This is a truly Odyssean journey. Soon the islands of the Sirens come

in sight,—bare bluffs of rock, shaped like galleys 270 taking flight

for the broad sea. As we row past in this ambrosial weather, the

oarsmen keeping time and ploughing furrows in the fruitless fields of

Nereus, it is not difficult to hear the siren voices—for earth and

heaven and sea make melodies far above mortal singing. The water round

the Galli—so the islands are now called, as antiquaries tell us, from

an ancient fortress named Guallo—is very deep, and not a sign of

habitation is to be seen upon them. In bygone ages they were used as

prisons; and many doges of Amalfi languished their lives away upon

those shadeless stones, watching the sea around them blaze like a

burnished shield at noon, and the peaks of Capri deepen into purple

when the west was glowing after sunset with the rose and daffodil of

Southern twilight.

The end of the Sorrentine promontory, Point Campanella, is absolutely

barren—grey limestone, with the scantiest over-growth of rosemary and

myrtle. A more desolate spot can hardly be imagined. But now the

morning breeze springs up behind; sails are hoisted, and the boatmen

ship their oars. Under the albatross wings of our lateen sails we scud

across the freshening waves. The precipice of Capri soars against the

sky, and the Bay of Naples expands before us with those sweeping curves

and azure amplitude that all the poets of the world have sung. Even

thus the mariners of ancient Hellas rounded this headland when the

world was young. Rightly they named yon rising ground, beneath

Vesuvius, Posilippo—rest from grief. Even now, after all those

centuries of toil, though the mild mountain has been turned into a

mouth of murderous fire, though Roman emperors and Spanish despots have

done their worst to mar what nature made so perfect, we may here lay

down the burden of our cares, gaining tranquillity by no mysterious

lustral rites, no penitential prayers or offerings of holocausts, but

by the influence of beauty in 271 the earth and air, and by sympathy

with a people unspoiled in their healthful life of labour alternating

with simple joy.

The last hour of the voyage was beguiled by stories of our boatmen,

some of whom had seen service on distant seas, while others could tell

of risks on shore and love adventures. They showed us how the

tunny-nets were set, and described the solitary life of the

tunny-watchers, in their open boats, waiting to spear the monsters of

the deep entangled in the chambers made for them beneath the waves. How

much of Æschylean imagery, I reflected, is drawn from this old fisher's

art—the toils of Clytemnestra and the tragedy of Psyttaleia rising to

my mind. One of the crew had his little son with him, a child of six

years old; and when the boy was restless, his father spoke of

Barbarossa and Timberio (_sic_) to keep him quiet; for the memory of

the Moorish pirate and the mighty emperor is still alive here. The

people of Capri are as familiar with Tiberius as the Bretons with King

Arthur; and the hoof-mark of illustrious crime is stamped upon the

island.

Capri offers another example of the versatility of Southern Italy. If

Amalfi brings back to us the naval and commercial prosperity of the

early middle ages; if Pæstuni remains a monument of the oldest Hellenic

civilisation; Capri, at a few miles' distance, is dedicated to the

Roman emperor who made it his favourite residence, when, life-weary

with the world and all its shows, he turned these many peaks and

slumbering caves into a summer palace for the nursing of his brain-sick

phantasy. Already on landing, we are led to remember that from this

shore was loosed the galley bearing that great letter—_verbosa et

grandis epistola_—which undid Sejanus and shook Rome. Riding to

Ana-Capri and the Salto di Tiberio, exploring the remains of his

favourite twelve villas, and gliding over the smooth waters paved with

the white marbles of his baths, we are for ever attended by the 272

same forbidding spectre. Here, perchance, were the _sedes arcanarum

libidinum_ whereof Suetonius speaks; the Spintrian medals, found in

these recesses, still bear witness that the biographer trusted no mere

fables for the picture he has drawn. Here, too, below the Villa Jovis,

gazing 700 feet sheer down into the waves, we tread the very parapet

whence fell the victims of that maniac lust for blood. 'After long and

exquisite torments,' says the Roman writer, 'he ordered condemned

prisoners to be cast into the sea before his eyes; marines were

stationed near to pound the fallen corpses with poles and oars, lest

haply breath should linger in their limbs.' The Neapolitan Museum

contains a little basrelief representing Tiberius, with the well-known

features of the Claudian house, seated astride upon a donkey, with a

girl before him. A slave is leading the beast and its burden to a

terminal statue under an olive-tree. This curious relic, discovered

some while since at Capri, haunted my fancy as I climbed the

olive-planted slopes to his high villa on the Arx Tiberii. It is some

relief, amid so much that is tragic in the associations of this place,

to have the horrible Tiberius burlesqued and brought into donkey-riding

relation with the tourist of to-day. And what an ironical revenge of

time it is that his famous Salto should be turned into a restaurant,

where the girls dance tarantella for a few coppers; that a toothless

hermit should occupy a cell upon the very summit of his Villa Jovis;

and that the Englishwoman's comfortable hotel should be called

_Timberio_ by the natives! A spiritualist might well believe that the

emperor's ghost was forced to haunt the island, and to expiate his old

atrocities by gazing on these modern vulgarisms.

Few problems suggested by history are more darkly fascinating than the

madness of despots; and of this madness, whether inherent in their

blood or encouraged by the 273 circumstance of absolute autocracy, the

emperors of the Claudian and Julian houses furnish the most memorable

instance.[101] It is this that renders Tiberius ever present to our

memory at Capri. Nor will the student of Suetonius forget his even more

memorable grand-nephew Caligula. The following passage is an episode

from the biography of that imperial maniac, whose portrait in green

basalt, with the strain of dire mental tension on the forehead, is

still so beautiful that we are able at this distance of time to pity

more than loathe him. 'Above all, he was tormented with nervous

irritation, by sleeplessness; for he enjoyed not more than three hours

of nocturnal repose, nor even these in pure untroubled rest, but

agitated by phantasmata of portentous augury; as, for example, upon one

occasion, among other spectral visions, he fancied that he saw the sea,

under some definite impersonation, conversing with himself. Hence it

was, and from this incapacity of sleeping, and from weariness of lying

awake, that he had fallen into habits of ranging all night long through

the palace, sometimes throwing himself on a couch, sometimes wandering

along the vast corridors, watching for the earliest dawn, and anxiously

wishing its approach.' Those corridors, or loggie, where Caligula spent

his wakeful hours, opened perchance upon this Bay of Naples, if not

upon the sea-waves of his favourite Porto d'Anzio; for we know that one

of his great follies was a palace built above the sea on piles at Baiæ;

and where else could _Pelagus_, with his cold azure eyes and briny

locks, have more appropriately terrified his sleep with prophecy

conveyed in dreams? The very nature of this vision, selected for such

special comment 274 by Suetonius as to show that it had troubled

Caligula profoundly, proves the fantastic nature of the man, and

justifies the hypothesis of insanity.

[101] De Quincey, in his essay on _The Cæsars_, has worked out this

subject with such artistic vividness that no more need be said. From

his pages I have quoted the paraphrastic version of Suetonius that

follows.

But it is time to shake off the burden of the past. Only students,

carrying superfluity of culture in their knapsacks, will ponder over

the imperial lunatics who made Capri and Baiæ fashionable in the days

of ancient Rome. Neither Tiberius nor Caligula, nor yet Ferdinand of

Aragon or Bomba for that matter, has been able to leave trace of vice

or scar of crime on nature in this Eden. A row round the island, or a

supper-party in the loggia above the sea at sunset-time, is no less

charming now, in spite of Roman or Spanish memories, than when the

world was young.

Sea-mists are frequent in the early summer mornings, swathing the

cliffs of Capri in impenetrable wool and brooding on the perfectly

smooth water till the day-wind rises. Then they disappear like magic,

rolling in smoke-wreaths from the surface of the sea, condensing into

clouds and climbing the hillsides like Oceanides in quest of

Prometheus, or taking their station on the watch-towers of the world,

as in the chorus of the _Nephelai_. Such a morning may be chosen for

the _giro_ of the island. The blue grotto loses nothing of its beauty,

but rather gains by contrast, when passing from dense fog you find

yourself transported to a world of wavering subaqueous sheen. It is

only through the opening of the very topmost arch that a boat can glide

into this cavern; the arch itself spreads downward through the water,

so that all the light is transmitted from beneath and coloured by the

sea. The grotto is domed in many chambers; and the water is so clear

that you can see the bottom, silvery, with black-finned fishes diapered

upon the blue white sand. The flesh of a diver in this water showed

like the faces of children playing at snapdragon; all around him the

spray leapt up with 275 living fire; and when the oars struck the

surface, it was as though a phosphorescent sea had been smitten, and

the drops ran from the blades in blue pearls. I have only once seen

anything (outside the magic-world of a pantomime) to equal these

effects of blue and silver; and that was when I made my way into an

ice-cave in the Great Aletsch glacier—not an artificial gallery such as

they cut at Grindelwald, but a natural cavern, arched, hollowed into

fanciful recesses, and hung with stalactites of pendent ice. The

difference between the glacier-cavern and the sea-grotto was that in

the former all the light was transmitted through transparent sides, so

that the whole was one uniform azure, except in rare places where

little chinks opened upwards to the air, and the light of day came

glancing with a roseate flush. In the latter the light sent from

beneath through the water played upon a roof of rock; reflections

intermingled with translucence; and a greater variety of light and

shadow compensated the lack of that strange sense of being shut within

a solid gem.

Numberless are the caves at Capri. The so-called green grotto has the

beauty of moss-agate in its liquid floor; the red grotto shows a warmer

chord of colour; and where there is no other charm to notice, endless

beauty may be found in the play of sunlight upon roofs of limestone,

tinted with yellow, orange, and pale pink, mossed over, hung with fern,

and catching tones of blue or green from the still deeps beneath.

Sheets of water, wherever found, are the most subtle heighteners of

colour. To those who are familiar with Venetian or Mantuan sunsets, who

have seen the flocks of flamingoes reflected on the lagoons of Tunis,

or who have watched stormy red flakes tossed from crest to crest of

great Atlantic waves on our own coasts, this need hardly be said. Yet I

cannot leave this beauty of the sea at Capri without 276 touching on a

melodrama of light and colour I once saw at Castellammare. It was a

festa night, when the people sent up rockets and fireworks of every hue

from the harbour-breakwater. The surf rolled shoreward like a bath of

molten metals, all confused of blue, and red, and green, and gold—dying

dolphin tints that burned strangely beneath the purple skies and

tranquil stars. Boats at sea hung out their crimson cressets,

flickering in long lines on the bay; and larger craft moved slowly with

rows of lamps defining their curves; while the full moon shed over all

her 'vitreous pour, just tinged with blue.' To some tastes this

mingling of natural and artificial effects would seem unworthy of sober

notice; but I confess to having enjoyed it with childish eagerness like

music never to be forgotten.

After a day upon the water it is pleasant to rest at sunset in the

loggia above the sea. The Bay of Naples stretches far and wide in

front, beautiful by reason chiefly of the long fine line descending

from Vesuvius, dipping almost to a level and then gliding up to join

the highlands of the north. Now sun and moon begin to mingle: waning

and waxing splendours. The cliffs above our heads are still blushing a

deep flame-colour, like the heart of some tea-rose; when lo, the touch

of the huntress is laid upon those eastern pinnacles, and the horizon

glimmers with her rising. Was it on such a night that Ferdinand of

Aragon fled from his capital before the French, with eyes turned ever

to the land he loved, chanting, as he leaned from his galley's stern,

that melancholy psalm—'Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman

waketh but in vain'—and seeing Naples dwindle to a white blot on the

purple shore?

