It was apparently this completeness of preservation which had so enamoured Goethe that he dared to speak lightly of the stern majesty of the temple of Pæstum by comparison. Poseidon’s great fane he thought as inferior to Concord’s as a hero is inferior to a god. “A god to a hero,” quoted Jane with a resentful sniff. “It was just like that pompous, stodgy old German to be carried away by mere preservation, and to 200prefer this sugary-slightly-melted-vanilla-caramel temple to that solemn splendour of Pæstum.” “What an abominable simile you’ve used for this lovely thing,” scolded Peripatetica. “You’re even worse than Goethe—if possible.” “It isn’t an abominable simile,” protested Jane flippantly. “It is exactly the colour of a good vanilla caramel, and moreover it looks like one licked all over by some giant tongue.” Having said an outrageous thing she pretended to defend it and believe it, but her heart smote her for irreverence as she and Peripatetica strolled about the peristyle, gazing through the columns at the pictures their tawny flutings framed, and she grudgingly admitted that the situation at least was divine. Perched on the crest of a sheer-dropping rocky cliff, Concordia faces the west. To the south dark blue sea, and to the north billowy woods and fields in all the gamut of spring greens surge up to the apricot-tinted town, which is the last shrunken remnant of old Akragas. Beneath the cliff green meadows stretch smooth to the African Sea. Eastwards, on a neighbouring knoll, Juno lifts her exquisite columns against the blue, and softly moulded hills melt into the distant ruggedness of Castrogiovanni’s mountains. To the north lie fields and groves and orchards, with dottings of farmhouse and church, up to the top of the Rupe Athena, where, with her usual passion for conspicuousness, high Athena had once kept watch in her Temple, that now, according to the so frequent fate of the mighty, is fallen into nothingness. How worshipful his blithe gods of Sun and Abundance must have here appeared to the Greek; how 201good the world spread out for him in all its fairness; the citadel-crowned hill protecting his rich city, the shining sea carrying his commerce; the mountains of the bounteous Earth Mother’s home encircling the rolling groves and meadowland she blessed so fruitfully, and the triumphs of his own handiwork in the marvellous temples and buildings of this splendid Akragas, “fairest of mortal cities,” as even the poets of Greece admitted. The Plutonian shore of the previous night seemed very far away, now that Persephone was back in her own “belonging” country again; the dark terrors of Hades had grown dim. Naturally the gods of Light and Day were the only ones worshipped; they were supreme for life—and after—ah well! “the dark Fate which lay behind gods and men could not be propitiated by any rites, and must be encountered manfully as one meets the inevitable.”...