Intact in all but roof, on its platform of steep, worn steps it stands—in the midst of fields and groves that were once a clanging stone city, close beside the dusty highroad along which come the landau loads of hurried tourists—with its calm still unbroken. It embodies the permanence of peace through all the evanescent life of the flowing years. Unaltered through all the changes of time, its Doric columns rise, tranquil and fair, and hospitably it offers welcome to all who come.
“The Saffron Mass of Concordia”
As of old one may climb its steps to worship and admire. The road winds to its very base, and it stands as free to all comers as to the sun and wind. It alone of all the glories of once magnificent Akragas remains in its original shape. Other shrines were greater, larger, more splendid in their day. The high house of Zeus, with its mammoth columns, was nearly three times the height of Concord; it had an enclosure of three hundred and seventy-two feet to Concord’s one hundred and thirty-eight, and must once have looked scornfully on its little neighbour. Hercules, with his marvels of sculpture and painting; Juno, with her statue-enriched “thymele” terrace extending her precincts around its out-door altar and her renowned picture by Zeuxis, for whose composite beauty the five loveliest girls of the city had been models, probably outranked simple Concord. No record of its holding venerated treasures of beauty has come down from the days of its prime. Yet it alone has survived whole; emerging intact from the storms of war and nature, as if its own distilled atmosphere of serenity has acted as a preservative against Time. Even the Middle Ages treated it gently. St. Gregory of the Turnips took it for a shrine, and a gentle, serene saint he must have been; one able to dwell in the abode of Peace without feeling any desire to alter and rebuild, glad to look out of its open peristyle and watch his turnips in the sunny fields, wisely refraining from choking the pillars into walls and plaster like poor Minerva’s at Syracuse. Concordia’s cella seemed to have been just a cosy fit for St. Gregory and he a careful tenant, leaving only the two arched openings in its walls to mark his occupancy. And so the Temple is to-day the best preserved in existence—shorn of all its statues, stucco, and decoration, a little blurred and worn in outline, as if Time’s maw, while refraining from crushing, has yet mumbled it over gently.
It was apparently this completeness of preservation which had so enamoured Goethe that he dared to speak lightly of the stern majesty of the temple of Pæstum by comparison. Poseidon’s great fane he thought as inferior to Concord’s as a hero is inferior to a god.
“A god to a hero,” quoted Jane with a resentful sniff. “It was just like that pompous, stodgy old German to be carried away by mere preservation, and to prefer this sugary-slightly-melted-vanilla-caramel temple to that solemn splendour of Pæstum.”
“What an abominable simile you’ve used for this lovely thing,” scolded Peripatetica. “You’re even worse than Goethe—if possible.”
“It isn’t an abominable simile,” protested Jane flippantly. “It is exactly the colour of a good vanilla caramel, and moreover it looks like one licked all over by some giant tongue.”
Having said an outrageous thing she pretended to defend it and believe it, but her heart smote her for irreverence as she and Peripatetica strolled about the peristyle, gazing through the columns at the pictures their tawny flutings framed, and she grudgingly admitted that the situation at least was divine.
Perched on the crest of a sheer-dropping rocky cliff, Concordia faces the west. To the south dark blue sea, and to the north billowy woods and fields in all the gamut of spring greens surge up to the apricot-tinted town, which is the last shrunken remnant of old Akragas. Beneath the cliff green meadows stretch smooth to the African Sea. Eastwards, on a neighbouring knoll, Juno lifts her exquisite columns against the blue, and softly moulded hills melt into the distant ruggedness of Castrogiovanni’s mountains. To the north lie fields and groves and orchards, with dottings of farmhouse and church, up to the top of the Rupe Athena, where, with her usual passion for conspicuousness, high Athena had once kept watch in her Temple, that now, according to the so frequent fate of the mighty, is fallen into nothingness.