Our journey takes the opposite direction. Farewell to Capri, welcome to

Sorrento! The roads are sweet with scent of acacia and orange flowers.

When you walk in a garden at 277 night, the white specks beneath your

feet are fallen petals of lemon blossoms. Over the walls hang cataracts

of roses, honey-pale clusters of the Banksia rose, and pink bushes of

the China rose, growing as we never see them grow with us. The grey

rocks wave with gladiolus—feathers of crimson, set amid tufts of

rosemary, and myrtle, and tree-spurge. In the clefts of the sandstone,

and behind the orchard walls, sleeps a dark green night of foliage, in

the midst of which gleam globed oranges, and lemons dropping like great

pearls of palest amber dew. It is difficult to believe that the lemons

have not grown into length by their own weight, as though mere hanging

on the bough prevented them from being round—so waxen are they.

Overhead soar stone-pines—a roof of sombre green, a lattice-work of

strong red branches, through which the moon peers wonderfully. One part

of this marvellous _piano_ is bare rock tufted with keen-scented herbs,

and sparsely grown with locust-trees and olives. Another waves from sea

to summit with beech-copses and oak-woods, as verdant as the most

abundant English valley. Another region turns its hoary raiment of

olive-gardens to the sun and sea, or flourishes with fig and vine.

Everywhere, the houses of men are dazzling white, perched on natural

coigns of vantage, clustered on the brink of brown cliffs, nestling

under mountain eaves, or piled up from the sea-beach in ascending

tiers, until the broad knees of the hills are reached, and great Pan,

the genius of solitude in nature, takes unto himself a region yet

untenanted by man. The occupations of the sea and land are blent

together on this shore; and the people are both blithe and gentle. It

is true that their passions are upon the surface, and that the knife is

ready to their hand. But the combination of fierceness and softness in

them has an infinite charm when one has learned by observation that

their lives are laborious and frugal, and that 278 their honesty is

hardly less than their vigour. Happy indeed are they—so happy that, but

for crimes accumulated through successive generations by bad governors,

and but for superstitions cankering the soul within, they might deserve

what Shelley wrote of his imagined island in 'Epipsychidion.'

279

ETNA

The eruptions of Etna have blackened the whole land for miles in every

direction. That is the first observation forced upon one in the

neighbourhood of Catania, or Giarre, or Bronte. From whatever point of

view you look at Etna, it is always a regular pyramid, with long and

gradually sloping sides, broken here and there by the excrescence of

minor craters and dotted over with villages; the summit crowned with

snow, divided into peak and cone, girdled with clouds, and capped with

smoke, that shifts shape as the wind veers, dominates a blue-black

monstrous mass of outpoured lava. From the top of Monte Rosso, a

subordinate volcano which broke into eruption in 1669, you can trace

the fountain from which 'the unapproachable river of purest fire,' that

nearly destroyed Catania, issued. You see it still, bubbling up like a

frozen geyser from the flank of the mountain, whence the sooty torrent

spreads, or rather sprawls, with jagged edges to the sea. The plain of

Catania lies at your feet, threaded by the Simeto, bounded by the

promontory of Syracuse and the mountains of Castro Giovanni. This huge

amorphous blot upon the landscape may be compared to an ink-stain on a

variegated tablecloth, or to the coal districts marked upon a

geological atlas, or to the heathen in a missionary map—the green and

red and grey colours standing for Christians and Mahommedans and Jews

of different shades and qualities. The lava, where it has been

cultivated, is reduced to fertile 280 sand, in which vines and

fig-trees are planted—their tender green foliage contrasting strangely

with the sinister soil that makes them flourish. All the roads are

black as jet, like paths leading to coal-pits, and the country-folk on

mule-back plodding along them look like Arabs on an infernal Sahara.

The very lizards which haunt the rocks are swart and smutty. Yet the

flora of the district is luxuriant. The gardens round Catania, nestling

into cracks and ridges of the stiffened flood, are marvellously

brilliant with spurge and fennel and valerian. It is impossible to form

a true conception of flower-brightness till one has seen these golden

and crimson tints upon their ground of ebony, or to realise the

blueness of the Mediterranean except in contrast with the lava where it

breaks into the sea. Copses of frail oak and ash, undergrown with ferns

of every sort; cactus-hedges, orange-trees grafted with lemons and

laden with both fruits; olives of scarce two centuries' growth, and

fig-trees knobbed with their sweet produce, overrun the sombre soil,

and spread their boughs against the deep blue sea and the translucent

amethyst of the Calabrian mountains. Underfoot, a convolvulus with

large white blossoms, binding dingy stone to stone, might be compared

to a rope of Desdemona's pearls upon the neck of Othello.

The villages are perhaps the most curious feature of this scenery.

Their houses, rarely more than one story high, are walled, paved, and

often roofed with the inflexible material which once was ruinous fire,

and is now the servant of the men it threatened to destroy. The

churches are such as might be raised in Hades to implacable Proserpine,

such as one might dream of in a vision of the world turned into hell,

such as Baudelaire in his fiction of a metallic landscape might have

imagined under the influence of hasheesh. Their flights of steps are

built of sharply cut black lava blocks no 281 feet can wear. Their

door-jambs and columns and pediments and carved work are wrought and

sculptured of the same gloomy masonry. How forbidding are the acanthus

scrolls, how grim the skulls and cross-bones on these portals! The

bell-towers, again, are ribbed and beamed with black lava. A certain

amount of the structure is whitewashed, which serves to relieve the

funereal solemnity of the rest. In an Indian district each of these

churches would be a temple, raised in vain propitiation to the demon of

the fire above and below. Some pictures made by their spires in

combination with the sad village-hovels, the snowy dome of Etna, and

the ever-smiling sea, are quite unique in their variety of suggestion

and wild beauty.

The people have a sorrow-smitten and stern aspect. Some of the men in

the prime of life are grand and haughty, with the cast-bronze

countenance of Roman emperors. But the old men bear rigid faces of

carved basalt, gazing fixedly before them as though at some time or

other in their past lives they had met Medusa: and truly Etna in

eruption is a Gorgon, which their ancestors have oftentimes seen

shuddering, and fled from terror-frozen. The white-haired old women,

plying their spindle or distaff, or meditating in grim solitude, sit

with the sinister set features of Fates by their doorways. The young

people are very rarely seen to smile: they open hard, black, beaded

eyes upon a world in which there is little for them but endurance or

the fierceness of passions that delight in blood. Strangely different

are these dwellers on the sides of Etna from the voluble, lithe sailors

of Sciacca or Mazara, with their sunburnt skins and many-coloured

garments.

The Val del Bove—a vast chasm in the flank of Etna, where the very

heart of the volcano has been riven and its entrails bared—is the most

impressive spot of all this region. 282 The road to it leads from

Zafferana (so called because of its crocus-flowers) along what looks

like a series of black moraines, where the lava torrents pouring from

the craters of Etna have spread out, and reared themselves in stiffened

ridges against opposing mountain buttresses. After toiling for about

three hours over the dismal waste, a point between the native rock of

Etna and the dead sea of lava is reached, which commands a prospect of

the cone with its curling smoke surmounting a caldron of some four

thousand feet in depth and seemingly very wide. The whole of this space

is filled with billows of blackness, wave on wave, crest over crest,

and dyke by dyke, precisely similar to a gigantic glacier, swarthy and

immovable. The resemblance of the lava flood to a glacier is

extraordinarily striking. One can fancy oneself standing on the

Belvedere at Macugnaga, or the Tacul point upon the Mer de Glace, in

some nightmare, and finding to one's horror that the radiant snows and

river-breeding ice-fields have been turned by a malignant deity to

sullen, stationary cinders. It is a most hideous place, like a pit in

Dante's Hell, disused for some unexplained reason, and left untenanted

by fiends. The scenery of the moon, without atmosphere and without

life, must be of this sort; and such, rolling round in space, may be

some planet that has survived its own combustion. When the clouds,

which almost always hang about the Val del Bove, are tumbling at their

awful play around its precipices, veiling the sweet suggestion of

distant sea and happier hills that should be visible, the horror of

this view is aggravated. Breaking here and there, the billows of mist

disclose forlorn tracts of jet-black desolation, wicked, unutterable,

hateful in their hideousness, with patches of smutty snow above, and

downward-rolling volumes of murky smoke. Shakspere, when he imagined

the damned spirits confined to 'thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice,'

283 divined the nature of a glacier; but what line could he have

composed, adequate to shadow forth the tortures of a soul condemned to

palpitate for ever between the ridges of this thirsty and intolerable

sea of dead fire? If the world-spirit chose to assume for itself the

form and being of a dragon, of like substance to this, impenetrable,

invulnerable, unapproachable would be its hide. It requires no great

stretch of the imagination to picture these lava lakes glowing, as they

must have been, when first outpoured, the bellowing of the crater, the

heaving and surging of the solid earth, the air obstructed with cinders

and whizzing globes of molten rock. Yet in these throes of devilish

activity, the Val del Bove would be less insufferable than in its

present state of suspension, asleep, but threatening, ready to

regurgitate its flame, but for a moment inert.

An hour's drive from Nicolosi or Zafferana, seaward, brings one into

the richest land of 'olive and aloe and maize and vine' to be found

upon the face of Europe. Here, too, are laughing little towns, white,

prosperous, and gleeful, the very opposite of those sad stations on the

mountain-flank. Every house in Aci Reale has its courtyard garden

filled with orange-trees, and nespole, and fig-trees, and oleanders.

From the grinning corbels that support the balconies hang tufts of

gem-bright ferns and glowing clove-pinks. Pergolas of vines, bronzed in

autumn, and golden green like chrysoprase beneath an April sun, fling

their tendrils over white walls and shady loggie. Gourds hang ripening

in the steady blaze. Far and wide stretches a landscape rich with tilth

and husbandry, boon Nature paying back to men tenfold for all their

easy toil. The terrible great mountain sleeps in the distance innocent

of fire. I know not whether this land be more delightful in spring or

autumn. The little flamelike flakes of brightness upon vines and

fig-trees in April have their 284 own peculiar charm. But in November

the whole vast flank of Etna glows with the deep-blue tone of steel;

the russet woods are like a film of rust; the vine-boughs thrust living

carbuncles against the sun. To this season, when the peculiar

earth-tints of Etna, its strong purples and tawny browns, are

harmonised with the decaying wealth of forest and of orchard, I think

the palm of beauty must be given in this land.

The sea is an unchangeable element of charm in all this landscape. Aci

Castello should be visited, and those strange rocks, called the

Ciclopidi, forced by volcanic pressure from beneath the waves. They are

made of black basalt like the Giant's Causeway; and on their top can be

traced the caps of calcareous stone they carried with them in the fret

and fury of their upheaval from the sea-bed. Samphire, wild fennel,

cactus, and acanthus clothe them now from crest to basement where the

cliff is not too sheer. By the way, there are few plants more

picturesque than the acanthus in full flower. Its pale lilac spikes of

blossom stand waist-high above a wilderness of feathering, curving,

delicately indented, burnished leaves—deep, glossy, cool, and green.

