The Mediterranean: Its Storied Cities and Venerable RuinsAllen, Grant
History
The Mediterranean: Its Storied Cities and Venerable Ruins
Allen, Grant
Europe, Southern -- Description and travel; Mediterranean Region -- Description and travel
silent Pantheon of dead deities, this landscape which might almost seem to
be still echoing the last wail of the dying Pan; and it is a beauty of
death and desolation to which the like of nature, here especially
abounding, contributes not a little by contrast. For nowhere in Sicily is
the country-side more lavishly enriched by the olive. Its contorted stem
and quivering, silvery foliage are everywhere. Olives climb the
hill-slopes in straggling files; olives cluster in twos and threes and
larger groups upon the level plain; olives trace themselves against the
broken walls of the temples, and one catches the flicker of their branches
in the sunlight that streams through the roofless peristyles. From Rupe
Atenea out across the plain to where the eye lights upon the white loops
of the road to Porto Empedocle one might almost say that every object
which is not a temple or a fragment of a temple is an olive tree.
By far the most interesting of the ruins from the archæologist's point of
view is that of the Temple of Concord, which, indeed, is one of the
best-preserved in existence, thanks, curiously enough, to the religious
Philistinism which in the Middle Ages converted it into a Christian
church. It was certainly not in the spirit of its tutelary goddess that it
was so transformed: nothing, no doubt, was farther from the thoughts of
those who thus appropriated the shrine of Concord than to illustrate the
doctrine of the unity of religion. But art and archæology, if not romance,
have good reason to thank them that they "took over" the building on any
grounds, for it is, of course, to this circumstance that we owe its
perfect condition of preservation, and the fact that all the details of
the Doric style as applied to religious architecture can be studied in
this temple while so much of so many of its companion fanes has crumbled
into indistinguishable ruin. Concordia has remained virtually intact
through long centuries under the homely title of "the Church of St.
Gregory of the Turnips," and it rears its stately façade before the
spectator in consequence with architrave complete, a magnificent hexastyle
of thirty-four columns, its lateral files of thirteen shafts apiece
receding in noble lines of perspective. Juno Lacinia, or Juno Lucinda (for
it may have been either as the "Lacinian Goddess" or as the Goddess of
Childbed that Juno was worshipped here), an older fane than Concordia,
though the style had not yet entered on its decline when the latter temple
was built, is to be seen hard by, a majestic and touching ruin. It dates
from the fifth century B. C., and is therefore Doric of the best period.
Earthquakes, it seems, have co-operated with time in the work of
destruction, and though twenty-five whole pillars are left standing, the
façade, alas! is represented only by a fragment of architrave. More
extensive still have been the ravages inflicted on the Temple of Hercules
by his one unconquerable foe. This great and famous shrine, much venerated
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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