Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece Part 62

[1] Cicero's description of Enna is still accurate: 'Enna is placed in a very lofty and exposed situation, at the top of which is a tableland and never-failing supply of springs. The whole site is cut off from access, and precipitous.' But when he proceeds to say, 'many groves and lakes surround it and luxuriant flowers through all the year,' we cannot follow him. The only quality which Enna has not lost is the impregnable nature of its cliffs.

A few poplars and thorns are all that remain of its forests. Did we not know that the myth of Demeter and Persephone was a poem of seed-time and harvest, we might be tempted, while sitting on the crags of Castro Giovanni and looking toward the lake, to fancy that in old days a village dependent upon Enna, and therefore called her daughter, might have occupied the site of the lake, and that this village might have been withdrawn into the earth by the volcanic action which produced the cavity. Then people would have said that Demeter had lost Persephone and sought her vainly through all the cities of Sicily: and if this happened in spring Persephone might well have been thought to have been gathering flowers at the time when Hades took her to himself. So easy and yet so dangerous is it to rationalise a legend.

The capture of Palermo cost the Normans another eight years, part of which was spent according to their national tactics in plundering expeditions, part in the subjugation of Catania and other districts, part in the blockade of the capital by sea and land. After the fall of Palermo, it only remained for Roger to reduce isolated cities--Taormina, Syracuse,[1] Girgenti, and Castro Giovanni--to his sway. The last-named and strongest hold of the Saracens fell into his hands by the treason of Ibn-Hamuud in 1087, and thus, after thirty years' continual effort, the two brothers were at last able to divide the island between them. The lion's share, as was due, fell to Roger, who styled himself Great Count of Sicily and Calabria. In 1098, Urban II., a politician of the school of Cluny, who well understood the scope of Hildebrand's plan for subjecting Europe to the Court of Rome, rewarded Roger for his zeal in the service of the Church with the t.i.tle of Hereditary Apostolical Legate. The Great Count was now on a par with the most powerful monarchs of Europe. In riches he exceeded all; so that he was able to wed one daughter to the King of Hungary, another to Conrad, King of Italy, a third to Raimond, Count of Provence and Toulouse, dowering them all with imperial munificence.

[1] In this siege, as in that of the Athenians, and of the Saracens 878 A.D., decisive engagements took place in the great harbour.

Hale and vigorous, his life was prolonged through a green old age until his seventieth year; when he died in 1101, he left two sons by his third wife, Adelaide. Roger, the younger of the two, destined to succeed his father, and (on the death of his cousin, William, Duke of Apulia, in 1127) to unite South Italy and Sicily under one crown, was only four years old at the death of the Great Count. Inheriting all the valour and intellectual qualities of his family, he rose to even higher honour than his predecessors. In 1130 he a.s.sumed the style of King of Sicily, no doubt with the political purpose of impressing his Mussulman subjects; and nine years later, when he took Innocent captive at San Germano, he forced from the half-willing pontiff a confirmation of this t.i.tle as well as the invest.i.ture of Apulia, Calabria, and Capua. The extent of his sway is recorded in the line engraved upon his sword:--

Appulus et Calaber Siculus mihi servit et Afer.

King Roger died in 1154, and bequeathed his kingdoms to his son William, surnamed the Bad; who in his turn left them to a William, called the Good, in 1166. The second William died in 1189, transmitting his possessions by will to Constance, wife of the Suabian emperor. These two Williams, the last of the Hauteville monarchs of Sicily, were not altogether unworthy of their Norman origin. William the Bad could rouse himself from the sloth of his seraglio to head an army; William the Good, though feeble in foreign policy, and no general, administered the state with clemency and wisdom.

