Heart of Man Part 1

Heart of Man.

by George Edward Woodberry.

PREFACE

OF the papers contained in this volume "Taormina" was published in the _Century Magazine_; the others are new. The intention of the author was to ill.u.s.trate how poetry, politics, and religion are the flowering of the same human spirit, and have their feeding roots in a common soil, "deep in the general heart of men."

COLUMBIA COLLEGE,

February 22, 1809.

TAORMINA

I

What should there be in the glimmering lights of a poor fishing-village to fascinate me? Far below, a mile perhaps, I behold them in the darkness and the storm like some phosph.o.r.escence of the beach; I see the pale tossing of the surf beside them; I hear the continuous roar borne up and softened about these heights; and this is night at Taormina.

There is a weirdness in the scene--the feeling without the reality of mystery; and at evening, I know not why, I cannot sleep without stepping upon the terrace or peering through the panes to see those lights. At morning the charm has flown from the sh.o.r.e to the further heights above me. I glance at the vast banks of southward-lying cloud that envelop Etna, like deep fog upon the ocean; and then, inevitably, my eyes seek the double summit of the Taorminian mountain, rising nigh at hand a thousand feet, almost sheer, less than half a mile westward. The nearer height, precipice-faced, towers full in front with its crowning ruined citadel, and discloses, just below the peak, on an arm of rock toward its right, a hermitage church among the heavily hanging mists. The other horn of the ma.s.sive hill, somewhat more remote, behind and to the old castle's left, exposes on its slightly loftier crest the edge of a hamlet. It, too, is cloud-wreathed--the lonely crag of Mola. Over these hilltops, I know, mists will drift and touch all day; and often they darken threateningly, and creep softly down the slopes, and fill the next-lying valley, and roll, and lift again, and reveal the flank of Monte d'Oro northward on the far-reaching range. As I was walking the other day, with one of these floating showers gently blowing in my face down this defile, I noticed, where the mists hung in fragments from the cloud out over the gulf, how like air-shattered arches they groined the profound ravine; and thinking how much of the romantic charm which delights lovers of the mountains and the sea springs from such Gothic moods of nature, I felt for a moment something of the pleasure of recognition in meeting with this northern and familiar element in the Sicilian landscape.

One who has grown to be at home with nature cannot be quite a stranger anywhere on earth. In new lands I find the poet's old domain. It is not only from the land-side that these intimations of old acquaintance come.

When my eyes leave, as they will, the near girdle of rainy mountain tops, and range home at last upon the sea, something familiar is there too,--that which I have always known,--but marvellously transformed and heightened in beauty and power. Such sudden glints of sunshine in the offing through unseen rents of heaven, as brilliant as in mid-ocean, I have beheld a thousand times, but here they remind me rather of cloud-lights on far western plains; and where have I seen those still tracts of changeful colour, iridescent under the silvery vapours of noon; or, when the weather freshens darkens, those whirlpools of pure emerald in the gray expanse of storm? They seem like memories of what has been, made fairer. One recurring scene has the same fascination for my eyes as the fishers' lights. It is a simple picture: only an arm of mist thrusting out from yonder lowland by the little cape, and making a near horizon, where, for half an hour, the waves break with great dashes of purple and green, deep and angry, against the insubstantial mole. All day I gaze on these sights of beauty until it seems that nature herself has taken on n.o.bler forms forever more. When the mountain storm beats the pane at midnight, or the distant lightnings awake me in the hour before dawn, I can forget in what climate I am; but the oblivion is conscious, and half a memory of childhood nights: in an instant comes the recollection, "I am on the coasts, and these are the couriers, of Etna."

The very rain is strange: it is charged with obscure personality; it is the habitation of a new presence, a storm-genius that I have never known; it in born of Etna, whence all things here have being and draw nourishment. It is not rain, but the rain-cloud, spread out over the valleys, the precipices, the sounding beaches, the ocean plain; it is not a storm, but a season. It does not rise with the moist Hyades, or ride with cloudy Orion in the Mediterranean night; it does not pa.s.s like Atlantic tempests on great world-currents: it remains. Its home is upon Etna; thence it comes and thither it returns; it gathers and disperses, lightens and darkens, blows and is silent, and though it suffer the clear north wind, or the west, to divide its veils with heaven, again it draws the folds together about its abode. It obeys only Etna, who sends it forth; then with clouds and thick darkness the mountain hides its face: it is the Sicilian winter.

II

But Etna does not withdraw continuously from its children even in this season. On the third day, at farthest, I was told it would bring back the sun; and I was not deceived. Two days it was closely wrapped in impenetrable gray; but the third morning, as I threw open my cas.e.m.e.nt and stepped out upon the terrace, I saw it, like my native winter, expanding its broad flanks under the double radiance of dazzling clouds spreading from its extreme summit far out and upward, and of the snow-fields whose long fair drifts shone far down the sides. Villages and groves were visible, clothing all the lower zone, and between lay the plain. It seemed near in that air, but it is twelve miles away.

