Here, nearly three thousand years since, had come Archias, the rich Heraclid of Corinth. He had gathered sullenly into little ships his wealth, his family, and his servants, and had fled far down the horizon, an execrated fugitive because of the slaying of beautiful Actæon. And, finding on the coast of the distant God’s-land a reproduction of the bays and straits of the Corinth which had cast him out, he founded there a city. A city that was to have a life like the life of some gifted, powerful man, growing from timid infancy to a lusty youth full of dreams and passions and vague towering ambitions; struggling with and conquering his fellows; grasping at power and glory, heaping up riches unbelievable, decking himself in purple and gold, living long and gloriously and tumultuously; and who was to know rise and fall, defeats and triumphs, and finally was to die on the battlefield, and be left there by the victor to rot. So that all the flesh would drop from the long frame, the muscles dry and fall apart, the eyes be sightless, and the brain dark; and the little busy insects of the earth would carry away the fragments bit by bit, and on the field where he lay would be found at last only the hollow skull once so full of proud purpose; only the slack white bones of the arm that had wielded the strong sword, the vast arch of the gaunt ribs that once had sheltered the brave heart of Syracuse. And among these dry bones little curious creatures would come to peep and peer and build their homes; spiders spinning webs over the empty eye 149sockets, mice weaving their nests among the wide-flung knuckles....