as that of Arethusa did for many ages. We know enough, however, to guess that her exile cannot have been passed in solitude and, if only we had her Visitors’ Book complete, we should have something that would keep many learned persons busy. We get an early glimpse of her on her underground journey, passing near enough to the dread abode of Pluto to overhear some scandal about
That fair field
Of Enna where Proserpine, gathering flowers,
Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis
Was gathered.
She did not fully understand, but the nymph Cyane, who dwelt in another fountain up the river Anapo and remembered the affair, gave her full particulars; she made a mental note of it all and imparted the information to Ceres, who came weeping and telling her grief as she wandered the world in search of her lost daughter.
Venus, in one or other of her manifestations, was and is a welcome visitor; she rises from the sea as constantly as Arethusa falls into it, and some little time ago gave the nymph, for a keepsake, a portrait of herself as Venere Anadiomene done in marble. I know enough about painting not to be afraid to own that I know nothing about it, whereas with regard to sculpture my ignorance is so unfathomable that I can have no hesitation in saying what I think about this statue, which is that it is a pity it has been broken. If only it had its head and its right arm it would be an entry of which the owner of any visitors’ book might well be proud. It is now in the museum of Ortigia, where there is also a marble portrait of Cupid as he comes riding into the Great Harbour mounted on his dolphin’s back.
Diana, sailing through the night, seated in her silver chair, comes regularly to Ortigia. Arethusa always receives her with the respect and honour due to her Queen and Huntress, chaste and fair. Some centuries ago she
built her a temple with Doric columns and everything handsome about it; she put inside it a statue of the goddess, and the people forsook their old deity, whatever she was called, and went to the new temple worshipping Diana.
Phœnician traders came and did business with Arethusa, some of it not very straight business; for Ctesius, the king of the place, had a woman-servant, very tall and comely, who was from their own country; they cajoled her in ways that no woman can resist and, partly by means of “a necklace of gold with amber beads strung among it,” induced her to go away with them one evening, and she took with her out of the palace three cups and the king’s son, a child just able to run about. She may have thought of taking the boy because she had herself been kidnapped from Sidon, brought to Ortigia and sold to Ctesius. Before they had been a week on the voyage, Diana struck the woman dead and the traders threw her body overboard to the seals and fishes. We should never have known her tragic end but for the fact that the Odyssey was written by a woman jealous for the honour of her sex. The boy was afterwards sold to Laertes, the father of Ulysses, in whose service he put on immortality as the swineherd Eumæus. [294]
Early Greeks also did business with Arethusa and left with her vases, gold rings, glass beads, ivory combs and other objects which she still preserves in her museum. Later on, in quite modern days, about the time that Rome was being founded, less than eight centuries before Christ, other Greeks came from Corinth, turned out the Sikels and established a colony of their own in Ortigia.
After this Arethusa was no longer among those who have no history in any sense of the word. The records become less scanty, even voluminous, and they are more legible. The books are full of the great names of her visitors and of those native to her island. We read of the Tyrants, of Æschylus and Pindar, of Theocritus and Archimedes; of
the great siege when the Athenians failed to take the city; of Cicero coming to view the locality when preparing his speeches against Verres; of the five parts into which ancient Siracusa was divided, namely, Ortigia, on the island, and those four others with the beautiful names on the mainland, Achradina, Tyche, Neapolis, Epipolæ, the memory of whose former splendour still trembles among their ruins.