From the sea-dipping base to the white cone the slope measures more than twenty miles, and as many more conduct the eye downward to the western fringe--a vast bulk; yet one does not think of its size as he gazes; so large a tract the eye takes in, but no more realizes than it does the distance of the stars. High up, forests peer through the ribbed snows, and extinct craters stud the frozen scene with round hollow mounds innumerable. A thousand features, but it remains one mighty mountain.

How natural it seems for it to be sublime! It is the peer of the sea and of the sky. All day it flashed and darkened under the rack, and I rejoiced in the sight, and knew why Pindar called it the pillar of heaven; and at night it hooded itself once more with the winter cloud.

III

Would you see this land as I see it? Come then, since Etna gives a fair, pure morning, up over the shelving bank to the great eastern spur of Taormina, where stood the hollow theatre, now in ruins, and above it the small temple with which the Greeks surmounted the highest point. It is such a spot as they often chose for their temples; but none ever commanded a more n.o.ble prospect. The far-shining sea, four or five hundred feet below, washes the narrow, precipitous descent, and on each hand is disclosed the whole of that side of Sicily which faces the rising sun. To the left and northward are the level straits, with the Calabrian mountains opposite, thinly sown with light snow, as far as the Cape of Spartivento, distinctly seen, though forty miles away; in front expands the open sea; straight to the south runs the indented coast, bay and beach, point after point, to where, sixty miles distant, the great blue promontory of Syracuse makes far out. On the land-side Etna fills the south with its lifted snow-fields, now smoke-plumed at the languid cone; and thence, though lingeringly, the eye ranges nearer over the intervening plain to the well-wooded ridge of Castiglione, and, next, to the round solitary top of Monte Maestra, with its long sh.o.r.eward descent, and comes to rest on the height of Taormina overhead, with its hermitage of Santa Maria della Rocca, its castle, and Mola. Yet further off, at the hand of the defile, looms the barren summit of Monte Venere, with Monte d'Oro and other hills in the foreground, and northward, peak after peak, travels the close Messina range.

A landscape of sky, sea, plain, and mountains, great ma.s.ses majestically grouped, grand in contour! Yet to call it sublime does not render the impression it makes upon the soul. Sublime, indeed, it is at times, and dull were he whose heart from hour to hour awe does not visit here; but constantly the scene is beautiful, and yields that delight which dwells unwearied with the soul. One may be seldom touched to the exaltation which sublimity implies, but to take pleasure in loveliness is the habit of one who lives as heaven made him; and what characterizes this landscape and sets it apart is the permanence of its beauty, its perpetual and perfect charm through every change of light and weather, and in every quarter of its heaven and earth, felt equally whether the eye sweeps the great circuit with its vision, or pauses on the nearer features, for they, too, are wonderfully composed. This hill of my station falls down for half a mile with broken declivities, and then becomes the Cape of Taormina, and takes its steep plunge into the sea.

Yonder picturesque peninsula to its left, diminished by distance and strongly relieved on the purple waves, is the Cape of Sant' Andrea, and beside it a cl.u.s.ter of small islands lies nearer insh.o.r.e. On the other side, to the right of our own cape, shines our port, with Giardini, the village of my fishers' lights, the beach with its boats, and the white main road winding in the narrow level between the bluffs and the sands.

The port is guarded on the south by the peninsula of Schiso, where ancient Naxos stood; and just beyond, the river Alcantara cuts the plain and flows to the sea. At the other extremity, northward of Sant' Andrea, is the cove of Letojanni, with its village, and then, perhaps eight miles away, the bold headland of Sant' Alessio closes the sh.o.r.e view with a ma.s.s of rock that in former times completely shut off the land approach hither, there being no pa.s.sage over it, and none around it except by the strip of sand when the sea was quiet. All this ground, with in several villages, from Sant' Alessio to the Alcantara, and beyond into the plain, was anciently the territory of Taormina.

The little city itself lies on its hill, between the bright sh.o.r.e and the gray old castle, on a crescent-like terrace whose two horns jut out into the air like capes. The northern one of these is my station, the site of the old temple and the amphitheatre; the southern one opposite shows the facade of the Dominican convent; and the town circles between, possibly a mile from spur to spur. Here and there long broken lines of the ancient wall, black with age, stride the hillside. A round Gothic tower, built as if for warfare, a square belfry, a ruined gateway, stand out among the humble roofs. Gardens of orange and lemon trees gleam like oblong parks, princ.i.p.ally on the upper edge toward the great rock. If you will climb, as I have done, the craggy plateau close by, which overhangs the theatre and obstructs the view of the extreme end of the town at this point, you will see from its level face, rough with the plants of the p.r.i.c.kly-pear, a cross on an eminence just below, and the gate toward Messina.