This is the place for a child's story of the one-eyed giant Polyphemus,

who fed his flocks among the oak-woods of Etna, and who, strolling by

the sea one summer evening, saw and loved the fair girl Galatea. She

was afraid of him, and could not bear his shaggy-browed round rolling

eye. But he forgot his sheep and goats, and sat upon the cliffs and

piped to her. Meanwhile she loved the beautiful boy Acis, who ran down

from the copse to play with her upon the sea-beach. They hid together

from Polyphemus in a fern-curtained cavern of the shore. But Polyphemus

spied them out and heard them laughing together at their games. Then he

grew wroth, and stamped with his huge feet upon the 285 earth, and made

it shake and quiver. He roared and bellowed in his rage, and tore up

rocks and flung them at the cavern where the children were in hiding,

and his eye shot fire beneath the grisly pent-house of his wrinkled

brows. They, in their sore distress, prayed to heaven; and their

prayers were heard: Galatea became a mermaid, so that she might swim

and sport like foam upon the crests of the blue sea; and Acis was

changed into a stream that leapt from the hills to play with her amid

bright waters. But Polyphemus, in punishment for his rage, and spite,

and jealousy, was forced to live in the mid-furnaces of Etna. There he

growled and groaned and shot forth flame in impotent fury; for though

he remembered the gladness of those playfellows, and sought to harm

them by tossing red-hot rocks upon the shore, yet the light sea ever

laughed, and the radiant river found its way down from the copsewood to

the waves. The throes of Etna in convulsion are the pangs of his great

giant's heart, pent up and sick with love for the bright sea and

gladsome sun; for, as an old poet sings:—

There's love when holy heaven doth wound the earth;

And love still prompts the land to yearn for bridals:

The rain that falls in rivers from the sky,

Impregnates earth: and she brings forth for men

The flocks and herds and life of teeming Ceres.

To which let us add:—

But sometimes love is barren, when broad hills,

Rent with the pangs of passion, yearn in vain,

Pouring fire tears adown their furrowed cheeks,

And heaving in the impotence of anguish.

There are few places in Europe where the poetic truth of Greek

mythology is more apparent than here upon the coast between Etna and

the sea. Of late, philosophers have been eager to tell us that the

beautiful legends of the Greeks, which 286 contain in the coloured haze

of fancy all the thoughts afterwards expressed by that divine race in

poetry and sculpture, are but decayed phrases, dead sentences, and

words whereof the meaning was forgotten. In this theory there is a

certain truth; for mythology stands midway between the first lispings

of a nation in its language, and its full-developed utterances in art.

Yet we have only to visit the scenes which gave birth to some Hellenic

myth, and we perceive at once that, whatever philology may affirm, the

legend was a living poem, a drama of life and passion transferred from

human experience to the inanimate world by those early myth-makers, who

were the first and the most fertile of all artists. Persephone was the

patroness of Sicily, because amid the billowy cornfields of her mother

Demeter and the meadow flowers she loved in girlhood, are ever found

sulphurous ravines and chasms breathing vapour from the pit of Hades.

What were the Cyclops—that race of one-eyed giants—but the many minor

cones of Etna? Observed from the sea by mariners, or vaguely spoken of

by the natives, who had reason to dread their rage, these hillocks

became lawless and devouring giants, each with one round burning eye.

Afterwards the tales of Titans who had warred with Zeus were realised

in this spot. Typhoeus or Enceladus made the mountain heave and snort;

while Hephæstus not unnaturally forged thunder-bolts in the central

caverns of a volcano that never ceased to smoke. To the student of art

and literature, mythology is chiefly interesting in its latest stages,

when, the linguistic origin of special legends being utterly forgotten,

the poets of the race played freely with its rich material. Who cares

to be told that Achilles was the sun, when the child of Thetis and the

lover of Patroclus has been sung for us by Homer? Are the human agonies

of the doomed house of Thebes made less appalling by tracing back the

tale of OEdipus to some 287 prosaic source in old astronomy? The incest

of Jocasta is the subject of supreme tragic art. It does not improve

the matter, or whitewash the imagination of the Greeks, as some have

fondly fancied, to unravel the fabric wrought by Homer and by

Sophocles, into its raw material in Aryan dialects. Indeed, this new

method of criticism bids fair to destroy for young minds the human

lessons of pathos and heroism in Greek poetry, and to create an obscure

conviction that the greatest race of artists the world has ever

produced were but dotards, helplessly dreaming over distorted forms of

speech and obsolete phraseology.

Let us bid farewell to Etna from Taormina. All along the coast between

Aci and Giardini the mountain towers distinct against a sunset

sky—divested of its robe of cloud, translucent and blue as some dark

sea-built crystal. The Val del Bove is shown to be a circular crater in

which the lava has boiled and bubbled over to the fertile land beneath.

As we reach Giardini, the young moon is shining, and the night is alive

with stars so large and bright that they seem leaning down to whisper

in the ears of our soul. The sea is calm, touched here and there on the

fringes of the bays and headlands with silvery light; and impendent

crags loom black and sombre against the feeble azure of the moonlit

sky. _Quale per incertam lunam et sub luce malignâ_: such is our

journey, with Etna, a grey ghost, behind our path, and the reflections

of stars upon the sea, and glow-worms in the hedges, and the mystical

still splendour of the night, that, like Death, liberates the soul,

raising it above all common things, simplifying the outlines of the

earth as well as our own thoughts to one twilight hush of aë;rial

tranquillity. It is a strange compliment to such a landscape to say

that it recalls a scene from an opera. Yet so it is. What the arts of

the scene-painter and the musician strive to 288 suggest is here

realised in fact; the mood of the soul created by music and by passion

is natural here, spontaneous, prepared by the divine artists of earth,

air, and sea.

Was there ever such another theatre as this of Taormina? Turned to the

south, hollowed from the crest of a promontory 1000 feet above the sea,

it faces Etna with its crown of snow: below, the coast sweeps onward to

Catania and the distant headland of Syracuse. From the back the shore

of Sicily curves with delicately indented bays towards Messina: then

come the straits, and the blunt mass of the Calabrian mountains

terminating Italy at Spartivento. Every spot on which the eye can rest

is rife with reminiscences. It was there, we say, looking northward to

the straits, that Ulysses tossed between Scylla and Charybdis; there,

turning towards the flank of Etna, that he met with Polyphemus and

defied the giant from his galley. From yonder snow-capped eyrie, Αιτνας

σκοπία, the rocks were hurled on Acis. And all along that shore, after

Persephone was lost, went Demeter, torch in hand, wailing for the

daughter she could no more find among Sicilian villages. Then, leaving

myths for history, we remember how the ships of Nikias set sail from

Reggio, and coasted the forelands at our feet, past Naxos, on their way

to Catania and Syracuse. Gylippus afterwards in his swift galley took

the same course: and Dion, when he came to destroy his nephew's empire.

Here too Timoleon landed, resolute in his firm will to purge the isle

of tyrants.

What scenes, more spirit-shaking than any tragic shows—pageants of fire

and smoke, and mountains in commotion—are witnessed from these grassy

benches, when the earth rocks, and the sea is troubled, and the side of

Etna flows with flame, and night grows horrible with bellowings that

forebode changes in empires!—

289

Quoties Cyclopum effervere in agros

Vidimus undantem ruptis fornacibus Ætnam,

Flammarumque globos liquefactaque volvere saxa.

The stage of these tremendous pomps is very calm and peaceful now.

Lying among acanthus leaves and asphodels, bound together by wreaths of

white and pink convolvulus, we only feel that this is the loveliest

landscape on which our eyes have ever rested or can rest. The whole

scene is a symphony of blues—gemlike lapis-lazuli in the sea, aë;rial

azure in the distant headlands, light-irradiated sapphire in the sky,

and impalpable vapour-mantled purple upon Etna. The grey tones of the

neighbouring cliffs, and the glowing brickwork of the ruined theatre,

through the arches of which shine sea and hillside, enhance by contrast

these modulations of the one prevailing hue. Etna is the dominant

feature of the landscape—Αιτνας ματερ εμά—πολυδένδρεος Αιτνας— than

which no other mountain is more sublimely solitary, more worthy of

Pindar's praise, 'The pillar of heaven, the nurse of sharp eternal

snow.' It is Etna that gives its unique character of elevated beauty to

this coast scenery, raising it to a grander and more tragic level than

the landscape of the Cornice and the Bay of Naples.

290

PALERMO

THE NORMANS IN SICILY

Sicily, in the centre of the Mediterranean, has been throughout all

history the meeting-place and battle-ground of the races that

contributed to civilise the West. It was here that the Greeks measured

their strength against Phoenicia, and that Carthage fought her first

duel with Rome. Here the bravery of Hellenes triumphed over barbarian

force in the victories of Gelon and Timoleon. Here, in the harbour of

Syracuse, the Athenian Empire succumbed to its own intemperate

ambition. Here, in the end, Rome laid her mortmain upon Greek,

Phoenician, and Sikeliot alike, turning the island into a granary and

reducing its inhabitants to serfdom. When the classic age had closed,

when Belisarius had vainly reconquered from the Goths for the empire of

the East the fair island of Persephone and Zeus Olympius, then came the

Mussulman, filling up with an interval of Oriental luxury and Arabian

culture the period of utter deadness between the ancient and the modern

world. To Islam succeeded the conquerors of the house of Hauteville,

Norman knights who had but lately left their Scandinavian shores, and

settled in the northern provinces of France. The Normans flourished for

a season, and were merged in a line of Suabian princes, old

Barbarossa's progeny. German rulers thus came to sway the corn-lands of

Trinacria, until the bitter hatred of the Popes extinguished the house

of Hohenstauffen upon the battlefield 291 of Grandella and the scaffold

of Naples. Frenchmen had the next turn—for a brief space only; since

Palermo cried to the sound of her tocsins, 'Mora, Mora,' and the

tyranny of Anjou was expunged with blood. Spain, the tardy and patient

power, which inherited so much from the failure of more brilliant

races, came at last, and tightened so firm a hold upon the island, that

from the end of the thirteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth

century, with one brief exception, Sicily belonged to the princes of

Aragon, Castile, and Bourbon. These vicissitudes have left their traces

everywhere. The Greek temples of Segeste and Girgenti and Selinus, the

Roman amphitheatre of Syracuse, the Byzantine mosaics and Saracenic

villas of Palermo, the Norman cathedrals of Monreale and Cefalú, and

the Spanish habits which still characterise the life of Sicilian

cities, testify to the successive strata of races which have been

deposited upon the island. Amid its anarchy of tongues, the Latin alone

has triumphed. In the time of the Greek colonists Sicily was polyglot.

During the Saracenic occupation it was trilingual. It is now, and

during modern history it has always been, Italian. Differences of

language and of nationality have gradually been fused into one

substance, by the spirit which emanates from Rome, and vivifies the

Latin race.

The geographical position of Sicily has always influenced its history

in a very marked way. The eastern coast, which is turned towards Greece

and Italy, has been the centre of Aryan civilisation in the island, so

that during Greek and Roman ascendency Syracuse was held the capital.

