quarries from which the material of the metropolis was
scooped, the catacombs which burrow for miles underground--alone
prove how mighty must have been the Syracuse of Dionysius. Truly
'the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals
with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.'
Standing on the beach of the Great Harbour or the Bay of Thapsus, we
may repeat almost word by word Antipater's solemn lament over
Corinth:--

Where is thy splendour now, thy crown of towers,
Thy beauty visible to all men's eyes,
The gold and silver of thy treasuries,
Thy temples of blest gods, thy woven bowers
Where long-stoled ladies walked in tranquil hours,
Thy multitudes like stars that crowd the skies?
All, all are gone. Thy desolation lies
Bare to the night. The elemental powers
Resume their empire: on this lonely shore
Thy deathless Nereids, daughters of the sea,
Wailing 'mid broken stones unceasingly,
Like halcyons when the restless south winds roar,
Sing the sad story of thy woes of yore:
These plunging waves are all that's left to thee.

Time, however, though he devours his children, cannot utterly
destroy either the written record of illustrious deeds or the
theatre of their enactment. Therefore, with Thucydides in hand, we
may still follow the events of that Syracusan siege which decided
the destinies of Greece, and by the fall of Athens, raised Sparta,
Macedonia, and finally Rome to the hegemony of the civilised world.

[1] The fountain of Arethusa, recently rescued from the
washerwomen of Syracuse, is shut off from the Great
Harbour by a wall and planted with papyrus. Taste has not
been displayed in the bear-pit architecture of its
circular enclosure.

[2] This is not strictly true of Achradina, where some
_debris_ may still be found worth excavating.

There are few students of Thucydides and Grote who would not be
surprised by the small scale of the cliffs, and the gentle incline
of Epipolae--the rising ground above the town of Syracuse, upon the
slope of which the principal operations of the Athenian siege took
place.[1] Maps, and to some extent also the language of Thucydides,
who talks of the [Greek: prosbaseis] or practicable approaches to
Epipolae, and the [Greek: kremnoi], or precipices by which it was
separated from the plain, would lead one to suppose that the whole
region was on each hand rocky and abr