The face of the country is bare. Here beneath, where the main ravine of Taormina cuts into the earth between the two spurs of the city, are terraces of fruit trees and vegetables, and, wherever the naked rock permits, similar terraces are seen on the castle hill and every less steep slope, looking as if they would slide off. Almond and olive trees cling and climb all over the hillsides, but their boughs do not clothe the country. It is gray to look at, because of the ma.s.ses of natural rock everywhere cropping out, and also from the substructure of the terraces, which, seen from below, present banks of the same gray stone.

The only colour is given by the fan-like plants of the p.r.i.c.kly-pear, whose flat, thick-lipped, pear-shaped leaves, stuck with thorns, and often extruding their reddish fruit from the edge, lend a dull green to the scene. This plant grows everywhere, like wild bush, to a man's height, covering the otherwise infertile soil, and the goats crop it. A closer view shows patches of wild candytuft and marigolds, like those at my feet, and humble purple and blue blossoms hang from crannies or run over the stony turf; but these are not strong enough to be felt in the prevalent tones. The blue of ocean, the white of Etna, the gray of Taormina--this is the scene.

Three ways connect the town with the lower world. The modern carriage road runs from the Messina gate, and, quickly dropping behind the northern spur, winds in great serpentine loops between the Campo Santo below and old wayside tombs, Roman and Arabic, above, until it slowly opens on the southern outlook, and, after two miles of tortuous courses above the lovely coves, comes out on the main road along the coast. The second way starts from the other end of the town, the gate toward Etna, and goes down more precipitously along the outer flank of the southern spur, with Mola (here shifted to the other side of the castle hill) closing the deep ravine behind; and at last it empties into the torrent of Selina, in whose bed it goes on to Giardini. The third, or short way, leaps down the great hollow of the spurs, and yet keeps to a ridge between the folds of the ravine which it discloses on each side, with here and there a contadino cutting rock on the steep hillsides, or a sportsman wandering with his dog; or often at twilight, from some coign of vantage, you may see the goats trooping home across the distant sands by the sea. It debouches through great limestone quarries on the main road. There, seen from below, Taormina comes out--a cape, a town, and a hill. It is, in fact, a long, steep, broken ridge, shaped like a wedge; one end of the broad lace dips into the sea, the other, high on land, exposes swelling bluffs; its back bears the town, its point lifts the castle.

This is the Taorminian land. What a quietude hangs over it! How poor, how mean, how decayed the little town now looks amid all this silent beauty of enduring nature! It could not have been always so. This theatre at my feet, hewn in the living rock, flanked at each end by great piers of ma.s.sive Roman masonry, and showing broken columns thick strewn in the midst of the broad orchestra, tells of ancient splendour and populousness. The narrow stage still stands, with nine columns in position in two groups; part are shattered half-way up, part are yet whole, and in the gap between the groups shines the lovely sea with the long southern coast, set in the beauty of these ruins as in a frame.

Here Attic tragedies were once played, and Roman gladiators fought. The enclosure is large, much over a hundred yards in diameter. It held many thousands. Whence came the people to fill it? I noticed by the roadside, as I came up, Saracenic tombs. I saw in the first square I entered those small Norman windows, with the lovely pillars and the round arch. On the ancient church I have observed the ornamentation and mouldings of Byzantine art. The Virgin with her crown, over the fountain, was paltry enough, but I saw that this was originally a mermaid's statue. A water-clock here, a bath there; in all quarters I come on some slight, poor relics of other ages; and always in the faces of the people, where every race seems to have set its seal, I see the ruins of time. These echoes are not all of far-off things. That lookout below was a station of English cannon, I am told; and the bluff over Giardini, beyond the torrent, takes its name from the French tents pitched there long ago. The old walls can be traced for five miles, but now the circuit is barely two. I wonder, as I go down to my room in the Casa Timeo, what was the past of this silent town, now so shrunken from its ancient limits; and who, I ask myself, Timeo?