The western end, which projects into the African sea, was occupied in

the time of the Hellenes by Phoenicians, and afterwards by Mussulmans:

consequently Panormus, the ancient seat of Punic colonists, now called

Palermo, became the centre of the Moslem rule, which, inherited entire

by the Norman chieftains, 292 was transmitted eventually to Spain.

Palermo, devoid of classic monuments, and unknown except as a name to

the historians of Greek civilisation, is therefore the modern capital

of the island. 'Prima sedes, corona regis, et regni caput,' is the

motto inscribed upon the cathedral porch and the archiepiscopal throne

of Palermo: nor has any other city, except Messina,[102] presumed to

contest this title.

[102] Messina, owing to its mercantile position between the Levant,

Italy, and France, and as the key to Sicily from the mainland, might

probably have become the modern capital had not the Normans found a

state machinery ready to their use centralised at Palermo.

Perhaps there are few spots upon the surface of the globe more

beautiful than Palermo. The hills on either hand descend upon the sea

with long-drawn delicately broken outlines, so exquisitely tinted with

aë;rial hues, that at early dawn or beneath the blue light of a full

moon the panorama seems to be some fabric of the fancy, that must fade

away, 'like shapes of clouds we form,' to nothing. Within the cradle of

these hills, and close upon the tideless water, lies the city. Behind

and around on every side stretches the famous _Conca d'Oro_, or golden

shell, a plain of marvellous fertility, so called because of its

richness and also because of its shape; for it tapers to a fine point

where the mountains meet, and spreads abroad, where they diverge, like

a cornucopia, toward the sea. The whole of this long vega is a garden,

thick with olive-groves and orange-trees, with orchards of nespole and

palms and almonds, with fig-trees and locust-trees, with judas-trees

that blush in spring, and with flowers as multitudinously brilliant as

the fretwork of sunset clouds. It was here that in the days of the

Kelbite dynasty, the sugar-cane and cotton-tree and mulberry supplied

both East and West with produce for the banquet and the paper-mill and

the silk-loom; and though these industries are now neglected, vast

gardens of 293 cactuses still give a strangely Oriental character to

the scenery of Palermo, while the land flows with honey-sweet wine

instead of sugar. The language in which Arabian poets extolled the

charms of this fair land is even now nowise extravagant: 'Oh how

beautiful is the lakelet of the twin palms, and the island where the

spacious palace stands! The limpid water of the double springs

resembles liquid pearls, and their basin is a sea: you would say that

the branches of the trees stretched down to see the fishes in the pool

and smile at them. The great fishes swim in those clear waters, and the

birds among the gardens tune their songs. The ripe oranges of the

island are like fire that burns on boughs of emerald; the pale lemon

reminds me of a lover who has passed the night in weeping for his

absent darling. The two palms may be compared to lovers who have gained

an inaccessible retreat against their enemies, or raise themselves

erect in pride to confound the murmurs and ill thoughts of jealous men.

O palms of the two lakelets of Palermo, may ceaseless, undisturbed, and

plenteous dews for ever keep your freshness!' Such is the poetry which

suits the environs of Palermo, where the Moorish villas of La Zisa and

La Cuba and La Favara still stand, and where the modern gardens, though

wilder, are scarcely less delightful than those beneath which King

Roger discoursed with Edrisi, and Gian da Procida surprised his

sleeping mistress.[103] The groves of oranges and lemons are an

inexhaustible source of joy: not only because of their 'golden lamps in

a green night,' but also because of their silvery constellations,

nebulæ, and drifts of stars, in the same green night, and milky ways of

blossoms on the ground beneath. As in all southern scenery, the

transition from these perfumed thickly clustering gardens to the bare

unirrigated hillsides is very striking. There the dwarf-palm 294 tufts

with its spiky foliage the clefts of limestone rock, and the lizards

run in and out among bushes of tree-spurge and wild cactus and grey

asphodels. The sea-shore is a tangle of lilac and oleander and

laurustinus and myrtle and lentisk and cytisus and geranium. The

flowering plants that make our shrubberies gay in spring with blossoms,

are here wild, running riot upon the sand-heaps of Mondello or beneath

the barren slopes of Monte Pellegrino.

It was into this terrestrial paradise, cultivated through two preceding

centuries by the Arabs, who of all races were wisest in the arts of

irrigation and landscape-gardening, that the Norsemen entered as

conquerors, and lay down to pass their lives.[104]

[103] Boccaccio, Giorn. v. Nov. 6.

[104] The Saracens possessed themselves of Sicily by a gradual

conquest, which began about 827 A.D. Disembarking on the little isle

of Pantellaria and the headland of Lilyboeum, where of old the

Carthaginians used to enter Sicily, they began by overrunning the

island for the first four years. In 831 they took Palermo; during the

next ten years they subjugated the Val di Mazara; between 841 and 859

they possessed themselves of the Val di Noto; after this they extended

their conquest over the seaport towns of the Val Demone, but neglected

to reduce the whole of the N.E. district. Syracuse was stormed and

reduced to ruins after a desperate defence in 878, while Leo, the heir

of the Greek Empire, contented himself with composing two Anacreontic

elegies on the disaster at Byzantium. In 895 Sicily was wholly lost to

the Greeks, by a treaty signed between the Saracens and the remaining

Christian towns. The Christians during the Mussulman occupation were

divided into four classes—(1) A few independent municipalities

obedient loosely to the Greek Empire; (2) tributaries who paid the

Arabs what they would otherwise have sent to Byzantium; (3) vassals,

whose towns had fallen by arms or treaty into the hands of the

conquerors, and who, though their property was respected and religion

tolerated, were called 'dsimmi' or 'humbled;' (4) serfs, prisoners of

war, sold as slaves or attached to the soil (_Amari_, vol. i.).

No chapter of history more resembles a romance than that which records

the sudden rise and brief splendour of the house of Hauteville. In one

generation the sons of Tancred passed from the condition of squires in

the Norman vale of 295 Cotentin, to kinghood in the richest island of

the southern sea. The Norse adventurers became Sultans of an Oriental

capital. The sea-robbers assumed together with the sceptre the culture

of an Arabian court. The marauders whose armies burned Rome, received

at papal hands the mitre and dalmatic as symbols of ecclesiastical

jurisdiction.[105] The brigands who on their first appearance in Italy

had pillaged stables and farmyards to supply their needs, lived to mate

their daughters with princes and to sway the politics of Europe with

gold. The freebooters, whose skill consisted in the use of sword and

shield, whose brains were vigorous in strategy or statecraft, and whose

pleasures were confined to the hunting-field and the wine-cup, raised

villas like the Zisa and encrusted the cathedral of Monreale with

mosaics. Finally, while the race was yet vigorous, after giving two

heroes to the first Crusade, it transmitted its titles, its temper, and

its blood to the great Emperor, who was destined to fight out upon the

battlefield of Italy the strife of Empire against Papacy, and to

bequeath to mediæval Europe the tradition of cosmopolitan culture. The

physical energy of this brood of heroes was such as can scarcely be

paralleled in history. Tancred de Hauteville begat two families by

different wives. Of his children twelve were sons; two of whom stayed

with their father in Normandy, while ten sought fame and found a

kingdom in the south. Of these, William Iron Arm, the first Count of

Apulia; Robert Guiscard, who united Calabria and Apulia under one

dukedom, and carried victorious arms against both Emperors of East and

West; and Roger the Great Count, who added Sicily to the conquests of

the Normans and bequeathed the kingdom of South Italy to his son, rose

to the highest name. But all the brothers shared 296 the great

qualities of the house; and two of them, Humphrey and Drogo, also wore

a coronet. Large of limb and stout of heart, persevering under

difficulties, crafty yet gifted with the semblance of sincerity,

combining the piety of pilgrims with the morals of highwaymen, the

sturdiness of barbarians with the plasticity of culture, eloquent in

the council-chamber and the field, dear to their soldiers for their

bravery and to women for their beauty, equally eminent as generals and

as rulers, restrained by no scruples but such as policy suggested,

restless in their energy, yet neither fickle nor rash, comprehensive in

their views, but indefatigable in detail, these lions among men were

made to conquer in the face of overwhelming obstacles, and to hold

their conquests with a grasp of iron. What they wrought, whether wisely

or not for the ultimate advantage of Italy, endures to this day, while

the work of so many emperors, republics, and princes has passed and

shifted like the scenes in a pantomime. Through them the Greeks, the

Lombards, and the Moors were extinguished in the south. The Papacy was

checked in its attempt to found a province of S. Peter below the Tiber.

The republics of Naples, Gaeta, Amalfi, which might have rivalled

perchance with Milan, Genoa, and Florence, were subdued to a master's

hand. In short, to the Normans Italy owed that kingdom of the Two

Sicilies which formed one-third of her political balance, and which

proved the cause of all her most serious revolutions.

[105] King Roger in the mosaics of the Martorana Church at Palermo

wears the dalmatic, and receives his crown from the hands of Christ.

Roger, the youngest of the Hauteville family, and the founder of the

kingdom of Sicily, showed by his untamable spirit and sound intellect

that his father's vigour remained unexhausted. Each of Tancred's sons

was physically speaking a masterpiece, and the last was the prime work

of all. This Roger, styled the Great Count, begat a second Roger, the

first King of Sicily, whose son and grandson, both named William, ruled

in succession at Palermo. With them the 297 direct line of the house of

Hauteville expired. It would seem as if the energy and fertility of the

stock had been drained by its efforts in the first three generations.

Constance, the heiress of the family, who married Henry VI. and gave

birth to the Emperor Frederick II., was daughter of King Roger, and

therefore third in descent from Tancred. Drawing her blood more

immediately from the parent stem, she thus transmitted to the princes

of the race of Hohenstauffen the vigour of her Norman ancestry

unweakened. This was a circumstance of no small moment in the history

of Europe. Upon the fierce and daring Suabian stem were grafted the

pertinacity, the cunning, the versatility of the Norman adventurers.

Young Frederick, while strong and subtle enough to stand for himself

against the world, was so finely tempered by the blended strains of his

parentage that he received the polish of an Oriental education without

effeminacy. Called upon to administer the affairs of Germany, to govern

Italy, to contend with the Papacy, and to settle by arms and treaties

the great Oriental question of his days, Frederick, cosmopolitan from

the cradle, was equal to the task. Had Europe been but ready, the

Renaissance would have dated from his reign, and a universal empire, if

not of political government, yet of intellectual culture, might have

been firmly instituted.

