Seventy days sufficed to destroy all their grandeur! Five hundred and seventy-two years before the Christian era, the Crotoniates, under the famous athlete Milo, as we have already related, defeated the Sybarites in a pitched battle, broke down the dams of the Crathis, and let the furious stream into the town, where it soon overturned and swept away every building of use and ornament. The inhabitants were massacred without mercy; and the few that escaped the slaughter, and attempted to restore their city, were cut to pieces by a colony of Athenians, who afterwards removed to some distance, and founded Thurium. “Many ages, alas!” continues Mr. Swinburne, “have now revolved since man inhabited these plains in sufficient numbers to secure salubrity. The rivers have long rolled lawless over these low, desolated fields; leaving, as they shrink back to their beds, black pools and nauseous swamps, to poison the whole region, and drive mankind still farther from its ancient possessions. Nothing in reality remains of Sybaris, which once gave law to nations, and could muster even so large a force as 300,000 fighting men. Not one stone remains upon another[257]!” NO. XXXVI.—SYENE. This was a town in the Thebais, nearly under the tropic of Cancer; greatly celebrated for the first attempt to ascertain the measure of the circumference of the earth by Eratosthenes, who, about the year 276 A. C., was invited from Athens to Alexandria, by Ptolemy Evergetes. Juvenal, the poet, was banished there, on the pretence of commanding a cohort, stationed in the neighbourhood. Its principal antiquities are a small temple, supposed to be the remains of Eratosthenes’ observatory, the remains of a Roman bridge, and the ruins of the Saracen town. The latter includes the city wall, built of unburnt bricks, and defended by square towers, and several mosques with lofty minarets, and many large houses in a state of wonderful preservation, still entire, though resting on very frail foundations.