IV

I thought when I first saw the inaccessibility of this mountain-keep that I should have no walks except upon the carriage road; but I find there are paths innumerable. Leap the low walls where I will, I come on unsuspected ways broad enough for man and beast. They ran down the hillsides in all directions, and are ever dividing as they descend, like the branching streams of a waterfall. Some are rudely paved, and hemmed by low walls; others are mere footways on the natural rock and earth, often edging precipices, and opening short cross-cuts in the most unexpected places, not without a suggestion of peril, to make eye and foot alert, and to infuse a certain wild pleasure into the exercise. The multiplicity of these paths is a great boon to the lover of beauty, for here one charm of Italian landscape exists in perfection. Every few moments the scene rearranges itself in new combinations, as on the Riviera or at Amalfi, and makes an endless succession of lovely pictures. The infinite variety of these views is not to be imagined unless it has been witnessed; and besides the magic wrought by mere change of position, there is also a constant transformation of tone and colour from hour to hour, as the lights and shadows vary, and from day to day, with the unsettled weather.

Yet who could convey to black-and-white speech the sense of beauty which is the better part of my rambles? It is only to say that here I went up and down on the open hillsides, and there I followed the ridges or kept the cliff-line above the fair coves; that now I dropped down into the vales, under the shade of olive and lemon branches, and wound by the gushing streams through the orchards. In every excursion I make some discovery, and bring home some golden store for memory. Yesterday I found the olive slopes over Letojanni--beautiful old gnarled trees, such as I have never seen except where the nightingales sing by the eastern sh.o.r.e of Spezzia. I did not doubt when I was told that those orchards yield the sweetest oil in the world. It was the lemon harvest, and everywhere were piles of the pale yellow fruit heaped like apples under the slender trees, with a gatherer here and there; for this is always a landscape of solitary figures. To-day I found the little beach of San Nicolo, not far from the same place. I kept inland, going down the hollow by the Campo Santo, where there is a cool, gravelly stream in a dell that is like a nook in the Berkshire hills, and then along the upland on the skirts of Monte d'Oro, till by a sharp turn seaward I came out through a marble quarry where men were working with what seemed slow implements on the gray or party-coloured stone. I pa.s.sed through the rather silent group, who stopped to look at me, and a short distance beyond I crossed the main road, and went down by a stream to the sh.o.r.e.

I found it strewn with seaside rock, as a hundred other beaches are, but none with rocks like these. They were marble, red or green, or shot with variegated hues, with many a soft gray, mottled or wavy-lined; and the sea had polished them. Very lovely they were, and shone where the low wave gleamed over them. I had wondered at the profusion of marbles in the Italian churches, but I had not thought to find them wild on a lonely Sicilian beach. Once or twice already I had seen a block rosy in the torrent-beds, and it had seemed a rare sight; but here the whole sh.o.r.e was piled and inlaid with the beautiful stone.

I have learned now that Taormina is famous for these marbles. Over thirty varieties were sent to the Vienna Exhibition, and they won the prize. I got this information from the keeper of the Communal Library, with whom I have made friends. He recalls to my memory the ship that Hieron of Syracuse gave to Ptolemy, wonderful for its size. It had twenty banks of rowers, three decks, and s.p.a.ce to hold a library, a gymnasium, gardens with trees in them, stables, and baths, and towers for a.s.sault, and it was provided by Archimedes with many ingenious mechanical devices. The wood of sixty ordinary galleys was required for its construction. I describe it because its architect, Filea, was a Taorminian by birth, and esteemed in his day second only to Archimedes in his skill in mechanics; and in lining the baths of this huge galley he used these beautiful Taorminian marbles. My friend the librarian told me also, with his Sicilian burr, of the wine of Taormina, the Eugenaean, which was praised by Pliny, and used at the sacred feasts of Rome; but now, he said sadly, the grape had lost its flavour.

The sugar-cane, which nourished in later times, is also gone. But the mullet that is celebrated in Juvenal's verse, and the lampreys that once went to better Alexandrian luxury, are still the spoil of the fishers, the shrimps are delicate to the palate, and the marbles will endure as long as this rock itself. The rock lasts, and the sea. The most ancient memory here is of them, for this is the sh.o.r.e of Charybdis. It is stated in Sall.u.s.t and other Latin authors, as well as by writers throughout the Middle Ages, that all which was swallowed up in the whirlpool of the straits, after being carried beneath the sea for miles, was finally cast up on the beach beneath the hill of Taormina.

The rock and the sea were finely blended in one of my first discoveries in the land, and in consequence they have seemed, to my imagination, more closely united here than is common. On a stormy afternoon I had strolled down the main road, and was walking toward Letojanni. I came, after a little, to a great cliff that overhung the sea, with room for the road to pa.s.s beneath; and as I drew near I heard a strange sound, a low roaring, a deep-toned reverberation, that seemed not to come from the breaking waves, loud on the beach: it was a more solemn, a more piercing and continuous sound. It was from the rock itself. The grand music of the rolling sea beneath was taken up by the hollowed cliff, and reechoed with a mighty volume of sound from invisible sources. It seemed the voice of the rock, as if by long sympathy and neighbourhood in that lonely place the cliff were interpenetrated with the sea-music, and had become resonant of itself with those living harmonies heard only in the Psalmist's song. It seemed a lyre for the centuries; and I thought over how many a conqueror, how many a race, that requiem had been lifted upon it as they pa.s.sed to their death on this sh.o.r.e. I came back slowly in the twilight, and was roused from my reverie by the cold wind breathing on me as I reached the top of the hill, pure and keen and frosted like the bright December breezes of my own land. It was the kiss of Etna on my cheek.

