloved hero before the fickle public mind could forget him and the fickle public tongue learn to slander and to curse his name, was the highest fortune man could wish—though in all probability Timoleon himself never realized how kind the gods were to him!

From the upper level of the Theater the most desolate street of Syracuse climbs up the hill—the Street of Tombs, its burial vaults and niches yawning and yearning for the bodies they once sheltered. For centuries it has been the amiable custom, whenever the tomb of a great man is lost, to ascribe to him the finest mausoleum in the vicinity. We know positively that Timoleon was buried either in or very near the agora of Syracuse. We know also that when Cicero was the quÆstor of Sicily he discovered the tomb of Archimedes outside the city, and identified it by the geometrical diagram carved upon it to illustrate the master’s favorite demonstration that the solid content of a sphere is equal to two-thirds that of its circumscribing cylinder. Both mausolea have disappeared, and two fine Roman-Doric tombs beside the road to Catania have been arbitrarily identified with Timoleon and Archimedes, regardless of the rights of their original occupants.

Amusing incidents often transpire from the fact that the Sicilian is quite as eager to practice his halting English as we are to struggle with Italian. An ancient long-bearded monk in a very dirty robe opened the door of the church of San Giovanni Evangelista to us, and asked quickly: “Tedesco?”

“No.”

“Ah—Russky?”

“No.”

“Hmph. Inglese?”

“No.”

“Diavolo! But you speak a little English, don’t you?”

“A little,” I replied—in Italian.

The monk stared at me in disgust. “If you can, why don’t you? I speak it whenever I get the chance.”

This exceedingly interesting church dates from the latter part of the twelfth century, and its rose-window is a splendid example of the glass-staining and composition of that time. According to a popular legend, the Apostle Paul preached in the crypt-like chapel when he was in town—“And landing in Syracuse, we tarried there three days” (Acts, XXVIII:12)—and the monk shows the altar where he “celebrated the Mass.” Unfortunately for the illusion, the original San Giovanni was a fourth century structure, so St. Paul could not have seen it on his way to Rome or at any other time. The monk also points out a granite column at which he says St. Marcian was scourged to death, becoming the first martyr in Syracuse, and his seat and vaulted altar-tomb.

St. Marcian’s column stands close to the entrance to the catacombs, which underlie much of the Achradina quarter, and are not only far larger than those at Rome, but are among the most imposing subterranean cemeteries in the world. The main gallery, ten feet wide and eight feet high, runs through the solid limestone for more than a hundred yards. People of distinction were usually buried in the rotundas, large circular chambers or chapels; and here, when the churches above ground were destroyed, or open services interdicted, the hunted faithful worshiped in secret. Here and there, now carved over a door, now rudely daubed in red upon the side of some grave-niche, is the likeness of a palm branch, dumb witness that here lay one who valued faith more than life, and died a martyr.

Even in these dank and gloomy caverns brave souls made art of a crude sort possible. Upon the walls, in the lunettes and above the chapel altars are rough frescoes, poor things in color and design, but breathing the civilizing message of that Divine love which nothing can conquer. Walls and ceilings and doorways of this miniature city of perpetual night are sooty and black with the fumes of the lamps the Christians used. There is little doubt that large numbers of them took refuge in the catacombs during the early persecutions. We to-day cannot conceive of the horror of living in clammy darkness lighted only by the feeble, guttering flames of little bronze lamps. But we can admire the stern fortitude of men and women who could endure all things, and gladly weave into the handles of those poor lamps the words “Deo gratias—Thanks to God!” Unfortunately, not a tomb has been left undisturbed, and the only relics now visible are an occasional small pile of bones and smashed pottery; the few sarcophagi which were found having been removed to the Museum where, out of place, they possess little or no significance.

In the same vicinity is the Latomia dei Cappuccini, the largest and by far the most impressive of the quarries, a huge, irregularly shaped gulf whose sides are precipices, honeycombed with small pits, all carved out of honey, or, it might be, from dull clouded amber, and whose uneven floor here and there springs into the air in enormous fantastic columns of golden-gray stone. Both walls and columns riot in luxuriant verdure and flowers—silver vermouth, yellow spurge, glorious crimson roses against green cataracts of glossy ivy and myrtle, honeysuckle and clematis. In the heart of this vast floral labyrinth lofty pines reach vainly upward toward the world from still depths where no breeze ever scatters the leaves, no gales lash denuded branches; and sun-warmed and dew-bathed, little groves of silvery-gray olives flourish beside prickly pear, sulphur colored lemons, yellow nespoli, golden oranges, almond blossoms all a mass of pallor or blushes in the tender warmth of early Spring. Throughout this smiling beauty, shadows dapple rock and foliage, like somber memories of the tragic Greek days, when the captured Athenians were thrust into the inhospitable quarry, then no such glowing garden as it is to-day.

“At first the sun by day was both scorching and suffocating,” says Thucydides, “for they had no roof over their heads, while the Autumn nights were cold, and the extremes of temperature engendered violent disorders.... The corpses of those who died from their wounds, from exposure to the weather, and the like, lay heaped one upon another. The stench was intolerable, and they were at the same time afflicted by hunger and thirst.... Every kind of misery which could befall men in such a place befell them. This was the condition of the captives for about ten weeks.... The whole number of the prisoners is not accurately known, but they were not less than seven thousand.”

At the end of the ten weeks many of them were sold. Thucydides does not explain the fate of those not disposed of in the great auction, but Grote says: “The dramas of Euripides were so peculiarly popular throughout all Sicily, that those Athenian prisoners who knew by heart considerable portions of them, won the affections of their masters. Some even of the stragglers from the army are affirmed to have procured for themselves, by the same attraction, shelter and hospitality during their flight. Euripides, we are informed, lived to receive the thanks of several among these unhappy sufferers, after their return to Athens.”[B]

Others beside the Athenians have found their last beds here. In a gloomy little side cave, cut in the wall a foot or two above the floor, is a niche sealed with a marble slab—

What a vista that opens up! Who was the braggart who forced the quarrel, what were the weapons, what the circumstances of the quarrel, the conditions under which the courageous Englishman went consciously to his fate? And how sad the legend inscribed to our own young countryman upon a lonely niche in the soft tufa a little farther along—

Just above this latomia, among the olive groves and flowers, surrounded by fine gardens, is a charmingly situated hotel, whence one can look down into this sunken stone quarry-garden if he chooses, and dream of swart laborers hewing out the stones that reared Syracuse a city of cities, of the physical agonies and homesickness of the grave Athenian slaves, or simply of the graciousness of Demeter in clothing the ragged stones as not Solomon in all his glory was arrayed. But for me the hotel by the Bay, the outlook over sparkling, living water, the music of it ever in my ears. And to think of Syracuse is to think of the Promenade of Arethusa, with its musical speech, its Greek faces all about, its maidens and their lovers who need but the touch of sympathetic imagination to be transformed into the nymphs and fauns of Greek days!