wonder that the pious made offerings of incense at the top! Was it really true that Empedocles, that great philospher and healer, whose intellectual pride seems almost to claim divine honours, cast himself into the crater, that he might seem to have been swept away by the gods? Probably it was not true: but the story shows how the mountain worked on men’s imaginations.

If the theatre of Segesta has no Etna behind it, the surroundings to the eye are in other ways grand. It is seated upon the acropolis hill, whence a view can be taken at once of that corner of Sicily which was held by the mysterious Elymians, with their citadel and sanctuary of Eryx. Segesta was founded by a people who wanted protection, and feared the sea. But, like the rest of Sicily, it came under Greek influence; and its buildings, the two temples and the theatre, are Greek. This small town has played a part in history: it was the bone of contention which led Athens to interfere with Syracuse, and so on to her ruin. The columns of the temple are unfinished, the fluting has never been done. There is something that moves the sympathy in these unfinished places. No doubt the city was overwhelmed in some catastrophe, which perhaps left it quite desolate in the old cruel way. So the blocks of the Pinacotheca on the Athenian acropolis still keep the knobs which were used in mounting them; they were never cut off, for Athens fell. So, most striking of all, there lies in the quarry near Baalbek an enormous block of stone, seventy-seven feet long by fifteen and fourteen, squared and ready, one end tilted for moving; but it was never moved: there it has lain perhaps for three thousand years, and there it will lie till the world ends.

Girgenti, Agrigentum, Akragas, called by Pindar καλλἱστα βροτεἁν πολἱων, fairest of mortal cities; lofty Akragas, in Virgil’s words, spreading her walls so wide, mother of high-spirited horses—

although late founded in Greek history (B.C. 582), is set on a hilltop like some primaeval acropolis. Two rocky hills, with a space of level land between, were enclosed within a wall six miles round; below this the land slopes gently to the sea; the whole lies between two rivers. The existing remains, and the modern town, lie on one of the two hills. Akragas calls up only one name from the memory. Phalaris the Tyrant and his brazen bull. But Empedocles was born here. The great temple of Zeus Polieus, which Phalaris was said to have built, has perished, and those that remain cannot be certainly identified. One is called after Concord, but the Latin name cannot have properly belonged to it. The pictures here show some of the wonderful effects, which vary from hour to hour in this land of colour and sunlight. But the glory of Girgenti is the grouping of its remains: wall, temples, and rocks. If we could see the city as it was, it may well have been καλλἱστα βροτεἁν πολἱων. But in 406, the Carthaginians descended upon it, and starved out the people. All who could go migrated to Gela; the rest were massacred, and the city sacked. From this blow it never recovered, although it was afterwards inhabited.

Pæstum, the Greek Poseidonia, is one of those cities that have no history; at least, this city played no great part in ancient history and gave the world no great men. But Pæstum was not happy. It had its day, from the foundation in the seventh century for some two hundred years; but it fell early into the hands of the barbaric Lucanians. After this it existed, but it never became great. We know Pæstum for its roses, biferi rosaria Pæsti, which flower twice a year in May and November; and until lately, for its loneliness and desolation. Not a living soul was there in the circuit of the city walls, nothing but a bare plain with hundreds of flowering grasses, and the great temples in their grandeur. All its charm is gone now: a factory stains the sky with its smoke, and the modern world, whose god is its belly, has put its foul mark upon the quietude of Pæstum. Those who saw Pæstum when it was one of the most impressive sights in the world, will be careful not to go thither again.

Corinth, on the other hand, takes us back to the heart of the ancient world. From time immemorial Corinth was a great place. It lay on the high-road of the seas, in the time when voyagers hugged the coasts. Traders from Asia and Phœnicia would not ply to Italy and Spain along the open sea when they could go from island to island and along the sheltered waters of the two gulfs: all these must ship their goods across the Isthmus, and the Isthmus was dominated by the impregnable rock of Corinth. Thus the masters of Corinth could levy tolls on all commerce: they grew rich, as in older days Troy did, and later Constantinople, because they lay across a trade route. Here was built the first Greek navy of war-ships: here were the rich and powerful tyrants; here was worshipped Poseidon, with his famous Isthmian games, and Phoenician Aphrodite. A few years ago, the precinct of Poseidon was dug out, and there appeared a mass of votive tablets, on which we may see the daily life of Corinth in the seventh century before Christ. Pre-eminent amongst all the scenes are those of the potter’s trade: the pottery is seen being made on the wheel, baked in the furnace, and loaded into the ships for export to Italy and elsewhere. Corinth reminds us of some of the best stories of Herodotus: Cypselus and his chest, Arion and the dolphins, and that attractive scatterbrain Hippocleides, who at Sicyon hard by danced away his marriage, and did not care one jot. No great man of letters ever came out of Corinth, no poet and no orator; but Corinthian bronze was famous, and the city was full of works of art. When Mummius sacked Corinth and left it desolate, he made his famous bargain with the contractors who removed the spoil: if they damaged any of the works of art, they were to replace them with others as good. Corinth was afterwards rebuilt; all will remember St. Paul’s connection with the city, and the riot when Gallic was governor of Achaia.

The Acrocorinthus is one of the most magnificent sights in the world: it has the common quality of the Greek mountains, grandeur without excessive size; but standing as it does isolated from other hills, and visible everywhere, from Athens to Parnassus, its effect on the imagination is never to be forgotten. Its height is not far short of 2000 feet, and it is crowned with a fortress as it has been all through history. From the summit we see the whole centre of Greece; even the Parthenon itself, the centre of Greek artistic achievement. Here too is the sacred spring Peirene, struck out by the hoof of Pegasus.

The view here given towards the gulf shows Parnassus in the distance, like a ghost.

Athens is the heart of Greece, and Greece is the soul of mankind. No man who loves what is beautiful, or who admires what is noble, can fail to feel at home in Athens. Here in this little plain, girt with purple mountains, lived those men who discovered human reason, who showed how to express man’s greatest ideas, who pitted courage and intellect against brute force, who for a few short years lived the fullest life possible for mankind: we have lived on their thoughts ever since.

The beauties of the place have been often sung: they are summed up in one immortal phrase, “city of the violet crown.” The continued changes of colour, especially towards evening, in that clear air, with sea and cloud and mountain, make the scene a continual delight. In the midst of this fertile plain rises the sharp peak of Lycabettus, and beside it the buttressed Acropolis, from