Dionysius in twenty days has built a wall three miles long barring Himilcon’s ingress at the only weak point. Seventy thousand of the inhabitants of Syracuse had worked at this building. Forty thousand slaves had been in the Latomiæ cutting the blocks of easily hewn sandstone, which six thousand oxen carried to the wall, while other armies of men had been upon the slopes of Ætna ravaging the oak woods for huge beams. When Himilcon comes the wall is complete. Then there are more appearings and disappearings 162through the years, and suddenly Euryalus fills the foreground again. Archimedes is helping Hieronymus to fortify it against Marcellus—is designing veiled sally ports, and oblique apertures from which his “scorpions” and other curious war engines may hurl stones, is placing there the burning glasses with which he will set the Roman galleys on fire by means of the sun’s heat. But though the Carthagenians were terrible the Roman is more terrible still, and in spite of Archimedes they get into Syracuse after a three years’ siege. While the furies of final capture are raging Archimedes sits calmly drawing figures upon the sand. A Roman soldier rushing by carelessly smears them with his foot. Archimedes is angry, and “uses language.” The soldier, angry in his turn—no doubt “language” in Greek sounded especially insulting—shortens his sword and stabs “the greatest man then living in the world.” Marcellus sheds tears when he hears it, and buries the father of mathematics with splendid honours, marking the tombstone—as Archimedes had wished—with no name, with only a sphere and a cylinder. He spared Syracuse too; left her temples and splendours intact, and forbid the usual plundering and massacres. Marcellus was, it seems, in every way a very decent person, and Peripatetica grieved that those frigid Romans wouldn’t let him have a triumph when he went home, and Jane breathed a hope that he used more language to that murderous soldier.... Later comes Cicero to Syracuse, hunting evidence against Verres, who had, as pro-consul, robbed the city of all the treasures Marcellus had spared, and the great lawyer takes time from his examination of witnesses to look out Archimedes’ resting place. He finds 163it overgrown with thistles and brambles, but recognizes it by the sphere and cylinder, and sets it once more in order. “So Tully paused, amid the wrecks of time, On the rude stone to trace the truth sublime, Where at his feet in honoured dust disclosed The immortal Sage of Syracuse reposed.” “You cribbed that from one of the guide-books,” jeered Jane. “Of course I did,” admitted Peripatetica with calm unblushingness. “Do you imagine I go around with samples of formal Eighteenth Century Pope-ry concealed about my person?”