wars with the Siculians; during the Athenian war also they were very dangerous on account of the great enlargement of the city. Dionysius then fortified the city by building two mighty walls up the heights, so as to enclose those forts which now became citadels. The whole of the intermediate space between the walls, however, must not be imagined to have been covered with buildings, for between Neapolis and Tycha there were extensive tracts which can never have been built upon; the quarries also could not be built over, as is clear from the whole surface of the ground. But the circumference of the city was enormous. The misfortunes of Syracuse are very painful: it was visited by such a succession of devastations that we can hardly understand how it could maintain itself: it must have possessed an unusual degree of vital power. I believe that its happiest period was the reign of the last Hiero, though the population may at that time already have been much smaller than it had been in the earlier prosperous periods. In the Hannibalian war, when the city was taken by the Romans, Neapolis and Tycha were completely destroyed, and the alleged mildness of Marcellus was of no avail, for the work of destruction was completed with barbarous fury. At the capture of Achradina, Marcellus ordered to spare the lives of the inhabitants, and not to carry away a free-born Syracusan into slavery. This is always praised as an act of great humanity; but a new fragment in the excerpts from Diodorus shows that this apparently humane order did not prevent the complete pillage of the city: the Syracusans were robbed of everything, and freedom alone was granted to them. But this gift rendered their condition worse even than that of slaves, who received at least some food from their masters, while the free men died of hunger, no person supplying them with anything. Thus it happened that many a free man gave himself out to be a slave in order to find a purchaser and food. This is probably the most fearful occurrence in all ancient history. After that time there existed in Neapolis and Tycha only a few isolated buildings and temples, and the population disappeared; even in Achradina only very few inhabitants appear to have remained, for in Cicero’s time the real population was again confined to the island of Nasos; the same appears to have been the condition of the city under the emperors, and at present it is still the same. Under Augustus a Roman colony was established there; still, however, the whole island of Sicily was so essentially Greek, that under the emperors it was always regarded as a part of Greece. Even at the time of the Norman conquest, in the eleventh century of our era, Greek and Arabic were the only languages spoken there.