V

Will you hear the legend of Taormina?--for in these days I dare not call it history. n.o.ble and romantic it is, and age-long. I had not hoped to recover it; but my friend the librarian has brought me books in which patriotic Taorminians have written the story celebrating their dear city. I was touched by the simplicity with which he informed me that the town authorities had been unwilling to waste on a pa.s.sing stranger these little paper-bound memorials of their city. "But," he said, "I told them I had given you my word." So I possess these books with a pleasant a.s.sociation of Sicilian honour, and I have read them with real interest.

As I turned the pages I was reminded once more how impossible it is to know the past. The past survives in human inst.i.tutions, in the temperament of races, and in the creations of ideal art; but only in the last is it immortal. Custom and law are for an age: race after race is pushed to the sea, and dies; only epic and saga and psalm have one date with man, one destiny with the breath of his lips, one silence at the last with them. Least of all does the past survive in the living memories of men. Here and there the earth cherishes a coin or a statue, the desert embalms some solitary city, a few leagues of rainless air preserve on rock and column the lost speech of Nile; so the mind of man holds in dark places, or lifts to living fame, no more than ruins and fragments of the life that was. I have been a diligent reader of books in my time; and here in an obscure corner of the Old-World I find a narrative studded with n.o.ble names, not undistinguished by stirring deeds, and, save for the great movements of history and a few shadowy figures, it is all fresh to my mind. I have looked on three thousand years of human life upon this hill; something of what they have yielded, if you will have patience with such a tract of time, I will set down.

My author is Monsignore Giovanni di Giovanni, a Taorminian, who flourished in the last century. He was a man of vast erudition, and there is in his pages the Old-World learning which delights me. He was born before the days of historic doubt. He tells a true story. To allege an authority is with him to prove a fact, and to cite all writers who repeat the original source is to render truth impregnable. Rarely does he show any symptom of the modern malady of incredulity. _Scripta littera_ is reason enough, unless the fair fame of his city chances to be at stake. He was really learned, and I do wrong to seem to diminish his authority. He was a patient investigator of ma.n.u.scripts, and did important service to Sicilian history. The simplicity I have alluded to affects mainly the ecclesiastical part of his narrative. A few statements also in regard to the prehistoric period might disturb the modern mind, but I own to finding in them the charm of lost things. In my mental provinces I welcome the cave-man, the flint-maker, the lake-dweller, and all their primitive tribes to the abode of science; but I feel them to be intruders in my antiquity. I was brought up on quite other chronologies, and I still like a history that begins with the flood. I will not, however, ask any one of more serious mind to go back with Monsignore and myself to the era of autochthonous Sicily, when the children of the Cyclops inhabited the land, and Demeter in her search for Proserpina wept on this hill, and Charybdis lay stretched out under these bluffs watching the sea. It is precise enough to say that Taormina began eighty years before the Trojan War. Very dimly, it must be acknowledged, the ancient Sicani are seen arriving and driven, like all doomed races, south and west out of the land, and in their place the Siculi flourish, and a Samnite colony voyages over the straits from Italy and joins them. Here for three centuries these spa.r.s.e communities lived along these heights in fear of the sea pirates, and warred confusedly from their mainhold on Mount Taurus, or the Bull, so called because the two summits of the mountain from a distance resemble a bull's horns; and they left no other memory of themselves.

Authentic history begins toward the end of the eighth century before our era. It is a bright burst; for then, down by yonder green-foaming rock, the young Greek mariners leaped on the strand. This was their first land-fall in Sicily; that rock, their Plymouth; and here, doubtless, the alarmed mountaineers stood in their fastness and watched the bearers of the world's torch, and knew them not, bringing daybreak to the dark island for evermore, but fought, as barbarism will, against the light, and were at last made friends with it--a chance that does not always befall. Then quickly rose the lowland city of Naxos, and by the river sprang up the temple to Guiding Apollo, the earliest shrine of the Sicilian Greeks, where they came ever afterward to pray for a prosperous voyage when they would go across the sea, homeward. They were from the first a fighting race; and decade by decade the cloud of war grew heavier on each horizon, southward from Syracuse and northward from Messina, and swords beat fiercer and stronger with the rivalries of growing states--battles dimly discerned now. A single glimpse flashes out on the page of Thucydides. He relates that when once the Messenians threatened Naxos with overthrow, the mountaineers rushed down from the heights in great numbers to the relief of their Greek neighbours, and routed the enemy and slew many. This is the first bloodstain, clear and bright, on our Taorminian land. Shall I add, from the few relics of that age, that Pythagoras, on the journey he undertook to establish the governments of the Sicilian cities, wrought miracles here, curing a mad lover of his frenzy by music, and being present on this hill and at Metaponto the same day--a thing not to be done without magic? But at last we see plainly Alcibiades coasting along below, and the ill-fated Athenians wintering in the port, and hors.e.m.e.n going out from Naxos toward Etna on the side of Athens in the death-struggle of her glory.

