I do not know whether Ptolemy Philadelphos actually visited the nymph, but I have read somewhere that the papyrus which now grows where she rises was originally a present from him. It does not look so healthy as that which grows in the Fontana Cyane up the river Anapo across the harbour, and which he also sent to her.
About three hundred years after the statue of Venus was made, S. Paul, being on his way to Rome, was shipwrecked at Malta, where he remained three months. He sailed away in the Castor and Pollux of Alexandria, landed at Siracusa and tarried there three days. We know what S. Paul must have thought of Diana from the account of what happened at Ephesus, where the goddess was also worshipped; it is probable that he was among those who disbelieved in the eternal virginity of Arethusa, and he surely must have disapproved of the frequent visits of Venus and Cupid. In time the people of Ortigia professed themselves converted to his views and made a change, but they made it in a half-hearted way; for instead of pulling down the heathen temple, so that not one stone should be left upon another, they allowed the Doric columns to remain and merely filled up the intercolumniations with building material and baptised it into the Christian faith with a coat of whitewash and a new name. In other respects they went on very much as before.
Saracens visited the nymph, and Normans; Egyptians, Germans, Goths, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Albanians all came and all bequeathed some record of their coming. Many of them left their autographs written one over the
other upon the forms and features of the ancestors of those who still have their dwelling in her island.
Lord Nelson on his way to the Nile, where the papyrus came from, sailed into the Great Harbour with his fleet and did business with the nymph. He wrote to Sir William and Lady Hamilton:
Thanks to your exertions we have victualled and watered; and surely, having watered at the fountain of Arethusa we must have victory.
What a picture these words call up of Arethusa welcoming Nelson’s jolly tars! They are coming in their pinnaces and filling their barrels and kegs with the waters of the sacred spring and, as they row back across the harbour to the ships, one can almost hear them singing of “Tom Bowling,” “Black-eyed Susan” and “The Roast Beef of Old England.”
I have myself seen the German Emperor visiting Arethusa. His yacht, the Hohenzollern, was in the Great Harbour, and one afternoon I watched his suite being put ashore in little boats, like Nelson’s sailors, only there was no singing, and presently he came in a little boat and they all drove away in carriages to the Cappuccini, where I read in the Giornale di Sicilia that they inspected the latomia and took tea. They passed quite close to me and, although I had never seen His Majesty before, I was bold enough to raise my hat to him; he observed my salute and most affably returned it. I thought him looking extremely well.
The Kaiser landed at the Passeggiata Aretusa, a promenade that runs under shady trees between the Great Harbour and the cliff on which the city is built. It leads south to a garden, and further progress appears to be blocked by a buttress of the cliff; but the buttress is pierced by a tunnel, through which a path leads to another garden lying in an enclosure protected from the harbour by a wall which encircles it; the wall slopes down and on the top of it runs a path up which one can
walk and so enter the town without returning through the tunnel.