Sicily under the Normans offered the spectacle of a singularly hybrid civilisation. Christians and Northmen, adopting the habits and imbibing the culture of their Mussulman subjects, ruled a mixed population of Greeks, Arabs, Berbers, and Italians. The language of the princes was French; that of the Christians in their territory, Greek and Latin; that of their Mahommedan subjects, Arabic. At the same time the Scandinavian Sultans of Palermo did not cease to play an active part in the affairs, both civil and ecclesiastical, of Europe. The children of the Vikings, though they spent their leisure in harems, exercised, as hereditary Legates of the Holy See, a peculiar jurisdiction in the Church of Sicily. They dispensed benefices to the clergy, and a.s.sumed the mitre and dalmatic, together with the sceptre, and the crown, as symbols of their authority in Church as well as State. As a consequence of this confusion of nationalities in Sicily, we find French and English ecclesiastics[1] mingling at court with Moorish freedmen and Oriental odalisques, Apulian captains fraternising with Greek corsairs, Jewish physicians in attendance on the person of the prince, and Arabian poets eloquent in his praises. The very money with which Roger subsidised his Italian allies was stamped with Cuphic letters,[2] and there is reason to believe that the reproach against Frederick of being a false coiner arose from his adopting the Eastern device of plating copper pieces to pa.s.s for silver. The commander of Roger's navies and his chief minister of state was styled, according to Oriental usage, Emir or Ammiraglio. George of Antioch, who swept the sh.o.r.es of Africa, the Morea, and the Black Sea, in his service, was a Christian of the Greek Church, who had previously held an office of finance under Temin Prince of Mehdia.

The workers in his silk factories were slaves from Thebes and Corinth. The pages of his palace were Sicilian or African eunuchs.

His charters ran in Arabic as well as Greek and Latin. His jewellers engraved the rough gems of the Orient with Christian mottoes in Semitic characters.[3] His architects were Mussulmans who adapted their native style to the requirements of Christian ritual, and inscribed the walls of cathedrals with Catholic legends in the Cuphic language. The predominant characteristic of Palermo was Orientalism. Religious toleration was extended to the Mussulmans, so that the two creeds, Christian and Mahommedan, flourished side by side. The Saracens had their own quarters in the towns, their mosques and schools, and Cadis for the administration of petty justice. French and Italian women in Palermo adopted the Oriental fashions of dress. The administration of law and government was conducted on Eastern principles. In nothing had the Mussulmans shown greater genius than in their system of internal statecraft. Count Roger found a machinery of taxation in full working order, officers acquainted with the resources of the country, books and schedules constructed on the principles of strictest accuracy, a whole bureaucracy, in fact, ready to his use. By applying this machinery he became the richest potentate in Europe, at a time when the northern monarchs were dependent upon feudal aids and precarious revenues from crown lands. In the same way, the Saracens bequeathed to the Normans the court system, which they in turn had derived from the princes of Persia and the example of Constantinople. Roger found it convenient to continue that organisation of pages, chamberlains, ushers, secretaries, viziers, and masters of the wardrobe, invested each with some authority of state according to his rank, which confined the administration of an Eastern kingdom to the walls of the palace.[4] At Palermo Europe saw the first instance of a court not wholly unlike that which Versailles afterwards became. The intrigues which endangered the throne and liberty of William the Bad, and which perplexed the policy of William the Good, were court-conspiracies of a kind common enough at Constantinople. In this court life men of letters and erudition played a first part three centuries before Petrarch taught the princes of Italy to respect the pen of a poet.

[1] The English Gualterio Offamilio, or Walter of the Mill, Archbishop of Palermo during the reign of William the Good, by his intrigues brought about the match between Constance and Henry VI. Richard Palmer at the same time was Bishop of Syracuse. Stephen des Rotrous, a Frenchman of the Counts of Perche, preceded Walter of the Mill in the Arch See of Palermo.

[2] Frederick Barbarossa's soldiers are said to have bidden the Romans: 'Take this German iron in change for Arab gold. This pay your master gives you, and this is how Franks win empire.'--_Amari_, vol. iii. p. 468.

[3] The embroidered skullcap of Constance of Aragon, wife of Frederick II., in the sacristy of the cathedral at Palermo, is made of gold thread thickly studded with pearls and jewels--rough sapphires and carbuncles, among which may be noticed a red cornelian engraved in Arabic with this sentence, 'In Christ, G.o.d, I put my hope.'