Of the personal appearance of the Norman chiefs—their fair hair, clear

eyes, and broad shoulders—we hear much from the chroniclers. One

minutely studied portrait will serve to bring the whole race vividly

before us. Bohemond, Prince of Tarentum, the son of Robert Guiscard,

and first cousin to Tancred of Montferrat, was thus described by Anna

Comnena, who saw him at her father's court during the first Crusade:

'Neither amongst our own nation (the Greeks), nor amongst foreigners,

is there in our age a man equal to Bohemond. His presence dazzled the

eyes, as his reputation the fancy. 298 He was one cubit taller than the

tallest man known. In his waist he was thin, but broad in his shoulders

and chest, without being either too thin or too fat. His arms were

strong, his hands full and large, his feet firm and solid. He stooped a

little, but through habit only, and not on account of any deformity. He

was fair, but on his cheeks there was an agreeable mixture of

vermilion. His hair was not loose over his shoulders, according to the

fashion of the barbarians, but was cut above his ears. His eyes were

blue, and full of wrath and fierceness. His nostrils were large,

inasmuch as having a wide chest and a great heart, his lungs required

an unusual quantity of air to moderate the warmth of his blood. His

handsome face had in itself something gentle and softening, but the

height of his person and the fierceness of his looks had something wild

and terrible. He was more dreadful in his smiles than others in their

rage.' When we read this description, remembering the romance of

Bohemond's ancestry and his own life, we do not wonder at the tales of

chivalry. Those 'knights of Logres and of Lyoness, Lancelot or Pelleas

or Pellenore,' with whose adventures our tawny-haired magnificent

Plantagenets amused their leisure, become realities. The manly beauty,

described by the Byzantine princess in words which seem to betray a

more than common interest in her handsome foe, was hereditary in the

house of Hauteville. They transmitted it to the last of the Suabian

dynasty, to Manfred and Conradin, and to the king Enzio, whose long

golden hair fell down from his shoulders to his saddle-bow as he rode,

a captive, into Bologna.

The story of the Norman conquest is told by two chroniclers—William of

Apulia, who received his materials from Robert Guiscard, and Godfrey

Malaterra, who wrote down the oral narrative of Roger. Thus we possess

what is tantamount to personal memoirs of the Norman chiefs.

Nevertheless, a veil 299 of legendary romance obscures the first

appearance of the Scandinavian warriors upon the scene of history.

William of Apulia tells how, in the course of a pilgrimage to S.

Michael's shrine on Monte Gargano, certain knights of Normandy were

accosted by a stranger of imposing aspect, who persuaded them to draw

their swords in the quarrel of the Lombard towns of South Italy against

the Greeks. This man was Melo of Bari. Whether his invitation were so

theatrically conveyed or not, it is probable that the Norsemen made

their first acquaintance with Apulia on a pilgrimage to the Italian

Michael's mount; and it is certain that Melo, whom we dimly descry as a

patriot of enlarged views and indomitable constancy, provided them with

arms and horses, raised troops in Salerno and Benevento to assist them,

and directed them against the Greeks. This happened in 1017. Twelve

years later we find the town of Aversa built and occupied by Normans

under the control of their Count Rainulf; while another band, headed by

Ardoin, a Lombard of Milan, lived at large upon the country, selling

its services to the Byzantine Greeks. In the anarchy of Southern Italy

at this epoch, when the decaying Empire of the East was relaxing its

hold upon the Apulian provinces, when the Papacy was beginning to lift

up its head after the ignominy of Theodora and Marozia, and the Lombard

power was slowly dissolving upon its ill-established foundations, the

Norman adventurers pursued a policy which, however changeful, was

invariably self-advantageous. On whatever side they fought, they took

care that the profits of war should accrue to their own colony. Quarrel

as they might among themselves, they were always found at one against a

common foe. And such was their reputation in the field, that the

hardiest soldiers errant of all nations joined their standard. Thus it

fell out that when Ardoin and his Normans had helped Maniaces to wrest

the eastern districts of Sicily from 300 the Moors, they returned, upon

an insult offered by the Greek general, to extend the right hand of

fellowship to Rainulf and his Normans of Aversa. 'Why should you stay

here like a rat in his hole, when with our help you might rule those

fertile plains, expelling the women in armour who keep guard over

them?' The agreement of Ardoin and Rainulf formed the basis of the

future Norman power. Their companies joined forces. Melfi was chosen as

the centre of their federal government. The united Norman colony

elected twelve chiefs or counts of equal authority; and henceforth they

thought only of consolidating their ascendency over the effete races

which had hitherto pretended to employ their arms. The genius of their

race and age, however, was unfavourable to federations. In a short time

the ablest man among them, the true king, by right of personal vigour

and mental cunning, showed himself. It was at this point that the house

of Hauteville rose to the altitude of its romantic destiny. William

Iron Arm was proclaimed Count of Apulia. Two of his brothers succeeded

him in the same dignity. His half-brother, Robert Guiscard, imprisoned

one Pope,[106] Leo IX., and wrested from another, Nicholas II., the

title of Duke of Apulia and Calabria. By the help of his youngest

brother, Roger, he gradually completed the conquest of Italy below the

Tiber, and then addressed himself to the task of subduing Sicily. The

Papacy, incapable of opposing the military vigour of the Northmen, was

distracted between jealousy of their growing importance and desire to

utilise them for its own advantage.[107] The temptation to employ these

filial 301 pirates as a catspaw for restoring Sicily to the bosom of

the Church, was too strong to be resisted. In spite of many ebbs and

flows of policy, the favour which the Popes accorded to the Normans

gilded the might and cunning of the adventurers with the specious

splendour of acknowledged sanctity. The time might come for casting off

these powerful allies and adding their conquests to the patrimony of S.

Peter. Meanwhile it costs nothing to give away what does not belong to

one, particularly when by doing so a title to the same is gradually

formed. So the Popes reckoned. Robert and Roger went forth with banners

blessed by Rome to subjugate the island of the Greek and Moor.

[106] The Normans were lucky in getting hold of Popes. King Roger

caught Innocent II. at San Germano in 1139, and got from him the

confirmation of all his titles.

[107] Even the great Hildebrand wavered in his policy toward Robert

Guiscard. Having raised an army by the help of the Countess Matilda in

1074, he excommunicated Robert and made war against him. Robert proved

more than his match in force and craft; and Hildebrand had to confirm

his title as duke, and designate him Knight of S. Peter in 1080. When

Robert drove the Emperor Henry IV. from Rome, and burned the city of

the Coelian, Hildebrand retired with his terrible defender to Salerno,

and died there in 1085. Robert and both Rogers were good sons of the

Church, deserving the titles of 'Terror of the faithless,' 'Sword of

the Lord drawn from the scabbard of Sicily,' as long as they were

suffered to pursue their own schemes of empire. They respected the

Pope's person and his demesne of Benevento; they were largely liberal

in donations to churches and abbeys. But they did not suffer their

piety to interfere with their ambition.

The honours of this conquest, paralleled for boldness only by the

achievements of Cortes and Pizarro, belong to Roger. It is true that

since the fall of the Kelbite dynasty Sicily had been shaken by anarchy

and despotism, by the petty quarrels of princes and party leaders, and

to some extent also by the invasion of Maniaces. Yet on the approach of

Roger with a handful of Norman knights, 'the island was guarded,' to

quote Gibbon's energetic phrase, 'to the water's edge.' For some years

he had to content himself with raids and harrying excursions, making

Messina, which he won from the Moors by the aid of their Christian

serfs and vassals, the basis of his operations, and retiring from time

to time across the Faro 302 with booty to Reggio. The Mussulmans had

never thoroughly subdued the north-eastern highlands of Sicily.

Satisfied with occupying the whole western and southern sections of the

island, with planting their government firmly at Palermo, destroying

Syracuse, and establishing a military fort on the heights of Castro

Giovanni, they had somewhat neglected the Christian populations of the

Val Demone. Thus the key to Sicily upon the Italian side fell into the

hands of the invaders. From Messina Roger advanced by Rametta and

Centorbi to Troina, a hill-town raised high above the level of the sea,

within view of the solemn blue-black pyramid of Etna. There he planted

a garrison in 1062, two years after his first incursion into the

island. The interval had been employed in marches and countermarches,

descents upon the vale of Catania, and hurried expeditions as far as

Girgenti, on the southern coast. One great battle is recorded beneath

the walls of Castro Giovanni, when six hundred Norman knights, so say

the chroniclers, engaged with fifteen thousand of the Arabian chivalry

and one hundred thousand foot soldiers. However great the exaggeration

of these numbers, it is certain that the Christians fought at fearful

odds that day, and that all the eloquence of Roger, who wrought on

their fanaticism in his speech before the battle, was needed to raise

their courage to the sticking-point. The scene of the great rout of

Saracens which followed, is in every respect memorable. Castro

Giovanni, the old Enna of the Greeks and Romans, stands on the top of a

precipitous mountain, two thousand feet above a plain which waves with

corn. A sister height, Calascibetta, raised nearly to an equal

altitude, keeps ward over the same valley; and from their summits the

whole of Sicily is visible. Here in old days Demeter from her

rock-built temple could survey vast tracts of hill and dale, breaking

downwards to the sea and undulating everywhere with harvest. 303 The

much praised lake and vale of Enna[108] are now a desolate sulphur

district, void of beauty, with no flowers to tempt Proserpine. Yet the

landscape is eminently noble because of its breadth—bare naked hills

stretching in every direction to the sea that girdles Sicily—peak

rising above peak and town-capped eyrie over eyrie—while Etna, wreathed

with snow, and purple with the peculiar colour of its coal-black lava

seen through light-irradiated air, sleeps far off beneath a crown of

clouds. Upon the cornfields in the centre of this landscape the

multitudes of the Infidels were smitten hip and thigh by the handful of

Christian warriors. Yet the victory was by no means a decisive one. The

Saracens swarmed round the Norman fortress of Troina; where, during a

severe winter, Roger and his young wife, Judith of Evreux, whom he had

loved in Normandy, and who journeyed to marry him amid the din of

battles, had but one cloak to protect them both from the cold. The

traveller, who even in April has experienced the chill of a high-set

Sicilian village, will not be 304 inclined to laugh at the hardships

revealed by this little incident. Yet the Normans, one and all, were

stanch. A victory over their assailants in the spring gave them courage

to push their arms as far as the river Himera and beyond the Simeto,

while a defeat of fifty thousand Saracens by four hundred Normans at

Cerami opened the way at last to Palermo. Reading of these engagements,

we are led to remember how Gelon smote his Punic foes upon the Himera,

and Timoleon arrayed Greeks by the ten against Carthaginians by the

thousand on the Crimisus. The battlefields are scarcely altered; the

combatants are as unequally matched, and represent analogous races. It

is still the combat of a few heroic Europeans against the hordes of

Asia. In the battle of Cerami it is said that S. George fought visibly

on horseback before the Christian band, like that wide-winged

chivalrous archangel whom Spinello Aretino painted beside Sant' Efeso

in the press of men upon the walls of the Pisan Campo Santo.

[108] 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,[109] 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-Hamûud 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 305 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 title

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.

[109] 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 assumed 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

title as well as the investiture 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 306 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 assumed

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[110] 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,[111] and

there is 307 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 pass 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

shores 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.[112] 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 308 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.[113] 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.

[110] 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.

[111] 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.

[112] 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, God, I put my hope.'

[113] The Arabic title of _Kâid_, 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

κάιτος, 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

Kâid. 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 309 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 passing, 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 manuscript, 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, classical 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 assembled 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 310 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.[114] 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 passion-flowers, the pavilion of the

Cubola, built of 311 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

titles of 'Sweet Waters' and 'The Glory' and 'The Paradise of Earth.'

