No defeat was ever so unexpected. The Athenians, led away by the eloquence of their evil genius, Alcibiades--he was then thirty-five years old--the wittiest, bravest, handsomest, most worthless of men, had gone mad over their anticipated victory. They would become masters of Syracuse and the other Greek cities of Sicily; when Trinacria was conquered, Athens would take Italy, Carthage, the western islands of the Mediterranean. So Athens dreamt of the empire that, five centuries later, Rome built. In 415 B.C. the Athenians began the war with Syracuse that ended in such terrible destruction, and led to the downfall of Athens. The Athenians were at first successful; they built a double wall around Syracuse, they seemed on the point of reducing the city, when something happened. Some say the total eclipse of the moon frightened Nicias, the vacillating Athenian General; others that the Athenians were made prisoners between their own lines of defence by reinforcements from perfidious Sparta, at the moment when the Athenian ships under Demosthenes were cut off by sea. The overthrow was so complete that not a ship escaped, not one man went back to Greece to tell the tale. Nicias and Demosthenes happily committed suicide; those others were left to rot and die in that living tomb, where for ten weeks long the dead and the living lay together. Months after a traveling merchant told the story of the disaster to a barber in Piraeus, supposing all Greece knew it. The glaring stone quarry, where the Athenian captives were exposed to the burning sun by day, the bitter cold at night, while the gaily dressed Syracusan ladies, scent bottle in hand, peeped over the parapets, watching their agony curiously, is now a place of extraordinary beauty. We climbed down a flight of a hundred stairs to reach this subterranean garden, a solemn and romantic spot. The primrose colored walls of the old quarry are hung with a splendid tapestry, knotted ivy, and long trailing creepers of _madre selva_, clematis, the mother of the wood. Here and there, from some cranny in the dazzling limestone, a fig tree thrusts its strong green leaves up to the sun, the flame of the pomegranate glows beside the gold of oranges and lemons, long lines of lilies stand waiting to bloom for Easter. In the midst of this sunken garden of delight stand the busts of two great men the Syracusans of today delight to honor, Archimedes of Syracuse and Mazzini of Genoa. “Amerigo, behold! thy compatriots! _Piano_, _piano_, so; that was a good _riverenza_!” The father of Amerigo (porter at our hotel), a smart fellow dark as a Moor, patted his son, as the child, tugging at his scarlet cap, made us a deep bow.