[4] The Arabic t.i.tle of _Kaid_, which originally was given to a subordinate captain of the guard, took a wide significance at the Norman Court. Latinised to _gaytus_, and Grecised under the form of [Greek: kaitos], it frequently occurs in chronicles and diplomas to denote a high minister of state. Matteo of Ajello, who exercised so powerful an influence over the policy of William the Good, heading the Mussulman and national party against the great ecclesiastics who were intriguing to draw Sicily into the entanglements of European diplomacy, was a Kaid. Matteo favoured the cause of Tancred, Walter of the Mill espoused that of the Germans, during the war of succession which followed upon William's death. The barons of the realm had to range themselves under these two leaders--to such an extent were the affairs of state in Sicily within the grasp of courtiers and churchmen.

King Roger, of whom the court geographer Edrisi writes that 'he did more sleeping than any other man waking,' was surrounded during his leisure moments, beneath the palm-groves of Favara, with musicians, historians, travellers, mathematicians, poets, and astrologers of Oriental breeding. At his command Ptolemy's Optics were translated into Latin from the Arabic. The prophecies of the Erythrean Sibyl were rendered accessible in the same way. His respect for the occult sciences was proved by his disinterring the bones of Virgil from their resting-place at Posilippo, and placing them in the Castel dell' Uovo in order that he might have access through necromancy to the spirit of the Roman wizard. It may be remembered in pa.s.sing, that Palermo in one of her mosques already held suspended between earth and air the supposed relics of Aristotle. Such were the saints of modern culture in its earliest dawning. While Venice was robbing Alexandria of the body of S. Mark, Palermo and Naples placed themselves beneath the protection of a philosopher and a poet. But Roger's greatest literary work was the compilation of a treatise of universal geography. Fifteen years were devoted to the task; and the ma.n.u.script, in Arabic, drawn up by the philosopher Edrisi, appeared only six weeks before the king's death in 1154. This book, called 'The Book of Roger, or the Delight of whoso loves to make the Circuit of the World,' was based upon the previous labours of twelve geographers, cla.s.sical and Mussulman. But aiming at greater accuracy than could be obtained by a merely literary compilation, Roger caused pilgrims, travellers, and merchants of all countries to be a.s.sembled for conference and examination before him. Their accounts were sifted and collated. Edrisi held the pen while Roger questioned. Measurements and distances were carefully compared; and a vast silver disc was constructed, on which all the seas, islands, continents, plains, rivers, mountain ranges, cities, roads, and harbours of the known world were delineated. The text supplied an explanatory description of this map, with tables of the products, habits, races, religions, and qualities, both physical and moral, of all climates. The precious metal upon which the map was drawn proved its ruin, and the Geography remained in the libraries of Arab scholars. Yet this was one of the first great essays of practical exploration and methodical statistic, to which the genius of the Norseman and the Arab each contributed a quota. The Arabians, by their primitive nomadic habits, by the necessities of their system of taxation, by their predilection for astrology, by their experience as pilgrims, merchants, and poets errant, were specially qualified for the labour of geographical investigation. Roger supplied the unbounded curiosity and restless energy of his Scandinavian temper, the kingly comprehensive intellect of his race, and the authority of a prince who was powerful enough to compel the service of qualified collaborators.

The architectural works of the Normans in Palermo reveal the same ascendency of Arab culture. San Giovanni degli Eremiti, with its low white rounded domes, is nothing more or less than a little mosque adapted to the rites of Christians.[1] The country palaces of the Zisa and the Cuba, built by the two Williams, retain their ancient Moorish character. Standing beneath the fretted arches of the hall of the Zisa, through which a fountain flows within a margin of carved marble, and looking on the landscape from its open porch, we only need to reconstruct in fancy the green gardens and orange-groves, where fair-haired Normans whiled away their hours among black-eyed odalisques and graceful singing boys from Persia.

