quite other chronologies, and I still like a history that begins with
the flood. I will not, however, ask any one of more serious mind to go
back with Monsignore and myself to the era of autochthonous Sicily, when
the children of the Cyclops inhabited the land, and Demeter in her
search for Proserpina wept on this hill, and Charybdis lay stretched out
under these bluffs watching the sea. It is precise enough to say that
Taormina began eighty years before the Trojan War. Very dimly, it must
be acknowledged, the ancient Sicani are seen arriving and driven, like
all doomed races, south and west out of the land, and in their place the
Siculi flourish, and a Samnite colony voyages over the straits from
Italy and joins them. Here for three centuries these sparse communities
lived along these heights in fear of the sea pirates, and warred
confusedly from their mainhold on Mount Taurus, or the Bull, so called
because the two summits of the mountain from a distance resemble a
bull's horns; and they left no other memory of themselves.

Authentic history begins toward the end of the eighth century before our
era. It is a bright burst; for then, down by yonder green-foaming rock,
the young Greek mariners leaped on the strand. This was their first
land-fall in Sicily; that rock, their Plymouth; and here, doubtless, the
alarmed mountaineers stood in their fastness and watched the bearers of
the world's torch, and knew them not, bringing daybreak to the dark
island for evermore, but fought, as barbarism will, against the light,
and were at last made friends with it--a chance that does not always
befall. Then quickly rose the lowland city of Naxos, and by the river
sprang up the temple to Guiding Apollo, the earliest shrine of the
Sicilian Greeks, where they came ever afterward to pray for a prosperous
voyage when they would go across the sea, homeward. They were from the
first a fighting race; and decade by decade the cloud of war grew
heavier on each horizon, southward from Syracuse and northward from
Messina, and swords beat fiercer and stronger with the rivalries of
growing states--battles dimly discerned now. A single glimpse flashes
out on the page of Thucydides. He relates that when once the Messenians
threatened Naxos with overthrow, the mountaineers rushed down from the
heights in great numbers to the relief of their Greek neighbours, and
routed the enemy and slew many. This is the first bloodstain, clear and
bright, on our Tao