But if the monuments of Syracuse are on the whole comparatively unimpressive, what a history is crowded into the less than three centuries between Gelon, the second founder of the city, in that he made it great, and Marcellus. This history is far from being a mere record of slaughter, and sieges, and sack of cities. The time of Hiero I. is memorable for the appearance at Syracuse, in familiar if not always friendly converse, of Pindar, Simonides, Bacchylides, Æschylus, Epicharmos and Xenophanes. One must not think of the poetry of this Hieronian circle as exotic because most of the poets were transplanted: to the Greek poets any place in the Greek world where they were appreciated and cared for was home. Anacreon sang as well and as naturally at Samos and Athens as at his native Teos; Simonides's muse was apparently equally happy in Athens, Thessaly, and Sicily; and even the Theban eagle suffered no relaxation of his wings at the Syracusan court; nay, he appears to have made his loftiest flights there. Over one-third of his epinicion odes are for Sicilian victors. Of the Titan Æschylus alone of that company one may suspect that, although he did not always get on well at home, yet the sojourn so far from Eleusis and Marathon found him homesick and heartsick. It is only rarely in the world's history that such a lot of stars gather around a court. It is a good deal that Syracuse was again visited by the muses in the time of Hiero II., when Theocritus took up his abode there. The afternoon before we left Syracuse we got a reminder that its greatness did not all pass away with the Roman occupation. The enormous catacombs from Christian times speak of new and better days. But what stirs one more is one particular spot in the crypt of St. Marcian, a church partly made out of a temple of Bacchus. Here, in front of an old altar, a block of stone is pointed out as the stone on which St. Paul stood when he preached at Syracuse. One gets impatiently sceptical about traces of the saints in Italy; but why not accept the report that in his three days' stay at Syracuse, recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, St. Paul preached here? What is more fitting than that, by the very altar of the god of revelry, the great apostle should speak as he spoke at Athens? At any rate, I add this spot to Appii Forum and Tres Tabernæ as a place where I trod in the footsteps of a man beside whom Gelon, Pyrrhus, and Hannibal were pygmies. II