They have been reading tales of the Athenians’ long 175siege of Syracuse, of their final frightful despairing struggle, so full of anguish, terror, and fierce courage—“when Greek met Greek”—and they have come to look at the spot where those seven thousand unhappy prisoners finally found an end. When they were driven into this quarry they were all that remained of the tremendous expedition which Athens had drained her best blood to send. Alcibiades had fled long ago, and was in exile. Nicias and Demosthenes, who had surrendered them, were now dead; fallen on their own swords. The harbour of Syracuse was strewn with the charred wrecks of their fleet. The marshes of Anapus were rotting with their comrades, the fountain of Cyane choked with them. They themselves were wounded to a man, shuddering with fevers, starving, demoralised with long fighting and the horrible final débâcle when they were thrust all together into this Latomia; not as now a glorious garden with thyme and mint and rosemary beneath their feet, ivy-hung, full of groves and orchards, but raw, glaring, shaled with chipped stone, the staring yellow sides towering smoothly up for a hundred feet to the burning blue of the Sicilian sky. There in that waterless furnace for seventy days they died and died. Died of wounds, of thirst, of starvation; died of the poisonings of those already dead. And the populace of Syracuse came day by day, holding lemons to their noses, to look down at them curiously, until there was not one movement, not one sound from any one of the seven thousand. There is but one human gleam in the whole demoniacal story—a touch characteristically Greek. Some of the prisoners had beguiled the tedium of dying by 176chanting the noble choruses of Euripides’ newest play, which Syracuse had not yet heard, and these had been at once drawn up from among their fellows and treated with every kindness. They were entreated to repeat as much as they could remember of the poet’s lines again and again, and were finally sent back to Athens with presents and much honour. Not a trace of the tragedy remains. The only record of death now in those lovely wild, deep-sunken gardens is a banal monument to Mazzini, and a tomb hollowed out of the wall in one of the caves. A tomb closed with a marble slab, upon which was cut an epitaph telling, in the pompous formal language of that day, of the young American naval lieutenant who died here suddenly on his ship in the first decade of the Nineteenth Century, and because he was a Protestant, and therefore could not occupy any Catholic graveyard, was laid to rest alone in this place of hideous memories. Poor lad! Sleeping so far from his own people, and thrust away here by himself, since he must, of course, not expect to lie near those who had been baptised with a different motion of the fingers. Seeing which isolation Peripatetica quoted that amused saying of an ironic old Pagan world, “Behold, how these Christians love one another!”