under of Syracuse, had two
daughters, Ortygia and Syracusa, which may point to two coordinate
settlements, Ortygia and Syracuse; the latter, which was on this temple
plateau, being subsequently merged in the former, but, as sometimes
happens in such cases, giving its name to the combined result.

Besides these temple ruins there are many more foundations that tell a
more or less interesting story. Then there are remains of the ancient
city that can never be ruined--for instance, the great stone quarries,
pits over a hundred feet deep and acres broad, in some of which the
Athenian prisoners were penned up to waste away under the gaze of the
pitiless captors; the Greek theater cut out of the solid rock; the great
altar of Hiero II., six hundred feet long and about half as broad, also
of solid rock. Then there is a mighty Hexapylon, which closed the
fortifications of Dionysius at the northwest at the point where they
challenged attack from the land side. With its sally-ports and rock-hewn
passages, some capacious enough to quarter regiments of cavalry, showing
holes cut in the projecting corners of rock, through which the
hitch-reins of the horses were wont to be passed, and its great
magazines, it stands a lasting memorial to the energy of a tyrant. But
while this fortress is practically indestructible, an impregnable
fortress is a dream incapable of realization. Marcellus and his stout
Romans came in through these fortifications, not entirely, it is true,
by their own might, but by the aid of traitors, against whom no walls
are proof.

One of the stone quarries, the Latomia del Paradiso, has an added
interest from its association with the tyrant who made himself hated as
well as feared, while Gelon was only feared without being hated. An
inner recess of the quarry is called the "Ear of Dionysius," and
tradition says that at the inner end of this recess either he or his
creatures sat and listened to the murmurs that the people uttered
against him, and that these murmurs were requited with swift and fatal
punishment. Certain it is that a whisper in this cave produces a
wonderful resonance, and a pistol shot is like the roar of a cannon; but
that people who had anything to say about the butcher should come up
within ear-shot of him to utter it is not very likely. Historians are
not quite sure that the connection of Dionysius with this recess is
altogether mythical, but that he shaped it with the fell purpose above
mention