The force which Hannibal led against her was, at the lowest estimate, 100,000, which was more than the total population of the city. The first attack on the land side, where the walls were weak and out of repair because no danger had threatened for years, was repulsed. A call for help was sent to both Akragas and Syracuse. The former might have had its contingent before the walls in three days, allowing one for the messenger. But Akragas waited for the Syracusans, who were two days farther off, to come and take them on the way. She paid the penalty for this delay three years later. She, as well as Syracuse, ought to have known that at Selinus they would be fighting for their own life. Syracuse was, moreover, an ally of Selinus in the war against Athens, which was finished only three years before with such eclat as to make Syracuse a proper champion of the Greek cities against the great enemy.
It is probable that the call for help was sent out before the enemy actually made its assault, but so speedy were the movements of the Carthaginians that one might have expected even prompt aid to come too late. Selinus, however, held out with such tenacity as to frustrate all calculation. For nine days, in the consciousness that she stood as a vanguard of Hellas, while the eastern hills were eagerly scanned for the succor that was hourly expected, Selinus conducted a defence rarely equalled in history.
There were not men enough to allow reliefs in defending the wall. The same men stood at their posts day and night. The old men brought new weapons, and sharpened those that were dull. The women carried food and water. Even on the ninth day, when the fierce Iberian mercenaries broke through the wall and the weary defenders, and got inside the city, the defence did not cease. The city had to be taken house by house, men and women hurling down stones from the house-tops until the supply was exhausted. And now, house after house was pillaged by men spurred on by the promise of free plunder given by Hannibal; and delicate women fell into hands compared with which the claws of wild beasts were tender. Soldiers paraded the streets with heads on the points of their spears and strings of hands slung over their shoulders. Only 2,600 survivors somehow found their way to Akragas.
On this very day a large force started from Syracuse; but when, united with the contingent of Akragas, it confronted the Carthaginians, the woe of Selinus was accomplished. Hannibal told these belated allies that he had dealt Selinus only its deserts, and that even its gods had pronounced against it. What a theme for a Jeremiah!
The six large temples of Selinus lie in a worse condition than that in which the Carthaginians left them. Earthquakes have been more active here than at Akragas. But these ruins, in two large groups, one on the acropolis and one on a plateau to the east, are the most interesting, as well as the most impressive, ruins in Europe. Their interest lies in the fact that they present us in tangible form the history of Greek architecture as it unfolded itself in a provincial town. There is Temple C (probably a Herakles temple; but archæologists have refrained from giving doubtful names, and designated the temples by letters. Perhaps the names given at Syracuse and Girgenti, though false, are better pegs to serve the memory than letters), with “shapeless sculpture,” the well-known metope representing Perseus cutting off the head of Medusa, and another with Heracles carrying the mischievous Kerkopes flung over his shoulder. These grotesque attempts at sculpture, as well as the general consideration that the first thought of a colony was to erect a temple, allow us to date this oldest temple of Selinus as early as 600 B.C. The architecture is vastly better than the sculpture, a complete Doric style, with something of the clumsiness which marks the venerable ruin at Corinth. Then we may notice Temple E, probably a Hera temple, the southernmost of the three on the eastern plateau, a large and beautiful temple, once most gorgeously painted, and giving us, perhaps, more light than any other temple on the subject of polychromy in Doric architecture. The metopes, the best of which is Zeus receiving Hera on Mount Ida, mark this temple as a product of the early part of the fifth century, about the time of the temple of Zeus at Olympia. Then, at the other end of this line, on the eastern plateau, is Temple G, so enormous that it is supposed, like its brother at Akragas, to have been meant for none other than Zeus, the King of the gods. It is a few feet longer and a few feet wider than the great Akragas temple. