ixed than during Moslem supremacy. Besides the Greeks,
Normans, Saracens, and Hebrews, there were commercial colonies of Slavs,
Venetians, Lombardians, Catalans, and Pisans.

The most interesting public monuments at Palermo date from the Norman
period; and while many of the buildings are strikingly Saracenic in
character and recall similar structures erected by the Arabs in Spain,
it will be remembered that the Normans brought no trained architects to
the island, but employed the Arabs, Greeks, and Hebrews who had already
been in the service of the Saracen emirs. But the Arab influence in
architecture was dominant, and it survived well into the fourteenth
century.

GIRGENTI[35]

BY EDWARD A. FREEMAN

The reported luxury of the Sikeliot cities in this age is, in the
double-edged saying of Empedocles, connected with one of their noblest
tastes. They built their houses as if they were going to live for ever.
And if their houses, how much more their temples and other public
buildings? In some of the Sikeliot cities, this was the most brilliant
time of architectural splendor. At Syracuse indeed the greatest
buildings which remain to tell their own story belong either to an
earlier or to a later time. It is the theater alone, as in its first
estate a probable work of the first Hieron, which at all connects itself
with our present time. But at Akragas[36] and at Selinous the greatest
of the existing buildings belong to the days of republican freedom and
independence. At Akragas what the tyrant began the democracy went on
with. The series of temples that line the southern wall are due to an
impulse which began under Theron and went on to the days of the
Carthaginian siege.

Of the greatest among them, the temple of Olympian Zeus, this is
literally true. There can be little doubt that it was begun as one of
the thank-offerings after the victory of Himera, and it is certain that
at the coming of Hannibal and Hamilkon it was still so far imperfect
that the roof was not yet added. It was therefore in building during a
time of more than seventy years, years which take in the whole of the
brilliant days of Akragantine freedom and well-being.

To the same period also belong the other temples in the lower city,
temples which abide above ground either standing or in ruins, while the
older temples in the akropolis have to be looked for underneath
buildings of later ages. It was a grand conception to line the southern
wall