And then, suddenly, after the second three hundred years, all is over, the Greek city betrayed, sacked, destroyed, Naxos trodden out under the foot of Dionysius the tyrant.

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

Not only with brave deeds did Taormina begin, but, as a city should, with a great man. He was really great, this Andromachus. Do you not remember him out of Plutarch, and the n.o.ble words that have been his immortal memory among men? "This man was incomparably the best of all those that bore sway in Sicily at that time, governing his citizens according to law and justice, and openly professing an aversion and enmity to all tyrants." Was the defeat of Dionysius the first of his youthful exploits, as some say? I cannot determine; but it is certain that he gathered the surviving exiles of Naxos, and gave them this plateau to dwell upon, and it was no longer called Mount Taurus, as had been the wont, but Tauromenium, or the Abiding-place of the Bull. A few years later Andromachus performed the signal action of his life by befriending Timoleon, as great a character, in my eyes, as Plutarch records the glory of. Timoleon had set out from Corinth, at the summons of his Greek countrymen, to restore the liberty of Syracuse, then tyrannized over by the second Dionysius; and because Andromachus, in his stronghold of Taormina, hated tyranny, Plutarch says, he "gave Timoleon leave to muster up his troops there and to make that city the seat of war, persuading the inhabitants to join their arms with the Corinthian forces and to a.s.sist them in the design of delivering Sicily." It was on our beach that Timoleon disembarked, and from our city he went forth to the conquest foretold, by the wreath that fell upon his head as he prayed at Delphi, and by the prophetic fire that piloted his ship over the sea. The Carthaginians came quickly after him from Reggio, where he had eluded them, for they were in alliance with the tyrant; and from their vessels they parleyed with Andromachus in the port. With an insolent gesture, the envoy, raising his hand, palm up, and turning it lightly over, said that even so, and with such ease, would he overturn the little city; and Andromachus, mocking his hand-play, answered that if he did not leave the harbour, even so would he upset his galley. The Carthaginians sailed away. The city remained firm-perched. Timoleon prospered, brought back liberty to Syracuse, ruled wisely and n.o.bly, and gave to Sicily those twenty years of peace which were the flower of her Greek annals. Then, we must believe, rose the little temple on our headland, the Greek theatre where the tongue of Athens lived, the gymnasium where the youths grew fair and strong. Then Taormina struck her coins: Apollo with the laurel, with the lyre, with the grape; Dionysus with the ivy, and Zeus with the olive; for the G.o.ds and temples of the Naxians had become ours, and were religiously cherished; and with the rest was struck a coin with the Minotaur, our symbol. But of Andromachus, the founder of the well-built and fairly adorned Greek city that then rose, we hear no more--a hero, I think, one of the true breed of the founders of states. But alas for liberty! A new tyrant, Agathocles, was soon on the Syracusan throne, and he won this city by friendly professions, only to empty it by treachery and murder; and he drove into exile Timaeus, the son of Andromachus. Timaeus? He, evidently, of my Casa Timeo. I know him now, the once famed historian whom Cicero praises as the most erudite in history of all writers up to his time, most copious in facts and various in comment, not unpolished in style, eloquent, and distinguished by terse and charming expression.

Ninety years he lived in the Greek world, devoted himself to history, and produced many works, now lost. The ancient writers read him, and from their criticism it is clear that he was marked by a talent for invective, was given to sharp censure, and loved the bitter part of truth. He introduced precision and detail into his art, and is credited with being the first to realize the importance of chronology and to seek exactness in it. He never saw again his lovely birthplace, and I easily forgive to the exile and the son of Andromachus the vigour with which he depicted the crimes of Agathocles and others of the tyrants. In our city, meanwhile, the Greek genius waning to its extinction, Tyndarion ruled; and in his time Pyrrhus came hither to repulse the ever invading power of Carthage. But he was little more than a shedder of blood; he accomplished nothing, and I name him only as one of the figures of our beach.

