successively, and the subsequent decline of its own power and wealth, render it certain that no such work as this temple would have been undertaken after that date: moreover, the purity of its simple Doric form places it in the earlier ages of Sicilian history. The Carthaginian invasion of the island was doubtless the event which arrested the building. Cicero has described a wonderful statue of Diana in bronze which the people of Segesta showed him with pride as the greatest ornament of their city: it was of colossal size and faultless beauty, belonging to the best period of Greek art. As the statue was in existence before the Carthaginian invasion, it seems to me highly improbable that the citizens of Segesta would have built so grand a temple for any other purpose than to enshrine their most admired and revered statue and to make it a place of worship for Diana. This theory may explain in part the reason why the building was arrested, for it is known that the image was stolen to adorn the city of Carthage,[A] and its loss, as well as the subsequent poverty of Segesta, would have been a sufficient reason for ceasing to build a temple to contain it. Diana's worshippers of old must have looked upon these lovely mountain-ranges as an abode dear to the queen of the nymphs and the hunter's patron deity. It seems as if nothing less than the presence of the mountain-goddess lingering round her shrine could have kept the temple in its marvellous perfection through the lapse of ages in a land of wars and earthquakes. The houses of the neighboring city are indistinguishably levelled with the earth, but hardly a stone of the sacred building is displaced.

The position of the temple was outside and below the limits of the ancient city. The mountain-ridge rises near at hand to a somewhat greater height, and terminates in a peak, on the summit and sides of which the town was built. Warned by the decline of the sun, we turned from the Segestan house of worship and began to climb the slope toward the Segestan place of amusement: the Greek theatre still remains with little loss or change. The ascent was interrupted by many lingering backward looks toward the grand colonnade as it appeared at fresh points of view from above. Hardly a living creature appeared on the lonely heights, except that one wandering shepherd, seeing the dress of foreigners, came forward to offer his little stock of coins ploughed from the earth or found in ancient buildings. As usual, most of the pocketful were corroded beyond recognition, but one piece bore a noble head executed in the Greek style, and the clear inscription, ΠΑΝΟΡΜΙΤΑΛ, a coin of Panormus; which is, in modern speech, Palermo. A few coppers were accepted as an ample equivalent for a coin which will not circulate.

The scattered fragments of a fortress crown the peak; and immediately below, cut in the solid rock of the western slope, lies the theatre. It is not large as compared with buildings of its class at Athens and Syracuse, yet I believe that in its seating capacity it exceeds any opera-house of our time. Entering by a ruined stage-door and crossing the orchestra, we rested on the lower tiers of seats. The great arc, comprising two-thirds of a circle, upon which the spectators were ranged, has still its covering of fine cut-stone seats, complete except at one extremity. Every part of the desolate building gains a new interest when peopled in imagination with its ancient occupants, and when we recall to mind the vast multitudes of many generations who have watched with breathless and solemn interest the stately progress of Greek tragedy before that ruined scena.

As we lounged upon the lowest seats, whereon the high dignitaries of the town used to sit, and looked across the open space of the orchestra, there at the centre of its farther side lay the slab which supported the altar of Bacchus, where stood the chorus-leader: near it a line of stone marks the front of the stage, and beyond it is spread an expanse of stage-scenery such as no modern royal theatre can boast. The whole broad prospect commanded from the colonnade below is seen across the stage of the theatre, but widened by the greater height and finished in the foreground by the majestic presence of the temple. All the north-western mountains of the island are taken in with one glance of the eye: beneath us the valley of the little river Scamander opens a long vista northward to the Mediterranean Sea, and far away the port of Castellamare glitters, in contrast with the blue, as white as a polished shell upon the shore. Most distant among the group of peaks is Mount Eryx, the lonely rock by the sea on whose summit stood the temple of Venus Erycina, more renowned in the ancient world than all other shrines of the goddess.

We climbed to the brow of the hill in order to descend through the entire length of the city. Hardly one stone is left upon another of all the streets through which the Segestans proudly conducted Cicero. Here and there appear the circular openings of cisterns which occupied the centres of ancient courtyards. The stones once hewn and carved which are strewn over the slope are now reduced to the roughness of boulders, so that one might cross the tract and catch no sign that it was once a city. Little has been done to discover what remains lie beneath the surface, but at one point, where a small excavation has been made, a heap of fallen Ionic columns cover the fragments of a tomb built on a scale of regal magnificence; and a little lower on the mountain two rooms of a house have been exhumed, the floors of which are still covered with beautiful mosaics.

Alfred T. Bacon.