Only the temple of Diana at Ephesus was larger than this great shrine to the spirit of the overarching sky, and even yet, though moles and churches and villas have been wrought from its remains, the gigantic ruin daunts the imagination with its colossal fragments, its huge tumble of stone, its fallen mountains of masonry. Each triglyph alone weighed twelve tons, and the enormous columns around the whole length of its three hundred and seventy-two feet were more than sixty feet high. Theron, the benevolent despot of Akragas, built it with the labours of his Carthagenian captives, and no doubt a memory of their frightful toilings in the Sicilian noons inspired the Carthagenians, when they captured the city, to their fury of destruction against the fane they themselves had wrought. It would seem as if only some convulsion of nature could have brought down that prodigious construction, but still visible upon the bases of the fallen pillars are the cuts made by the Punic conquerors, sufficient to disturb the equilibrium of even these monster columns. When their rage had at last expended itself nothing of all that incredible mass of masonry remained standing save three of the enormous Telamone—the male caryatids—that had supported the entablature. And so firmly were these built that they stood there for fifteen centuries more before time and a quaking of the earth at last brought them down.
Now the last of these lies in the centre of the ruin, perhaps the most impressive figure wrought by man’s hands, so like does it seem—blurred, vague, tremendous—to some effort to symbolize in stone the whole human race—the very frame of the world itself. Shoulder and breast an upheaved mountain range, down which the mighty muscles pour like leaping rivers to the plain of the enormous loins and thighs. Rough-hewn locks cluster about the frowning brows, as a gnarled forest grips a cliff’s edge, from beneath which stare darkly the caverned eyes. Primeval, prehistoric in form, overrun by gnawing lichens, smeared by lapse of time to a mere vast adumbration of the human form.
This temple had been the supreme effort of Akragas, the richest and most beautiful city the Greeks ever built. The stories of its wealth, of its luxury, of its gardens, palaces, theatres, baths, its gaieties, and its pomps, sound like a description of Rome under the Empire, and would be incredible if such ruins as this did not exist to attest to the facts.
Far more characteristic of the Greek were those twin temples of Castor and Pollux
—“These be the great Twin Brethren
To whom the Dorians pray”—
to which Fortunato turned their steps as a refreshing counteraction of the stern immensities of Zeus. Light, delicate, gracious fragments they were, lifting themselves airily from a sea of flowers on the edge of the ravine-like Piscina, once the reservoir for the city’s water, but now full of lemon orchards, and fringed by immense dark carouba trees....
Another day, conducted by Fortunato always, they pilgrimed to the temple of Hercules, oldest and most archaic of them all, containing still in the cella remains of the pedestal on which stood that famous bronze statue of the muscular hero and demigod. The statue which that unscrupulous collector, Verres, tried to remove and thereby provoked a riot in the city. In this temple too had hung Zeuxis’ renowned painting of Hercules’ mother, Alcmena.
It was on still another day that Fortunato led through olive groves and bowery lanes to the temple of Juno Lacina, beguiling the way with light songs—some of them distinctly light—and scintillating conversation upon all matters in the heavens above, the earth beneath, and the waters under the earth. He mimicked deliciously the characteristics of English, French, German, and American tourists, differentiating their national peculiarities with delicate acuity. He made no effort to disguise that he had pondered much upon the sexes, and opined, with a shrug, that there was a hopeless and lifelong irreconcilability in their two points of view. Marriage, he frankly conceded to be a necessity, but considered it a lamentable one. Of course one must come to it soon or late, but, for a man, how sad a fate! Then he broke off to sing of undying passion, and interrupted himself to ask if the donkeys in Nuova Yorka were as quick and strong as those of Sicily; he supposed the streets must be crowded with them, where the needs of commerce were so great.
Eventually he brought them out upon the lovely eminence of the temple of the Mother of Heaven—Juno Lacina, special deity of mothers, which crowns the edge of a sheer cliff of orange-yellow tufa four hundred feet above the sea. The sea had washed close under the cliff when the temple was first built, but now at its foot the alluvial plains stretch level and rich, bearing orchards and meadows and vineyards more fertile than any old Akragas knew, though this very shrine was built from the proceeds of exportation of oil to Carthage.