old temple near the northern end of Ortygia, for the most
part embedded in the buildings of the modern city, yet with its east end
cleared and showing several entire columns with a part of the architrave
upon them. And what a surprize here awaits one who thinks of a Doric
temple as built on a stereotyped plan! Instead of the thirteen columns
on the long sides which one is apt to look for as going with a
six-column front, here are eighteen or nineteen, it is not yet quite
certain which. The columns stand less than their diameter apart, and the
abaci are so broad that they nearly touch.

So small is the inter-columnar space that archeologists incline to the
belief that in this one Doric temple there were triglyphs only over the
columns, and not also between them as in all other known cases.
Everything about this temple stamps it as the oldest in Sicily. An
inscription on the top step, in very archaic letters, much worn and
difficult to read, contains the name of Apollo in the ancient form....
The inscription may, of course, be later than the temple; but it is in
itself old enough to warrant the supposition that the temple was
erected soon after the first Corinthian colonists established themselves
in the island. While the inscription makes it reasonably certain that
the temple belonged to Apollo, the god under whose guiding hand all
these Dorians went out into these western seas, tradition, with strange
perversity, has given it the name of "Temple of Diana." But it is all in
the family.

Another temple ruin on the edge of the plateau, which begins about two
miles south of the city, across the Anapos, one might also easily
overlook in a casual survey, because it consists only of two columns
without capitals, and a broad extent of the foundations from which the
accumulated earth has been only partially removed. This was the famous
temple of Olympian Zeus, built probably in the days of Hiero I., soon
after the Persian war, but on the site of a temple still more venerable.
One seeks a reason for the location of this holy place at such a
distance from the city. Holm, the German historian of Sicily, argues
with some plausibility that this was no mere suburb of Syracuse, but the
original Syracuse itself. In the first place, the list of the citizens
of Syracuse was kept here down at least to the time of the Athenian
invasion. In the second place, tradition, which, when rightly consulted,
tells so much, says that Archias, the fo