The day of Greece was gone; but those two clouds of war still hung on the horizon, north and south, with ever darker tempest. Instead of Syracuse and Messina, Carthage and the new name of Rome now sent them forth, and over this island they encountered. Our city, true to its ancient tradition, became Rome's ever faithful ally, as you may read in the poem of Silius Italicus, and was dignified by treaty with the t.i.tle of a confederate city; and of this fact Cicero reminded the judges when in that famous trial he thundered against Verres, the spoiler of our Sicilian province, and with the other cities defended this of ours, whose people had signalized their hatred of the Roman praetor by overthrowing his statue in the market-place and sparing the pedestal, as they said, to be an eternal memorial of his infamy. From the Roman age, however, I take but two episodes, for I find that to write this town's history were to write the history of half the Mediterranean world. When the slaves rose in the Servile War, they intrenched themselves on this hill, and in their hands the city bore its siege by the Roman consul as hardily as was ever its custom. Cruel they were, no doubt, and vindictive. With horror Monsignore relates that they were so resolved not to yield that, starving, they ate their children, their wives, and one another; and he rejoices when they were at last betrayed and ma.s.sacred, and this disgrace was wiped away. I hesitate. I cannot feel regret when those whom man has made brutal answer brutally to their oppressors. I have enough of the old Taorminian spirit to remember that the slaves, too, fought for liberty. I am sorry for those penned and dying men; their famine and slaughter in these walls were least horrible for their part in the catastrophe, if one looks through what they did to what they were, and remembers that the civilization they violated had stripped them of humanity. After the slave, I make room--for whom else than imperial Augustus? Off this sh.o.r.e he defeated s.e.xtus Pompey, and he thought easily to subdue the town above when he summoned it. But Taormina was always a loyal little place, and it would not yield without a siege.

Then Augustus, sitting down before it, prayed in our temple of Guiding Apollo that he might have the victory; and as he walked by the beach afterward a fish threw itself out of the water before him--an omen, said the diviners, that even so the Pompeians, who held the seas, after many turns of varied fortune, should be brought to his feet. Pompey returned with a fleet, and in these waters again the battle was fought and Augustus lost it, and the siege was raised. But when a third time the trial of naval strength was essayed, and the cause of the Pompeians ruined, Augustus remembered the city that had defied him, sent its inhabitants into exile, and planted a Roman colony in its place. Latin was now the language here. The ma.s.sive grandeur of Roman architecture replaced the old Greek structures. The amphitheatre was enlarged and renewed in its present form, villas of luxury bordered the coasts as in Campania, and coins were struck in the Augustan name.

The Roman domination in its turn slowly moved to its fall; and where should the new age begin more fitly than in this city of beginnings? As of old the Greek torch first gleamed here, here first on Sicilian soil was the Cross planted. The G.o.ds of Olympus had many temples about the hill slopes, shrines of venerable antiquity even in those days; but if the monkish chronicles be credited, the new faith signalized its victory rather over three strange idolatries,--the worship of Falcone, of Lissone, and of Scamandro, a G.o.ddess. I refuse to believe that the citizens were accustomed to sacrifice three youths annually to Falcone; and as for the other two deities, little is known of them except that their destruction marked the advent of the young religion. Pancrazio was the name of him who was destined to be our patron saint through the coming centuries. He was born in Antioch, and when a child of three years, going with his father into Judea, he had seen the living Christ; now, grown into manhood, he was sent by St. Peter to spread the gospel in the isles of the sea. He disembarked on our beach, and forthwith threw Lissone's image into the waves, and with it a holy dragon which was coiled about it like a garment and was fed with sacrifices; and he shattered with his cross the great idol Scamandro: and so Taormina became Christian, welcomed St. Peter on his way to Rome, and entered on the long new age. It was here, as elsewhere, the age of martyrs--Pancrazio first, and after him Geminiano, guided hither with his mother by an angel; and then San Nicone, who suffered with his one hundred and ninety-nine brother monks, and Sepero and Corneliano with their sixty; the age of monks--Luca, who fled from his bridal to live on Etna, with fasts, visions, and prophecies; and, later, simple-minded Daniele, the follower of St. Elia, of whom there is more to be recorded; the age of bishops, heard in Roman councils and the palace of Byzantium, of whom two only are of singular interest--Zaccaria, who was deprived, evidently the ablest in mind and policy of all the succession, once a great figure in the disputes of East and West; and Procopio, whom the Saracens slew, for the Crescent now followed the Cross.

