They have been reading tales of the Athenians’ long siege of Syracuse, of their final frightful despairing struggle, so full of anguish, terror, and fierce courage—“when Greek met Greek”—and they have come to look at the spot where those seven thousand unhappy prisoners finally found an end. When they were driven into this quarry they were all that remained of the tremendous expedition which Athens had drained her best blood to send. Alcibiades had fled long ago, and was in exile. Nicias and Demosthenes, who had surrendered them, were now dead; fallen on their own swords. The harbour of Syracuse was strewn with the charred wrecks of their fleet. The marshes of Anapus were rotting with their comrades, the fountain of Cyane choked with them. They themselves were wounded to a man, shuddering with fevers, starving, demoralised with long fighting and the horrible final débâcle when they were thrust all together into this Latomia; not as now a glorious garden with thyme and mint and rosemary beneath their feet, ivy-hung, full of groves and orchards, but raw, glaring, shaled with chipped stone, the staring yellow sides towering smoothly up for a hundred feet to the burning blue of the Sicilian sky. There in that waterless furnace for seventy days they died and died. Died of wounds, of thirst, of starvation; died of the poisonings of those already dead.
And the populace of Syracuse came day by day, holding lemons to their noses, to look down at them curiously, until there was not one movement, not one sound from any one of the seven thousand.
There is but one human gleam in the whole demoniacal story—a touch characteristically Greek. Some of the prisoners had beguiled the tedium of dying by chanting the noble choruses of Euripides’ newest play, which Syracuse had not yet heard, and these had been at once drawn up from among their fellows and treated with every kindness. They were entreated to repeat as much as they could remember of the poet’s lines again and again, and were finally sent back to Athens with presents and much honour.
Not a trace of the tragedy remains. The only record of death now in those lovely wild, deep-sunken gardens is a banal monument to Mazzini, and a tomb hollowed out of the wall in one of the caves. A tomb closed with a marble slab, upon which was cut an epitaph telling, in the pompous formal language of that day, of the young American naval lieutenant who died here suddenly on his ship in the first decade of the Nineteenth Century, and because he was a Protestant, and therefore could not occupy any Catholic graveyard, was laid to rest alone in this place of hideous memories.
Poor lad! Sleeping so far from his own people, and thrust away here by himself, since he must, of course, not expect to lie near those who had been baptised with a different motion of the fingers. Seeing which isolation Peripatetica quoted that amused saying of an ironic old Pagan world, “Behold, how these Christians love one another!”
It is the terrace of the Villa Politi. They have finally forgiven the villa, and have climbed up here from the Latomia to sit on its lovely terrace, to drink tea and eat the honey of Hybla, to look down on one side into the blossom-hung depths of the Athenians’ prison, on the other out to the mauve and silver of the twilight sea.
“Peripatetica,” says Jane with great firmness, “I am suffering from an indigestion of history. I am going away somewhere. All these spirits of the past block up the place so that I’ve no freedom of movement. It’s an oppression to feel that every time one puts a foot down it’s in the track of thousands and thousands of dead feet, and that one’s stirring up the dust of bones with every step we take. Everything we look at is covered so thick with layer on layer of passion and pain that I’ve got an historic heartache. I leave to-morrow.”
Peripatetica didn’t answer at first. She was looking out over the dusky sea, from which breathed a soft slow wind.
The change had come while they were in the Latomia; had come suddenly. That bleak unkindness in the atmosphere—of which they were always conscious even in the sun—had all at once disappeared. Even though the sun was gone a mild sweetness seemed to exhale from the earth, as from a heart at last content.