Amid a wild tangle of olive and lemon trees overgrown with scarlet pa.s.sion-flowers, the pavilion of the Cubola, built of hewn stone and open at each of its four sides, still stands much as it stood when William II. paced through flowers from his palace of the Cuba, to enjoy the freshness of the evening by the side of its fountain. The views from all these Saracenic villas over the fruitful valley of the Golden Horn, and the turrets of Palermo, and the mountains and the distant sea, are ineffably delightful. When the palaces were new--when the gilding and the frescoes still shone upon their honeycombed ceilings, when their mosaics glittered in noonday twilight, and their amber-coloured masonry was set in shade of pines and palms, and the cool sound of rivulets made music in their courts and gardens, they must have well deserved their Arab t.i.tles of 'Sweet Waters' and 'The Glory' and 'The Paradise of Earth.'

[1] Tradition a.s.serts that the tocsin of this church gave the signal in Palermo to the ma.s.sacre of the Sicilian Vespers.

But the true splendour of Palermo, that which makes this city one of the most glorious of the south, is to be sought in its churches--in the mosaics of the Cappella Palatina founded by King Roger, in the vast aisles and cloisters of Monreale built by King William the Good at the instance of his Chancellor Matteo,[1] in the Cathedral of Palermo begun by Offamilio, and in the Martorana dedicated by George the Admiral. These triumphs of ecclesiastical architecture, none the less splendid because they cannot be reduced to rule or a.s.signed to any single style, were the work of Saracen builders a.s.sisted by Byzantine, Italian, and Norman craftsmen. The genius of Latin Christianity determined the basilica shape of the Cathedral of Monreale. Its bronze doors were wrought by smiths of Trani and Pisa.

Its walls were incrusted with the mosaics of Constantinople. The woodwork of its roof, and the emblazoned patterns in porphyry and serpentine and gla.s.s and smalto, which cover its whole surface, were designed by Oriental decorators. Norman sculptors added their dog-tooth and chevron to the mouldings of its porches; Greeks, Frenchmen, and Arabs may have tried their skill in turn upon the mult.i.tudinous ornaments of its cloister capitals. 'The like of which church,' said Lucius III. in 1182, 'hath not been constructed by any king even from ancient times, and such an one as must compel all men to admiration.' These words remain literally and emphatically true.

Other cathedrals may surpa.s.s that of Monreale in sublimity, simplicity, bulk, strength, or unity of plan. None can surpa.s.s it in the strange romance with which the memory of its many artificers invests it. None again can exceed it in richness and glory, in the gorgeousness of a thousand decorative elements subservient to one controlling thought. 'It is evident,' says Fergusson in his 'History of Architecture,' 'that all the architectural features in the building were subordinate in the eyes of the builders to the mosaic decorations, which cover every part of the interior, and are in fact the glory and the pride of the edifice, and alone ent.i.tle it to rank among the finest of mediaeval churches.' The whole of the Christian history is depicted in this series of mosaics; but on first entering, one form alone compels attention. The semi-dome of the eastern apse above the high altar is entirely filled with a gigantic half-length figure of Christ. He raises His right hand to bless, and with His left holds an open book on which is written in Greek and Latin, 'I am the Light of the world.' His face is solemn and severe, rather than mild or piteous; and round His nimbus runs the legend [Greek: 'Iesous Christos ho pantokrator]. Below Him on a smaller scale are ranged the archangels and the mother of the Lord, who holds the child upon her knees. Thus Christ appears twice upon this wall, once as the Omnipotent Wisdom, the Word by whom all things were made, and once as G.o.d deigning to a.s.sume a shape of flesh and dwell with men. The magnificent image of supreme Deity seems to fill with a single influence and to dominate the whole building. The house with all its glory is His. He dwells there like Pallas in her Parthenon or Zeus in his Olympian temple. To left and right over every square inch of the cathedral blaze mosaics, which portray the story of G.o.d's dealings with the human race from the Creation downwards, together with those angelic beings and saints who symbolise each in his own degree some special virtue granted to mankind. The walls of the fane are therefore an open book of history, theology, and ethics for all men to read.