The ancient war-cloud had again gathered out of Africa. The Saracens were in the land, and every city had fallen except Syracuse and Taormina. For sixty years the former held out, and our city for yet another thirty, the sole refuge of the Christians. Signs of the impending destruction were first seen by that St. Elia already mentioned, who wandered hither, and was displeased by the manners and morals of the citizens. I am sorry to record that Monsignore believed his report, for only here is there mention of such a matter. "The citizens," says my author, "lived in luxury and pleasure not becoming to a state of war. They saw on all sides the fields devastated, houses burnt, wealth plundered, cities given to the flames, friends and companions killed or reduced to slavery, yet was there no vice, no sin, that did not rule unpunished among them." Therefore the saint preached the woe to come, and, turning to the governor, Constantine Patrizio, in his place in the cathedral, he appealed to him to restrain his people.

"Let the philosophy of the Gentiles," he exclaimed, "be your shame.

Epaminondas, that ill.u.s.trious _condottiere_, strictly restrained himself from intemperance, from every l.u.s.t, every allurement of pleasure. So, also, Scipio, the Roman leader, was valorous through the same continence as Epaminondas; and therefore they brought back signal victory, one over the Spartans, the other over the Carthaginians, and both erected immortal trophies." He promised them mercy with repentance, but ended threateningly: "So far as in me lies I have clearly foretold to you all that has been divinely revealed to me. If you believe my words, like the penitents of Nineveh, you shall find mercy; if you despise my admonitions, bound and captive you shall be reduced to the worst slavery." He prophesied yet more in private. He went to the house of a n.o.ble citizen, Crisione, who esteemed him as a father, and, lying in bed, he said to him: "Do you see, Crisione, the bed in which I now lie?

In this same bed shall Ibrahim sleep, hungry for human blood, and the walls of the rooms shall see many of the most distinguished persons of this city all together put to the edge of the sword." Then he left the house and went to the square in the centre of the city, and, standing there, he lifted his garments above the knee. Whereupon simple Daniele, who always followed him about, marvelling asked, "What does this thing mean, father?" The old man had his answer ready, "Now I see rivers of blood running, and these proud and magnificent buildings which you see exalted shall be destroyed even to the foundations by the Saracens." And the monk fled from the doomed city, like a true prophet, and went overseas.

The danger was near, but perhaps not more felt than it must always have been where the prayer for defence against the Saracens had gone up for a hundred years in the cathedral. The governor, however, had taken pains to add to the strength of the city by strong fortifications upon Mola.

Ahulabras came under the walls, but gave over the ever unsuccessful attempt to take the place, and went on to ruin Reggio beyond the straits. When it was told to his father Ibrahim that Tabermina, as the Saracens called it, had again been pa.s.sed by, he cried out upon his son, "He is degenerate, degenerate! He took his nature from his mother and not from his father; for, had he been born from me, surely his sword would not have spared the Christians!" Therefore he recalled him to the home government, and came himself and sat down before the city. The garrison was small and insufficient, but, says my author, following old chronicles, "youths, old men, and children, without distinction of age, s.e.x, or condition, fearing outrage and all that slavery would expose them to, all spontaneously offered themselves to fight in this holy war even to death: with such courage did love of country and religious zeal inspire the citizens." Ibrahim had other weapons than the sword. He first corrupted the captains of the Greek fleet, who were afterward condemned for the treason at Byzantium. Then, all being ready, he promised some Ethiopians of his army, who are described as of a ferocious nature and harsh aspect, that he would give them the city for booty, besides other gifts, if they would devote themselves to the bold undertaking. The catastrophe deserves to be told in Monsignore's own words:

"This people, accustomed to rapine, allured by the riches of the Taorminians and the promises of the king, with the aid of the traitors entered unexpectedly into the city, and with b.l.o.o.d.y swords and mighty cries and clamour a.s.sailed the citizens. Meanwhile King Ibrahim, having entered with all his army by a secret gate under the fortress of Mola, thence called the gate of the Saracens, raged against the citizens with such unexpected and cruel slaughter that not only neither the weakness of s.e.x, nor tender years, nor reverence for h.o.a.ry age, but not even the abundance of blood that like torrents flowed down the ways, touched to pity that ferocious heart. The soldiers, masters of the beautiful and wealthy city, divided among them the riches and goods of the citizens according as to each one the lot fell; they levelled to the ground the magnificent buildings, public or private, sacred or profane, all that were proudest for amplitude, construction, and ornament; and that not even the ruins of ancient splendour should remain, all that had survived they gave to the flames."

This city, which the Saracens destroyed, is the one the Taorminians cherish as the culmination of their past. In the Greek, the Roman, and the early Christian ages it had flourished, as both its ruins and its history attest, and much must have yet survived from those times; while its station as the only Christian stronghold in the island would naturally have attracted wealth hither for safety. In this first sack of the Saracens, the ancient city must have perished, but the destruction could hardly have been so thorough as is represented, since some of the churches themselves, in their present state, show Byzantine workmanship.