They delighted in pageants and splendid public festivals, these splendour-loving Akragantines, of whom their philosopher Empedocles said that they “built as if they were to live forever and feasted as if they were to die on the morrow!” We know they went out to welcome young Exainetos, victor at the Olympian Games, with three hundred glittering chariots drawn all by milk-white horses; we know of the wonderful illuminations that lit all the city, from the monuments of the high Acropolis to the temple-crowned sea-rampart, when a noble bride passed at night to her new home, with flutings and chorus, and an escort of eight hundred carriages and riders innumerable. Now the town seemed to be mostly a winding tangle of steep stairs—with houses for walls—and these stairs were bestrewn with ancient remnants of vegetables that had outlived their usefulness, and a swarming population of children. Fazelli mentions an Agrigentian woman of his time who brought forth seventy-three children at thirty-three births, and judging from the appearance of the streets that rabbit-like practice still maintains. Way could hardly be made through the swarm of juvenile pests, clamouring for pennies and offering themselves as guides, until a boy in slightly 218cleaner rags was chosen to show the way to the Cathedral. Once given an official position he furiously put his competitors to flight, and with goat-footed lightness flitted before up the ladder-like alleys, while the two panted after until it seemed as if they should be able easily to step off into the sky. A queer old Fourteenth Century campanile, with Norman ogives and Moorish balconies, still gives character to the exterior of this thousand-foot-long Cathedral of San Gerlando perched aloft in the windy blue, but inside the Eighteenth Century had done its worst. Baroque rampant; colossal stucco mermaids and cupids, interspersed with gilded whorls and scrolls as thick as shells upon the “shell-work” boxes of the seaside booths. A giant finger could flick out a dozen cupids anywhere without their ever being missed. Yet it stands upon the ruins of a temple to Jove, and here for more than two thousand years have prayers and praise and incense gone up to the gods of the overarching blue that looks so near, so that even stucco and gilding cannot render it irreverent or lessen its power to brood the children of earth beneath its wings. Temples of Castor and Pollux, Girgenti “Lifting Themselves Airily From a Sea of Flowers”