dals of Asiatic fashion, or of Greek
buskins of great majesty, when you hear in the nearest plaza the clash
of arms, shouts, death cries, and you rush to shut the door so that a
stray missile will not nail you to your seat! And why? What reason is
there for living like cats and dogs in the bosom of this Zacynthus,
which used to be so tranquil and so industrious?"

"The pride and riches of the Greeks"----began his companion.

"Yes, I know that reason. The hatred between Iberians and Greeks; the
belief that the latter, by their riches and wisdom, dominate and exploit
the former--as if in the city there actually existed Iberians and
Greeks! Iberians are those who are behind those mountains which mark off
our horizon; a Greek is he whom we have seen disembark, and who is
following our footsteps; but we are only sons of Zacynthus or of
Saguntum, as they wish to call our city. We are the product of a
thousand encounters by land and by sea, and Jupiter himself would be
driven into a corner to tell who our grandparents were. Who can
enumerate the people that have come here and have remained, in spite of
others having come afterward to wrest from them the dominion of these
lands and mines, since Zacynthus was bitten by the serpent in these
fields, and our father Hercules raised the great walls of the Acropolis?
Hither came the peoples of Tyre with their red sailed ships for the
silver from the interior; the mariners from Zante fleeing with their
families from the tyrants of their country; the Rutulian race from
Ardea, people from Italy, who were powerful in the times when Rome did
not as yet exist; Carthaginians of the epoch in which they thought more
of commerce than of arms--and how do I know how many other peoples? You
should hear the pedagogues when they explain our history on the portico
of the temple of Diana! And I, do I know, perchance whether I am Greek
or Iberian? My grandfather was a freedman from Sicily who came to take
charge of a pottery and married a Celtiberian from the interior. My
mother was a Lusitanian who came here on an expedition to sell gold dust
to merchants from Alexandria. I call myself a Saguntine like all the
rest. Those who consider themselves Iberians in Saguntum believe in the
gods of the Greeks; the Greeks unconsciously adopt many Iberian customs;
they think themselves different because they have divided the city in
half and live separate; but their feasts are the same, and in the next
Panathena