[114] Tradition asserts that the tocsin of this church gave the signal

in Palermo to the massacre 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,[115] 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 assigned to any

single style, were the work of Saracen builders assisted 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 glass and

smalto, which cover its whole surface, were designed 312 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 multitudinous 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 surpass that of Monreale in

sublimity, simplicity, bulk, strength, or unity of plan. None can

surpass 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 entitle it to rank

among the finest of mediæval 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 Ιησους Χριστος 'ο

παντοκράτωρ. 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 God deigning to assume a 313

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 God'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.

[115] 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 glass. 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 314 her shrines with colour. Not so the Paganism of

Hellas. 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 gods and heroes, bathing clear-cut columns and sharp

basreliefs in simple lustre, was enough for the Phoebean rites of

Hellas. 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 Hellenic 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 glass, 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 315 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 lustrous 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

passed:—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[116] who persecuted 316 Paterini while he respected

the superstition 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.[117] 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 317

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 hell 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 mediæval times he contributed, if only as the memory

of a mighty name, to the progress of civilised humanity.

[116] 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.

[117] 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[118] 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 clustered 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 318 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.

[118] 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 passing 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

Siciliæ'—with his daughter Constance in her purple chest beside him.

Henry VI. and Frederick II. and Constance of Aragon complete the group,

which surpasses 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, assembled 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 pass 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.

319

SYRACUSE AND GIRGENTI

The traveller in Sicily is constantly reminded of classical 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 Æneas instituted 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, Αιτνα 320 ματερ εμά....πολυδένδρεος Αιτνα. The solemn

heights of Castro Giovanni bring lines of Ovid to our lips:—

Haud procul Hennæis lacus est a moenibu altæ

Nomine Pergus aquæ. 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 shore 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 classical associations, 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 321 recorded by Thucydides, the conflict between eastern and

western Hellas 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

Hellas.[119] 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.[120] _Etiam periere ruinæ._ 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 322 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 gods, thy woven bowers

Where long-stoled ladies walked in tranquil hours,

Thy multitudes 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 shore

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 illustrious 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 323 Athens, raised Sparta, Macedonia, and finally

Rome to the hegemony of the civilised world.

[119] 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.

[120] This is not strictly true of Achradina, where some _débris_ may

still be found worth excavating.

There are few students of Thucydides and Grote who would not be

surprised by the small scale of the cliffs, and the gentle incline of

Epipolæ—the rising ground above the town of Syracuse, upon the slope of

which the principal operations of the Athenian siege took place.[121]

Maps, and to some extent also the language of Thucydides, who talks of

the προσβάσεις or practicable approaches to Epipolæ, and the κρημνοι,

or precipices by which it was separated from the plain, would lead one

to suppose that the whole region was on each hand rocky and abrupt. In

reality it is extremely difficult to distinguish the rising ground of

Epipolæ upon the southern side from the plain, so very gradual is the

line of ascent and so comparatively even is the rocky surface of the

hill. Thucydides, in narrating the night attack of Demosthenes upon the

lines of Gylippus (book vii. 43-45), lays stress upon the necessity of

approaching Epipolæ from the western side by Euryâlus, and again

asserts that during the hurried retreat of the Athenians great numbers

died by leaping from the cliffs, while still more had to throw away

their armour. At this time the Athenian army was encamped upon the

shore of the Great Harbour, and held trenches and a wall that stretched

from that side at least halfway across Epipolæ. It seems therefore

strange that, unless their movements were impeded by counterworks and

lines of walls, of which we have no information, the troops of

Demosthenes should not, at least in their retreat, have been able to

pour down over the gentle 324 descent of Epipolæ toward the Anapus,

instead of returning to Euryâlus. Anyhow, we can scarcely discern

cliffs of more than ten feet upon the southern slope of Epipolæ, nor

can we understand why the Athenians should have been forced to take

these in their line of retreat. There must have been some artificial

defences of which we read nothing, and of which no traces now remain,

but which were sufficient to prevent them from choosing their ground.

Slight difficulties of this kind raise the question whether the

wonderful clearness of Thucydides in detail was really the result of

personal observation, or whether his graphic style enabled him to give

the appearance of scrupulous accuracy. I incline to think that the

author of the sixth and seventh books of the History must have visited

Syracuse, and that if we could see his own map of Epipolæ, we should

better be able to understand the difficulties of the backward night

march of Demosthenes, by discovering that there was some imperative

necessity for not descending, as seems natural, upon the open slope of

the hill to the south. The position of Euryâlus at the extreme point

called Mongibellisi is clear enough. Here the ground, which has been

continually rising from the plateau of Achradina (the northern suburb

of Syracuse), comes to an abrupt finish. Between Mongibellisi and the

Belvedere hill beyond there is a deep depression, and the slope to

Euryâlus either from the south or north is gradual. It was a gross

piece of neglect on the part of Nikias not to have fortified this spot

on his first investment of Epipolæ, instead of choosing Labdalum,

which, wherever we may place it, must have been lower down the hill to

the east. For Euryâlus is the key to Epipolæ. It was here that Nikias

himself ascended in the first instance, and that afterwards he

permitted Gylippus to enter and raise the siege, and lastly that

Demosthenes, by overpowering the insufficient Syracusan guard, got at

night within the lines of 325 the Spartan general. Thus the three most

important movements of the siege were made upon Euryâlus. Dionysius,

when he enclosed Epipolæ with walls, recognised the value of the point,

and fortified it with the castle which remains, and to which, as

Colonel Leake believes, Archimedes, at the order of Hiero II., made

subsequent additions. This castle is one of the most interesting Greek

ruins extant. A little repair would make it even now a substantial

place of defence, according to Greek tactics. Its deep foss is cut in

the solid rock, and furnished with subterranean magazines for the

storage of provisions. The three piles of solid masonry on which the

drawbridge rested, still stand in the centre of this ditch. The oblique

grand entrance to the foss descends by a flight of well-cut steps. The

rock itself over which the fort was raised is honeycombed with

excavated passages for infantry and cavalry, of different width and

height, so that one sort can be assigned to mounted horsemen and

another to foot soldiers. The trap-doors which led from these galleries

into the fortress are provided with rests for ladders that could be let

down to help a sallying force or drawn up to impede an advancing enemy.

The inner court for stabled horses and the stations for the catapults

are still in tolerable preservation. Thus the whole arrangement of the

stronghold can be traced not dimly but distinctly. Being placed on the

left side of the chief gate of Epipolæ, the occupants of the fort could

issue to attack a foe advancing toward that gate in the rear. At the

same time the subterranean galleries enabled them to pour out upon the

other side, if the enemy had forced an entrance, while the minor

passages and trap-doors provided a retreat in case the garrison were

overpowered in one of their offensive operations. The view from

Euryâlus is extensive. To the left rises Etna, snowy, solitary, broadly

vast, above the plain of Catania, the curving shore, Thapsus, 326 and

the sea. Syracuse itself, a thin white line between the harbour and the

open sea, a dazzling streak between two blues, terminates the slope of

Epipolæ, and on the right hand stretch the marshes of Anapus rich with

vines and hoary with olives.

[121] Epipolæ is in shape a pretty regular isosceles triangle, of

which the apex is Mongibellisi or Euryâlus, and the base Achradina or

the northern quarter of the ancient city. Thucydides describes it as

χωρίου αποκρήμνου τε και υπερ της πόλεως ευθυς κειμένου... εξήρτηται

γαρ το αλλο χωρίον και μέχρι της πόλεως επικλινές τέ εστι και επιφανες

παν εισο και ωνομαστα υπυ τον Συρακοσίων δια το επιπολης του αλλου

ειναι Επιπολαι (vi. 96).]

By far the most interesting localities of Syracuse are the Great

Harbour and the stone quarries. When the sluggish policy and faint

heart of Nikias had brought the Athenians to the verge of ruin, when

Gylippus had entered the besieged city, and Plemmyrium had been wrested

from the invaders, and Demosthenes had failed in his attack upon

Epipolæ, and the blockading trenches had been finally evacuated, no

hope remained for the armament of Athens except only in retreat by

water. They occupied a palisaded encampment upon the shore of the

harbour, between the mouth of the Anapus and the city; whence they

attempted to force their way with their galleys to the open sea.

Hitherto the Athenians had been supreme upon their own element; but now

the Syracusans adopted tactics suited to the narrow basin in which the

engagements had to take place. Building their vessels with heavy beaks,

they crushed the lighter craft of the Athenians, which had no room for

flank movements and rapid evolutions. A victory was thus obtained by

the Syracusan navy; the harbour was blockaded with chains by the order

of Gylippus; the Athenians were driven back to their palisades upon the

fever-haunted shore. Their only chance seemed to depend upon a renewal

of the sea-fight in the harbour. The supreme moment arrived. What

remained of the Athenian fleet, in numbers still superior to that of

their enemies, steered straight for the mouth of the harbour. The

Syracusans advanced from the naval stations of Ortygia to meet them.

The shore was thronged with spectators, Syracusans tremulous with the

expectation of a decisive success, Athenians on the tenter-hooks 327 of

hope and dread. In a short time the harbour became a confused mass of

clashing triremes; the water beaten into bloody surf by banks of oars;

the air filled with shouts from the combatants and exclamations from

the lookers-on: ολοφυρμός, βοή, νικοντες, κρατούμενοι, αλλα οσα εν

μεγάλω κινδύνω μέγα στρατόπεδον πολυειδη αναγκάζοιτο φθέγγεσθαι. Then

after a struggle, in which desperation gave energy to the Athenians,

and ambitious hope inspired their foes with more than wonted vigour,

the fleet of the Athenians was finally overwhelmed. The whole scene can

be reproduced with wonderful distinctness; for the low shores of

Plemmyrium, the city of Ortygia, the marsh of Lysimeleia, the hills

above the Anapus, and the distant dome of Etna, are the same as they

were upon that memorable day. Nothing has disappeared except the temple

of Zeus Olympius and the buildings of Temenitis.

What followed upon the night of that defeat is less easily realised.

Thucydides, however, by one touch reveals the depth of despair to which

the Athenians had sunk. They neglected to rescue the bodies of their

dead from the Great Harbour, or to ask for a truce, according to

hallowed Greek usage, in order that they might perform the funeral

rites. To such an extent was the army demoralised. Meanwhile within the

city the Syracusans kept high festival, honouring their patron

Herakles, upon whose day it happened that the battle had been fought.

Nikias neglected this opportunity of breaking up his camp and retiring

unmolested into the interior of the island. When after the delay of two

nights and a day he finally began to move, the Syracusans had blockaded

the roads. How his own division capitulated by the blood-stained banks

of the Asinarus after a six days' march of appalling misery, and how

that of Demosthenes surrendered in the olive-field of Polyzelus, is too

well known.

328 One of the favourite excursions from modern Syracuse takes the

traveller in a boat over the sandy bar of the Anapus, beneath the old

bridge which joined the Helorine road to the city, and up the river to

its junction with the Cyane. This is the ground traversed by the army

first in their attempted flight and then in their return as captives to

Syracuse. Few, perhaps, who visit the spot, think as much of that last

act in a world-historical tragedy, as of the picturesque compositions

made by arundo donax, castor-oil plant, yellow flags, and papyrus, on

the river-banks and promontories. Like miniature palm-groves these

water-weeds stand green and golden against the bright blue sky,

feathering above the boat which slowly pushes its way through clinging

reeds. The huge red oxen of Sicily in the marsh on either hand toss

their spreading horns and canter off knee-deep in ooze. Then comes the

fountain of Cyane, a broad round well of water, thirty feet in depth,

but quite clear, so that you can see the pebbles at the bottom and

fishes swimming to and fro among the weeds. Papyrus plants edge the

pool; thick and tufted, they are exactly such as one sees carved or

painted upon Egyptian architecture of the Ptolemaic period.