[1] Matteo of Ajello induced William to found an archbishopric at Monreale in order to spite his rival Offamilio.

The superiority of mosaics over fresco as an architectural adjunct on this gigantic scale is apparent at a glance in Monreale.

Permanency of splendour and glowing richness of tone are all on the side of the mosaics. Their true rival is painted gla.s.s. The jewelled churches of the south are constructed for the display of coloured surfaces illuminated by sunlight falling on them from narrow windows, just as those of the north--Rheims, for example, or Le Mans--are built for the transmission of light through a variegated medium of transparent hues. The painted windows of a northern cathedral find their proper counterpart in the mosaics of the south.

The Gothic architect strove to obtain the greatest amount of translucent surface. The Byzantine builder directed his attention to securing just enough light for the illumination of his glistening walls. The radiance of the northern church was similar to that of flowers or sunset clouds or jewels. The glory of the southern temple was that of dusky gold and gorgeous needlework. The north needed acute brilliancy as a contrast to external greyness. The south found rest from the glare and glow of noonday in these sombre splendours.

Thus Christianity, both of the south and of the north, decked her shrines with colour. Not so the Paganism of h.e.l.las. With the Greeks, colour, though used in architecture, was severely subordinated to sculpture; toned and modified to a calculated harmony with actual nature, it did not, as in a Christian church, create a world beyond the world, a paradise of supersensual ecstasy, but remained within the limits of the known. Light falling upon carved forms of G.o.ds and heroes, bathing clear-cut columns and sharp basreliefs in simple l.u.s.tre, was enough for the Phoebean rites of h.e.l.las. Though we know that red and blue and green and gilding were employed to accentuate the mouldings of Greek temples, yet neither the gloomy glory of mosaics nor the gemmed fretwork of storied windows was needed to attune the souls of h.e.l.lenic worshippers to devotion.

Less vast than Monreale, but even more beautiful, because the charm of mosaic increases in proportion as the surface it covers may be compared to the interior of a casket, is the Cappella Palatina of the royal palace in Palermo. Here, again, the whole design and ornament are Arabo-Byzantine. Saracenic pendentives with Cuphic legends incrust the richly painted ceiling of the nave. The roofs of the apses and the walls are coated with mosaics, in which the Bible history, from the dove that brooded over Chaos to the lives of S.

Peter and S. Paul, receives a grand though formal presentation.

Beneath the mosaics are ranged slabs of grey marble, edged and divided with delicate patterns of inserted gla.s.s, resembling drapery with richly embroidered fringes. The floor is inlaid with circles of serpentine and porphyry encased in white marble, and surrounded by winding bands of Alexandrine work. Some of these patterns are restricted to the five tones of red, green, white, black, and pale yellow. Others add turquoise blue, and emerald, and scarlet, and gold. Not a square inch of the surface--floor, roof, walls, or cupola--is free from exquisite gemmed work of precious marbles. A candelabrum of fanciful design, combining lions devouring men and beasts, cranes, flowers, and winged genii, stands by the pulpit.

Lamps of chased silver hang from the roof. The cupola blazes with gigantic archangels, stationed in a ring beneath the supreme figure and face of Christ. Some of the Ravenna churches are more historically interesting, perhaps, than this little masterpiece of the mosaic art. But none is so rich in detail and l.u.s.trous in effect. It should be seen at night, when the lamps are lighted in a pyramid around the sepulchre of the dead Christ on Holy Thursday, when partial gleams strike athwart the tawny gold of the arches, and fall upon the profile of a priest declaiming in voluble Italian to a listening crowd.

