It was not till 580 B.C. that this Rhodian colony was founded, so Akragas was a century and a half younger than her great rival, Syracuse—the offspring of Corinth. But that site on the steep river-girt hill, rising from such fertile country, proved so favourable to life and commerce; trade with the opposite coast of Africa developed so richly, that Akragas’ rise to wealth and power was rapid, and she was soon pressing Syracuse hard for the place of first city. Her temples were the greatest of all Sicily, almost of all Greece. The city’s magnificence became a bye-word, and accounts of the wealth and prodigality of its private citizens read like Arabian Nights imaginings. In the public gymnasium the people used golden strigils and gold vessels for oil. One rich Akragantine kept slaves in waiting all day at the door of his great mansion to invite every passing stranger in to feast and repose in his spacious courts, where there were baths and fresh garments always waiting and slaves to entertain with dance and music; flower garlands and food and wine unlimited at his call. There was wine in the cellars by the reservoir full—three hundred reservoirs of nine hundred gallons each—hewn in the solid rock! This same genial Gelleas, when five hundred riders came at once from Gela, took them all in, and, it being the dead of winter, presented each man with new warm garments.
They delighted in pageants and splendid public festivals, these splendour-loving Akragantines, of whom their philosopher Empedocles said that they “built as if they were to live forever and feasted as if they were to die on the morrow!” We know they went out to welcome young Exainetos, victor at the Olympian Games, with three hundred glittering chariots drawn all by milk-white horses; we know of the wonderful illuminations that lit all the city, from the monuments of the high Acropolis to the temple-crowned sea-rampart, when a noble bride passed at night to her new home, with flutings and chorus, and an escort of eight hundred carriages and riders innumerable.
Now the town seemed to be mostly a winding tangle of steep stairs—with houses for walls—and these stairs were bestrewn with ancient remnants of vegetables that had outlived their usefulness, and a swarming population of children. Fazelli mentions an Agrigentian woman of his time who brought forth seventy-three children at thirty-three births, and judging from the appearance of the streets that rabbit-like practice still maintains. Way could hardly be made through the swarm of juvenile pests, clamouring for pennies and offering themselves as guides, until a boy in slightly cleaner rags was chosen to show the way to the Cathedral. Once given an official position he furiously put his competitors to flight, and with goat-footed lightness flitted before up the ladder-like alleys, while the two panted after until it seemed as if they should be able easily to step off into the sky.
A queer old Fourteenth Century campanile, with Norman ogives and Moorish balconies, still gives character to the exterior of this thousand-foot-long Cathedral of San Gerlando perched aloft in the windy blue, but inside the Eighteenth Century had done its worst. Baroque rampant; colossal stucco mermaids and cupids, interspersed with gilded whorls and scrolls as thick as shells upon the “shell-work” boxes of the seaside booths. A giant finger could flick out a dozen cupids anywhere without their ever being missed. Yet it stands upon the ruins of a temple to Jove, and here for more than two thousand years have prayers and praise and incense gone up to the gods of the overarching blue that looks so near, so that even stucco and gilding cannot render it irreverent or lessen its power to brood the children of earth beneath its wings.
Temples of Castor and Pollux, Girgenti
“Lifting Themselves Airily From a Sea of Flowers”
Even so it seemed to-day, for merrily and thickly as the throngs of naked little stucco cupids chased each other on the walls, infants of flesh and blood in gay rags and heavy hob-nailed shoes swarmed over the marble floor. As if it were a kindergarten small boys played games of tag around the columns, small girls trotted about more demurely, or flocked like rows of perching sparrows around the numerous altars. The church resounded with the hum of their voices and the patter of their feet; yet the old women at prayer continued their devotions, quite undisturbed, and no passing priest or sacristan did more than shake a gentle finger at some especially boisterous youngster.
The sacristy holds the jewel of the Cathedral, a ravished jewel which does not belong at all in this ecclesiastical setting—the lovely Greek sarcophagus portraying the passionate story of Hippolytus and Phædra. This is the one remnant now left to Akragas out of all her treasures of Greek art. Found in the temple of Concord, where the gentle St. Gregory had probably cherished it, the Girgentians offered it to their Cathedral, and in that most tolerant of churches it served for long as the High Altar until influx of the outer world made some sense of its incongruity felt even here. At one end of the tomb Phædra swoons amourously among her maidens, their delicate little round child-like faces and soft-draped forms melting into the background in exquisite low relief. Two of a more stately beauty hold up the Queen’s limp arms and support her as she confesses to her old nurse the secret passion consuming her for that god-like boy, son of her own husband, whom with all her fiery blood she had once hated as illegitimate rival to her own children, but now had come to find so dear that she “loved the very touch of his fleecy coat”—that simple grey-and-white homespun his Amazon mother’s loving fingers had woven. In high bold relief of interlacing trees Hippolytus on the other side hunts as joyously as his patroness Artemis herself. Opposite, arrested among his dogs and companions, he stands in the clear purity of his young beauty, like “the water from the brook or the wild flowers of the morning, or the beams of the morning star turned to human flesh,” turning away his head from the bent shrunken form of the old nurse pleading her shameful embassy. And on the other end is carved the tragedy of his death, the revenge of Aphrodite in anger at his obduracy against herself and her votary Phædra. “Through all the perils of darkness he had guided the chariot safely along the curved shore; the dawn was come, and a little breeze astir as the grey level spaces parted delicately into white and blue, when angry Aphrodite awoke from the deep betimes, rent the tranquil surface; a great wave leapt suddenly into the placid distance of the little shore, and was surging here to the very necks of the plunging horses, a moment since enjoying so pleasantly with him the caress of the morning air, but now, wholly forgetful of their old affectionate habit of obedience, dragging their leader headlong over the rough pavements.”
Life seemed to breathe from the ivory-coloured marble. So vividly had its creator’s hand carried out the conception of his brain that all the elapsed centuries since the vision of beauty had come to him were but as drifting mists. Races, dynasties, powers, the very form of the earth itself, had altered, in the changing ages, but the grace of this little dream was still a living force.
“Oh Attic shape! Fair Attitude! with brede