With Thucydides still in hand, before quitting Syracuse we must follow

the Athenian captives to their prison-grave. The Latomia de' Cappuccini

is a place which it is impossible to describe in words, and of which no

photographs give any notion. Sunk to the depth of a hundred feet below

the level of the soil, with sides perpendicular and in many places as

smooth as though the chisel had just passed over them, these vast

excavations produce the impression of some huge subterranean gallery,

widening here and there into spacious halls, the whole of which has

been unroofed and opened to the air of heaven. It is a solemn and

romantic labyrinth, where no wind blows rudely, and where orange-trees

shoot 329 upward luxuriantly to meet the light. The wild fig bursts

from the living rock, mixed with lentisk-shrubs and pendent

caper-plants. Old olives split the masses of fallen cliff with their

tough, snakelike, slowly corded and compacted roots. Thin flames of

pomegranate-flowers gleam amid foliage of lustrous green; and lemons

drop unheeded from femininely fragile branches. There too the ivy hangs

in long festoons, waving like tapestry to the breath of stealthy

breezes; while under foot is a tangle of acanthus, thick curling leaves

of glossiest green, surmounted by spikes of dull lilac blossoms. Wedges

and columns and sharp teeth of the native rock rear themselves here and

there in the midst of the open spaces to the sky, worn fantastically

into notches and saws by the action of scirocco. A light yellow

calcined by the sun to white is the prevailing colour of the quarries.

But in shady places the limestone takes a curious pink tone of great

beauty, like the interior of some sea-shells. The reflected lights too,

and half-shadows in their scooped-out chambers, make a wonderful

natural chiaroscuro. The whole scene is now more picturesque in a

sublime and grandiose style than forbidding. There is even one spot

planted with magenta-coloured mesembrianthemums of dazzling brightness;

and the air is loaded with the drowsy perfume of lemon-blossoms. Yet

this is the scene of a great agony. This garden was once the Gethsemane

of a nation, where 9000 free men of the proudest city of Greece were

brought by an unexampled stroke of fortune to slavery, shame, and a

miserable end. Here they dwindled away, worn out by wounds, disease,

thirst, hunger, heat by day and cold by night, heart-sickness, and the

insufferable stench of putrefying corpses. The pupils of Socrates, the

admirers of Euripides, the orators of the Pnyx, the athletes of the

Lyceum, lovers and comrades and philosophers, died here like dogs; and

the dames of Syracuse stood doubtless on those parapets 330 above, and

looked upon them like wild beasts. What the Gorgo of Theocritus might

have said to her friend Praxinoe on the occasion would be the subject

for an idyll _à la_ Browning! How often, pining in those great glaring

pits, which were not then curtained with ivy or canopied by

olive-trees, must the Athenians have thought with vain remorse of their

own Rhamnusian Nemesis, the goddess who held scales adverse to the

hopes of men, and bore the legend 'Be not lifted up'! How often must

they have watched the dawn walk forth fire-footed upon the edge of

those bare crags, or the stars slide from east to west across the

narrow space of sky! How they must have envied the unfettered clouds

sailing in liquid ether, or traced the far flight of hawk and swallow,

sighing, 'Oh that I too had the wings of a bird!' The weary eyes turned

upwards found no change or respite, save what the frost of night

brought to the fire of day, and the burning sun to the pitiless cold

constellations.

A great painter, combining Doré's power over space and distance with

the distinctness of Flaxman's design and the colouring of Alma Tadema,

might possibly realise this agony of the Athenian captives in the stone

quarries. The time of day chosen for the picture should be full noon,

with its glare of light and sharply defined vertical shadows. The

crannies in the straight sides of the quarry should here and there be

tufted with a few dusty creepers and wild fig-trees. On the edge of the

sky-line stand parties of Syracusan citizens with their wives and

children, shaded by umbrellas, richly dressed, laughing and triumphing

over the misery beneath. In the full foreground there are placed two

figures. A young Athenian has just died of fever. His body lies

stretched along the ground, the head resting on a stone, and the face

turned to the sky. Beside him kneels an older warrior, sunburned and

dry with thirst, but full as yet of vigour. He stares with 331 wide

despair-smitten eyes straight out, as though he had lately been

stretched upon the corpse, but had risen at the sound of movement, or

some supposed word of friends close by. His bread lies untasted near

him, and the half-pint of water—his day's portion—has been given to

bathe the forehead of his dying friend. They have stood together

through the festival of leave-taking from Peiræus, through the battles

of Epipolæ, through the retreat and the slaughter at the passage of the

Asinarus. But now it has come to this, and death has found the younger.

Perhaps the friend beside him remembers some cool wrestling-ground in

far-off Athens, or some procession up the steps of the Acropolis, where

first they met. Anyhow his fixed gaze now shows that he has passed in

thought at least beyond the hell around him. Not far behind should be

ranged groups of haggard men, with tattered clothes and dulled or

tigerish eyes, some dignified, some broken down by grief; while here

and there newly fallen corpses, and in one hideous corner a great heap

of abandoned dead, should point the ghastly words of Thucydides: τον

νεκρον ομου επ' αλλήλοις ξυννενημένων.

Every landscape has some moment of its own at which it should be seen

for the first time. Mediæval cities, with their narrow streets and

solemn spires, demand the twilight of a summer night. Mediterranean

islands show their best in the haze of afternoon, when sea and sky and

headland are bathed in aë;rial blue, and the mountains seem to be made

of transparent amethyst. The first sight of the Alps should be taken at

sunset from some point of vantage, like the terrace at Berne, or the

castle walls of Salzburg. If these fortunate moments be secured, all

after knowledge of locality and detail serves to fortify and deepen the

impression of picturesque harmony. The mind has then conceived a

leading thought, which gives ideal unity to scattered memories and

invests the 332 crude reality with an æsthetic beauty. The lucky moment

for the landscape of Girgenti is half an hour past sunset in a golden

afterglow. Landing at the port named after Empedocles, having caught

from the sea some glimpses of temple-fronts emergent on green

hill-slopes among almond-trees, with Pindar's epithet of

'splendour-loving' in my mind, I rode on such an evening up the path

which leads across the Drago to Girgenti. The way winds through

deep-sunk lanes of rich amber sandstone, hedged with cactus and

dwarf-palm, and set with old gnarled olive-trees. As the sunlight

faded, Venus shone forth in a luminous sky, and the deep yellows and

purples overhead seemed to mingle with the heavy scent of

orange-flowers from scarcely visible groves by the roadside. Saffron in

the west and violet in the east met midway, composing a translucent

atmosphere of mellow radiance, like some liquid gem—_dolce color d'

oriental berillo_. Girgenti, far off and far up, gazing seaward, and

rearing her topaz-coloured bastions into that gorgeous twilight, shone

like the aë;rial vision of cities seen in dreams or imaged in the

clouds. Hard and sharp against the sallow line of sunset, leaned

grotesque shapes of cactuses like hydras, and delicate silhouettes of

young olive-trees like sylphs: the river ran silver in the hollow, and

the mountain-side on which the town is piled was solid gold. Then came

the dirty dull interior of Girgenti, misnamed the magnificent. But no

disenchantment could destroy the memory of that vision, and Pindar's

φιλάγλαος Ακράγας remains in my mind a reality.[122]

[122] Lest I should seem to have overstated the splendour of this

sunset view, I must remark that the bare dry landscape of the south is

peculiarly fortunate in such effects. The local tint of the Girgenti

rock is yellow. The vegetation on the hillside is sparse. There is

nothing to prevent the colours of the sky being reflected upon the

vast amber-tinted surface, which then glows with indescribable glory.

The temples of Girgenti are at the distance of two miles 333 from the

modern town. Placed upon the edge of an irregular plateau which breaks

off abruptly into cliffs of moderate height below them, they stand in a

magnificent row between the sea and plain on one side, and the city and

the hills upon the other. Their colour is that of dusky honey or dun

amber; for they are not built of marble, but of sandstone, which at

some not very distant geological period must have been a sea-bed.

Oyster and scallop shells are embedded in the roughly hewn masonry,

while here and there patches of a red deposit, apparently of broken

coralline, make the surface crimson. The vegetation against which the

ruined colonnades are relieved consists almost wholly of almond and

olive trees, the bright green foliage of the one mingling with the

greys of the other, and both enhancing the warm tints of the stone.

This contrast of colours is very agreeable to the eye; yet when the

temples were perfect it did not exist. There is no doubt that their

surface was coated with a fine stucco, wrought to smoothness, toned

like marble, and painted over with the blue and red and green

decorations proper to the Doric style. This fact is a practical answer

to those æsthetic critics who would fain establish that the Greeks

practised no deception in their arts. The whole effect of the

colonnades of Selinus and Girgenti must have been an illusion, and

their surface must have needed no less constant reparation than the

exterior of a Gothic cathedral. The sham jewellery frequently found in

Greek tombs, and the curious mixture of marble with sandstone in the

sculptures from Selinus, are other instances that Greeks no less than

modern artists condescended to trickery for the sake of effect. In the

series of the metopes from Selinus now preserved in the museum at

Palermo, the flesh of the female persons is represented by white

marble, while that of the men, together with the dresses and other

accessories, is wrought of common 334 stone. Yet the basreliefs in

which this peculiarity occurs belong to the best period of Greek

sculpture, and the groups are not unworthy for spirit and design to be

placed by the side of the metopes of the Parthenon. Most beautiful, for

example, is the contrast between the young unarmed Hercules and the

Amazon he overpowers. His naked man's foot grasps with the muscular

energy of an athlete her soft and helpless woman's foot, the roughness

of the sandstone and the smoothness of the marble really heightening

the effect of difference.

Though ranged in a row along the same cornice, the temples of Girgenti,

originally at least six in number, were not so disposed that any of

their architectural lines should be exactly parallel. The Greeks

disliked formality; the carefully calculated _asymmetreia_ in the

disposition of their groups of buildings secured variety of effect as

well as a broken surface for the display of light and shadow. This is

very noticeable on the Acropolis of Athens, where, however regular may

be the several buildings, all are placed at different angles to each

other and the hill. Only two of the Girgenti temples survive in any

degree of perfection—the so-called Concordia and the Juno Lacinia. The

rest are but mere heaps of mighty ruins, with here and there a broken

column, and in one place an angle of a pediment raised upon a group of

pillars. The foundations of masonry which supported them and the drums

of their gigantic columns are tufted with wild palm, aloe, asphodel,

and crimson snapdragon. Yellow blossoming sage, and mint, and lavender,

and mignonette, sprout in the crevices where snakes and lizards

harbour. The grass around is gemmed with blue pimpernel and

convolvulus. Gladiolus springs amid the young corn-blades beneath the

almond-trees; while a beautiful little iris makes the most unpromising

dry places brilliant with its delicate greys and blues. In cooler 335

and damper hollows, around the boles of old olives and under ruined

arches, flourishes the tender acanthus, and the road-sides are gaudy

with a yellow daisy flower, which may perchance be the ελίχρυσος of

Theocritus. Thus the whole scene is a wilderness of brightness, less

radiant but more touching than when processions of men and maidens

bearing urns and laurel-branches, crowned with ivy or with myrtle,

paced along those sandstone roads, chanting pæans and prosodial hymns,

toward the glistening porches and hypæthral cells.