Such are a few of the monuments which still remain to show of what sort was the mixed culture of Normans, Saracens, Italians, and Greeks at Palermo. In scenes like these the youth of Frederick II.

was pa.s.sed:--for at the end, while treating of Palermo, we are bound to think again of the Emperor who inherited from his German father the ambition of the Hohenstauffens, and from his Norman mother the fair fields and Oriental traditions of Sicily. The strange history of Frederick--an intellect of the eighteenth century born out of date, a cosmopolitan spirit in the age of Saint Louis, the crusader who conversed with Moslem sages on the threshold of the Holy Sepulchre, the Sultan of Lucera[1] who persecuted Paterini while he respected the superst.i.tion of Saracens, the anointed successor of Charlemagne, who carried his harem with him to the battlefields of Lombardy, and turned Infidels loose upon the provinces of Christ's Vicar--would be inexplicable, were it not that Palermo still reveals in all her monuments the _genius loci_ which gave spiritual nurture to this phoenix among kings. From his Mussulman teachers Frederick derived the philosophy to which he gave a vogue in Europe. From his Arabian predecessors he learnt the arts of internal administration and finance, which he transmitted to the princes of Italy. In imitation of Oriental courts, he adopted the practice of verse composition, which gave the first impulse to Italian literature. His Grand Vizier, Piero Delle Vigne, set an example to Petrarch, not only by composing the first sonnet in Italian, but also by showing to what height a low-born secretary versed in art and law might rise. In a word, the zeal for liberal studies, the luxury of life, the religious indifferentism, the bureaucratic system of state government, which mark the age of the Italian Renaissance, found their first manifestation within the bosom of the Middle Ages in Frederick. While our King John was signing Magna Charta, Frederick had already lived long enough to comprehend, at least in outline, what is meant by the spirit of modern culture.[2] It is true that the so-called Renaissance followed slowly and by tortuous paths upon the death of Frederick. The Church obtained a complete victory over his family, and succeeded in extinguishing the civilisation of Sicily. Yet the fame of the Emperor who transmitted questions of sceptical philosophy to Arab sages, who conversed familiarly with men of letters, who loved splendour and understood the arts of refined living, survived both long and late in Italy. His power, his wealth, his liberality of soul and lofty aspirations, formed the theme of many a tale and poem. Dante places him in h.e.l.l among the heresiarchs; and truly the splendour of his supposed infidelity found for him a goodly following. Yet Dante dated the rise of Italian literature from the blooming period of the Sicilian court.

Frederick's unorthodoxy proved no drawback to his intellectual influence. More than any other man of mediaeval times he contributed, if only as the memory of a mighty name, to the progress of civilised humanity.

[1] Charles of Anjou gave this nickname to Manfred, who carried on the Siculo-Norman tradition. Frederick, it may here be mentioned, had transferred his Saracen subjects of the vale of Mazara to Lucera in the Capitanate. He employed them as trusty troops in his warfare with the Popes and preaching friars. Nothing shows the confusion of the century in matters ecclesiastical and religious more curiously than that Frederick, who conducted a crusade and freed the Holy Sepulchre, should not only have tolerated the religion of Mussulmans, but also have armed them against the Head of the Church. What we are apt to regard as religious questions really belonged at that period to the sphere of politics.

[2] It is curious to note that in this year 1215, the date of Magna Charta, Frederick took the Cross at Aix-la-Chapelle.

Let us take leave both of Frederick and of Palermo, that centre of converging influences which was his cradle, in the cathedral where he lies gathered to his fathers. This church, though its rich sunbrowned yellow[1] reminds one of the tone of Spanish buildings, is like nothing one has seen elsewhere. Here even more than at Monreale the eye is struck with a fusion of styles. The western towers are grouped into something like the cl.u.s.tered sheafs of the Caen churches: the windows present Saracenic arches: the southern porch is covered with foliated incrustations of a late and decorative Gothic style: the exterior of the apse combines Arabic inlaid patterns of black and yellow with the Greek honeysuckle: the western door adds Norman dog-tooth and chevron to the Saracenic billet. Nowhere is any one tradition firmly followed. The whole wavers and yet is beautiful--like the immature eclecticism of the culture which Frederick himself endeavoured to establish in his southern kingdoms. Inside there is no such harmony of blended voices: all the strange tongues, which speak together on the outside, making up a music in which the far North, and ancient Byzance, and the delicate East sound each a note, are hushed. The frigid silence of the Palladian style reigns there--simple indeed and dignified, but lifeless as the century in which it flourished.

