Fortunato, leaning over the marge, clapped his hands suddenly, and a cloud of rock pigeons flew forth from the crevices, to wheel and flutter and settle again among the vines. Probably descendants of those pigeons who lived in these same crevices in the days of the monster Phalaris, and helped to compass his death.
Pythagoras—that strange wanderer and mystic, whose outlines loom so beautiful and so incomprehensible through the vagueness of legend, was first flattered and then threatened by the Tyrant, who feared the philosopher’s teachings of freedom and justice. At one of those public discussions, so impossible in any other country ruled despotically, and yet so characteristically Greek—Pythagoras rounded a burst of eloquence by pointing to a flock of these pigeons fleeing before a hawk.
“See what a vile fear is capable of,” he cried. “If but one of these pigeons dared to resist he would save his companions, who would have time to flee.”
Fired by the suggestion the old Telemachus threw a stone at the Tyrant and despite the efforts of his guards, Phalaris was ground to a bloody paste by the stones and fury of the suddenly enfranchised Akragantines.
“It is our last day,” Jane had said; “we will go and bid the temples good-bye.”
Which was why she and Peripatetica were scaling in the sunset the golden cliffs which Concordia crowned, having come to it by a détour to Theron’s tomb.
They drew themselves laboriously up to the crest, and sank breathlessly upon the verge among the crumbled grave pits, where the Greeks buried their dead along the great Temple road. Not only their beloved human companions they interred here, but the horses who had been Olympian victors, their faithful dogs, and their pet birds. It was in rifling these graves, in search of jewels and treasure, that the greedy Carthagenians had reaped a hideous pestilence as a price of their impiety. Now the graves were but empty grass-grown troughs, and one might sit among them safely to watch the skyey glories flush across the sapphire sea, and redden the hill where the little shrunken Girgenti sent down the soft pealing of Cathedral chimes from her airy distance. Beside them Concordia’s columns deepened to tints of beaten gold in the last rays, and across the level plain far below—already dusk—the people streamed home from their long day’s labour. Flocks of silky, antlered goats strayed and cropped as they moved byre-wards, urged by brown goatherds who piped the old country tunes as they went. The same tunes Theocritus listened to in the dusk thousands of summers since, or that Empedocles, purple-clad, and golden-crowned, might have heard vaguely fluting through his dreams of life and destiny as he meditated beneath these temple shadows as night came down.
Asses pattered and tinkled towards the farms, laden with crimson burdens of sweet-smelling lupin. Painted carts rattled by with oil or wine; and cries and laughter and song came faintly up to them as the evening grew grey.
“How little it changes,” said Peripatetica wistfully. “We will pass and vanish as all these did on whose tombs we rest, and hundreds of years from now there will be the same colours and the same songs to widen the new eyes with delight.”