The only temple about the name of which there can be no doubt is that

of Zeus Olympius. A prostrate giant who once with nineteen of his

fellows helped to support the roof of this enormous fane, and who now

lies in pieces among the asphodels, remains to prove that this was the

building begun by the Agrigentines after the defeat of the Phoenicians

at the Himera, when slaves were many and spoil was abundant, and Hellas

both in Sicily and on the mainland felt a more than usual thrill of

gratitude to their ancestral deity. The greatest architectural works of

the island, the temples of Segeste and Selinus, as well as those of

Girgenti, were begun between this period and the Carthaginian invasion

of 409 B.C. The victory of the Hellenes over the barbarians in 480

B.C., symbolised in the victory of Zeus over the enslaved Titans of

this temple, gave a vast impulse to their activity and wealth. After

the disastrous incursion of the same foes seventy years later, the

western Greek towns of the island received a check from which they

never recovered. Many of their noblest buildings remained unfinished.

The question which rises to the lips of all who contemplate the ruins

of this gigantic temple and its compeer dedicated to Herakles is this:

Who wrought the destruction of works so solid and enduring? For what

purpose of spite or interest were those vast columns—in the very

flutings of which a man can stand with ease—felled like 336 forest

pines? One sees the mighty pillars lying as they sank, like swathes

beneath the mower's scythe. Their basements are still in line. The

drums which composed them have fallen asunder, but maintain their

original relation to each other on the ground. Was it earthquake or the

hand of man that brought them low? Poggio Bracciolini tells us that in

the fifteenth century they were burning the marble buildings of the

Roman Campagna for lime. We know that the Senator Brancaleone made

havoc among the classic monuments occupied as fortresses by Frangipani

and Savelli and Orsini. We understand how the Farnesi should have

quarried the Coliseum for their palace. But here, at the distance of

three miles from Girgenti, in a comparative desert, what army, or what

band of ruffians, or what palace-builders could have found it worth

their while to devastate mere mountains of sculptured sandstone? The

Romans invariably respected Greek temples. The early Christians used

them for churches:—and this accounts for the comparative perfection of

the Concordia. It was in the age of the Renaissance that the ruin of

Girgenti's noblest monuments occurred. The temple of Zeus Olympius was

shattered in the fifteenth century, and in the next its fragments were

used to build a breakwater. The demolition of such substantial edifices

is as great a wonder as their construction. We marvel at the energy

which must have been employed on their overthrow, no less than at the

art which raised such blocks of stone and placed them in position.

While so much remains both at Syracuse and at Girgenti to recall the

past, we are forced here, as at Athens, to feel how very little we

really know about Greek life. We cannot bring it up before our fancy

with any clearness, but rather in a sort of hazy dream, from which some

luminous points emerge. The entrance of an Olympian victor through the

337 breach in the city walls of Girgenti, the procession of citizens

conducting old Timoleon in his chariot to the theatre, the conferences

of the younger Dionysius with Plato in his guarded palace-fort, the

stately figure of Empedocles presiding over incantations in the marshes

of Selinus, the austerity of Dion and his mystic dream, the first

appearance of stubborn Gylippus with long Lacedæmonian hair in the

theatre of Syracuse,—such picturesque pieces of history we may fairly

well recapture. But what were the daily occupations of the Simætha of

Theocritus? What was the state dress of the splendid Queen Philistis,

whose name may yet be read upon her seat, and whose face adorns the

coins of Syracuse? How did the great altar of Zeus look, when the oxen

were being slaughtered there by hundreds, in a place which must have

been shambles and meat-market and temple all in one? What scene of

architectural splendour met the eyes of the swimmers in the Piscina of

Girgenti? How were the long hours of so many days of leisure occupied

by the Greeks, who had each three pillows to his head in

'splendour-loving Acragas'? Of what sort was the hospitality of

Gellias? Questions like these rise up to tantalise us with the

hopelessness of ever truly recovering the life of a lost race. After

all the labour of antiquary and the poet, nothing remains to be uttered

but such moralisings as Sir Thomas Browne poured forth over the urns

discovered at Old Walsingham: 'What time the persons of these ossuaries

entered the famous nations of the dead, and slept with princes and

counsellors, might admit a wide solution. But who were the

proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were

a question above antiquarism; not to be resolved by man, nor easily

perhaps by spirits except we consult the provincial guardians, or

tutelary observators.' Death reigns over the peoples of the past, and

we must fain be satisfied to cry with 338 Raleigh: 'O eloquent, just,

and mighty death! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what

none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered,

thou only hast cast out of the world and despised: thou hast drawn

together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and

ambition of men, and covered it all over with these two narrow words,

_hic jacet_.' Even so. Yet while the cadence of this august rhetoric is

yet in our ears, another voice is heard as of the angel seated by a

void and open tomb, 'Why seek ye the living among the dead?' The spirit

of Hellas is indestructible, however much the material existence of the

Greeks be lost beyond recovery; for the life of humanity is not many

but one, not parcelled into separate moments but continuous.

339

ATHENS

Athens, by virtue of scenery and situation, was predestined to be the

motherland of the free reason of mankind, long before the Athenians had

won by their great deeds the right to name their city the ornament and

the eye of Hellas. Nothing is more obvious to one who has seen many

lands and tried to distinguish their essential characters, than the

fact that no one country exactly resembles another, but that, however

similar in climate and locality, each presents a peculiar and

well-marked property belonging to itself alone. The specific quality of

Athenian landscape is light—not richness or sublimity or romantic

loveliness or grandeur of mountain outline, but luminous beauty, serene

exposure to the airs of heaven. The harmony and balance of the scenery,

so varied in its details and yet so comprehensible, are sympathetic to

the temperance of Greek morality, the moderation of Greek art. The

radiance with which it is illuminated has all the clearness and

distinction of the Attic intellect. From whatever point the plain of

Athens with its semicircle of greater and lesser hills may be surveyed,

it always presents a picture of dignified and lustrous beauty. The

Acropolis is the centre of this landscape, splendid as a work of art

with its crown of temples; and the sea, surmounted by the long low

hills of the Morea, is the boundary to which the eye is irresistibly

led. Mountains and islands and plain alike are made of limestone,

hardening here and there into marble, broken 340 into delicate and

varied forms, and sprinkled with a vegetation of low shrubs and

brushwood so sparse and slight that the naked rock in every direction

meets the light. This rock is grey and colourless: viewed in the

twilight of a misty day, it shows the dull, tame uniformity of bone.

Without the sun it is asleep and sorrowful. But by reason of this very

deadness, the limestone of Athenian landscape is always ready to take

the colours of the air and sun. In noonday it smiles with silvery

lustre, fold upon fold of the indented hills and islands melting from

the brightness of the sea into the untempered brilliance of the sky. At

dawn and sunset the same rocks array themselves with a celestial robe

of rainbow-woven hues: islands, sea, and mountains, far and near, burn

with saffron, violet, and rose, with the tints of beryl and topaz,

sapphire and almandine and amethyst, each in due order and at proper

distances. The fabled dolphin in its death could not have showed a more

brilliant succession of splendours waning into splendours through the

whole chord of prismatic colours. This sensitiveness of the Attic

limestone to every modification of the sky's light gives a peculiar

spirituality to the landscape. The hills remain in form and outline

unchanged; but the beauty breathed upon them lives or dies with the

emotions of the air from whence it emanates: the spirit of light abides

with them and quits them by alternations that seem to be the pulses of

an ethereally communicated life. No country, therefore, could be better

fitted for the home of a race gifted with exquisite sensibilities, in

whom humanity should first attain the freedom of self-consciousness in

art and thought. Αει δια λαμπροτάτου βαίνοντες αβρος αιθέρος—ever

delicately moving through most translucent air—said Euripides of the

Athenians: and truly the bright air of Attica was made to be breathed

by men in whom the light of culture should begin to shine. Ιοστέφανος

is an epithet 341 of Aristophanes for his city; and if not crowned with

other violets, Athens wears for her garland the air-empurpled

hills—Hymettus, Lycabettus, Pentelicus, and Parnes.[123] Consequently,

while still the Greeks of Homer's age were Achaians, while Argos was

the titular seat of Hellenic empire, and the mythic deeds of the heroes

were being enacted in Thebes or Mycenæ, Athens did but bide her time,

waiting to manifest herself as the true godchild of Pallas, who sprang

perfect from the brain of Zeus, Pallas, who is the light of cloudless

heaven emerging after storms. And Pallas, when she planted her chosen

people in Attica, knew well what she was doing. To the far-seeing eyes

of the goddess, although the first-fruits of song and science and

philosophy might be reaped upon the shores of the Ægean and the

islands, yet the days were clearly descried when Athens should stretch

forth her hand to hold the lamp of all her founder loved for Europe. As

the priest of Egypt told Solon: 'She chose the spot of earth in which

you were born, because she saw that the happy temperament of the

seasons in that land would produce the wisest of men. Wherefore the

goddess, who was a lover both of war and wisdom, selected and first of

all settled that spot which was the most likely to produce men likest

herself.' This sentence from the 'Timæus' of Plato[124] reveals the

consciousness possessed by the Greeks of that intimate connection which

subsists between a country and the temper of its race. To us the name

Athenai—the fact that Athens by its title even in the prehistoric age

was marked out as the appanage of her 342 who was the patroness of

culture—seems a fortunate accident, an undesigned coincidence of the

most striking sort. To the Greeks, steeped in mythologic faith,

accustomed to regard their lineage as autochthonous and their polity as

the fabric of a god, nothing seemed more natural than that Pallas

should have selected for her own exactly that portion of Hellas where

the arts and sciences might flourish best. Let the Boeotians grow fat

and stagnant upon their rich marshlands: let the Spartans form

themselves into a race of soldiers in their mountain fortress: let

Corinth reign, the queen of commerce, between her double seas: let the

Arcadians in their oak woods worship pastoral Pan: let the plains of

Elis be the meeting-place of Hellenes at their sacred games: let Delphi

boast the seat of sooth oracular from Phoebus. Meanwhile the sunny but

barren hills of Attica, open to the magic of the sky, and beautiful by

reason of their nakedness, must be the home of a people powerful by

might of intelligence rather than strength of limb, wealthy not so much

by natural resources as by enterprise. Here, and here only, could stand

the city sung by Milton:—

Built nobly, pure the air, and light the soil,

Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts

And eloquence, native to famous wits

Or hospitable, in her sweet recess,

City or suburban, studious walks and shades.

[123] This interpretation of the epithet Ιοστέφανος is not, I think,

merely fanciful. It seems to occur naturally to those who visit Athens

with the language of Greek poets in their memory. I was glad to find,

on reading a paper by the Dean of Westminster on the topography of

Greece, that the same thought had struck him. Ovid, too, gives the

adjective _purpureus_ to Hymettus.