[1] Nearly all cities have their own distinctive colour.

That of Venice is a pearly white suggestive of every hue in delicate abeyance, and that of Florence is a sober brown. Palermo displays a rich yellow ochre pa.s.sing at the deepest into orange, and at the lightest into primrose.

This is the tone of the soil, of sun-stained marble, and of the rough ashlar masonry of the chief buildings.

Palermo has none of the glaring whiteness of Naples, nor yet of that particoloured gradation of tints which adds gaiety to the grandeur of Genoa.

Yet there, in a side chapel near the western door, stand the porphyry sarcophagi which shrine the bones of the Hautevilles and their representatives. There sleeps King Roger--'Dux strenuus et primus Rex Siciliae'--with his daughter Constance in her purple chest beside him. Henry VI. and Frederick II. and Constance of Aragon complete the group, which surpa.s.ses for interest all sepulchral monuments--even the tombs of the Scaligers at Verona--except only, perhaps, the statues of the nave of Innspruck. Very sombre and stately are these porphyry resting-places of princes born in the purple, a.s.sembled here from lands so distant--from the craggy heights of Hohenstauffen, from the green orchards of Cotentin, from the dry hills of Aragon. They sleep, and the centuries pa.s.s by. Rude hands break open the granite lids of their sepulchres, to find tresses of yellow hair and fragments of imperial mantles, embroidered with the hawks and stags the royal hunter loved. The church in which they lie changes with the change of taste in architecture and the manners of successive ages. But the huge stone arks remain unmoved, guarding their freight of mouldering dust beneath gloomy canopies of stone that temper the sunlight as it streams from the chapel windows.

_SYRACUSE AND GIRGENTI_

The traveller in Sicily is constantly reminded of cla.s.sical history and literature. While tossing, it may be, at anchor in the port of Trapani, and wondering when the tedious Libeccio will release him, he must perforce remember that here aeneas inst.i.tuted the games for Anchises. Here Mnestheus and Gyas and Sergestus and Cloanthus raced their galleys: on yonder little isle the Centaur struck; and that was the rock which received the dripping Menoetes:--

Illum et labentem Teucri et risere natantem, Et salsos rident revomentem pectore fluctus.

Or crossing a broken bridge at night in the lumbering diligence, guarded by infantry with set bayonets, and wondering on which side of the ravine the brigands are in ambush, he suddenly calls to mind that this torrent was the ancient Halycus, the border between Greeks and Carthaginians, established of old, and ratified by Timoleon after the battle of the Crimisus. Among the bare grey hills of Segeste his thoughts revert to that strange story told by Herodotus of Philippus, the young soldier of Crotona, whose beauty was so great, that when the Segesteans found him slain among their foes, they raised the corpse and burned it on a pyre of honour, and built a hero's temple over the urn that held his ashes. The first sight of Etna makes us cry with Theocritus, [Greek: Aitna mater ema ... polydendreos Aitna]. The solemn heights of Castro Giovanni bring lines of Ovid to our lips:--

Haud procul Hennaeis lacus est a moenibu altae Nomine Pergus aquae. Non illo plura Caystros Carmina cygnorum labentibus audit in undis.

Silva coronat aquas, cingens latus omne; suisque Frondibus ut velo Phoebeos summovet ignes.

Frigora dant rami, Tyrios humus humida flores.

Perpetnum ver est.

We look indeed in vain for the leafy covert and the purple flowers that tempted Proserpine. The place is barren now: two solitary cypress-trees mark the road which winds downwards from a desolate sulphur mine, and the lake is clearly the crater of an extinct volcano. Yet the voices of old poets are not mute. 'The rich Virgilian rustic measure' recalls a long-since buried past. Even among the wavelets of the Faro we remember Homer, scanning the sh.o.r.e if haply somewhere yet may linger the wild fig-tree which saved Ulysses from the whirlpool of Charybdis. At any rate we cannot but exclaim with Goethe, 'Now all these coasts, gulfs, and creeks, islands and peninsulas, rocks and sand-banks, wooded hills, soft meadows, fertile fields, neat gardens, hanging grapes, cloudy mountains, constant cheerfulness of plains, cliffs and ridges, and the surrounding sea, with such manifold variety are present in my mind; now is the "Odyssey" for the first time become to me a living world.'

But rich as the whole of Sicily may be in cla.s.sical a.s.sociations, two places, Syracuse and Girgenti, are pre-eminent for the power of bringing the Greek past forcibly before us. Their interest is of two very different kinds. Girgenti still displays the splendour of temples placed upon a rocky cornice between sea and olive-groves.

Syracuse has nothing to show but the scene of world-important actions. Yet the great deeds recorded by Thucydides, the conflict between eastern and western h.e.l.las which ended in the annihilation of the bright, brief, brilliant reality of Athenian empire, remain so clearly written on the hills and harbours and marshlands of Syracuse that no place in the world is topographically more memorable. The artist, whether architect, or landscape-painter, or poet, finds full enjoyment at Girgenti. The historian must be exacting indeed in his requirements if he is not satisfied with Syracuse.

What has become of Syracuse, 'the greatest of Greek cities and the fairest of all cities' even in the days of Cicero? Scarcely one stone stands upon another of all those temples and houses. The five towns which were included by the walls have now shrunk to the little island which the first settlers named Ortygia, where the sacred fountain of Arethusa seemed to their home-loving hearts to have followed them from h.e.l.las.[1] Nothing survives but a few columns of Athene's temple built into a Christian church, with here and there the marble masonry of a bath or the Roman stonework of an amphitheatre. There are not even any mounds or deep deposits of rubble mixed with pottery to show here once a town had been.[2]

_Etiam periere ruinae._ The vast city, devastated for the last time by the Saracens in 878 A.D., has been reduced to dust and swept by the scirocco into the sea. This is the explanation of its utter ruin. The stone of Syracuse is friable and easily disintegrated. The petulant moist wind of the south-east corrodes its surface; and when it falls, it crumbles to powder. Here, then, the elements have had their will unchecked by such sculptured granite as in Egypt resists the mounded sand of the desert, or by such marble colonnades as in Athens have calmly borne the insults of successive sieges. What was hewn out of the solid rock--the semicircle of the theatre, the street of the tombs with its deeply dented chariot-ruts, the gigantic quarries from which the material of the metropolis was scooped, the catacombs which burrow for miles underground--alone prove how mighty must have been the Syracuse of Dionysius. Truly 'the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.'

Standing on the beach of the Great Harbour or the Bay of Thapsus, we may repeat almost word by word Antipater's solemn lament over Corinth:--

Where is thy splendour now, thy crown of towers, Thy beauty visible to all men's eyes, The gold and silver of thy treasuries, Thy temples of blest G.o.ds, thy woven bowers Where long-stoled ladies walked in tranquil hours, Thy mult.i.tudes like stars that crowd the skies?

All, all are gone. Thy desolation lies Bare to the night. The elemental powers Resume their empire: on this lonely sh.o.r.e Thy deathless Nereids, daughters of the sea, Wailing 'mid broken stones unceasingly, Like halcyons when the restless south winds roar, Sing the sad story of thy woes of yore: These plunging waves are all that's left to thee.

Time, however, though he devours his children, cannot utterly destroy either the written record of ill.u.s.trious deeds or the theatre of their enactment. Therefore, with Thucydides in hand, we may still follow the events of that Syracusan siege which decided the destinies of Greece, and by the fall of Athens, raised Sparta, Macedonia, and finally Rome to the hegemony of the civilised world.

[1] The fountain of Arethusa, recently rescued from the washerwomen of Syracuse, is shut off from the Great Harbour by a wall and planted with papyrus. Taste has not been displayed in the bear-pit architecture of its circular enclosure.

[2] This is not strictly true of Achradina, where some _debris_ may still be found worth excavating.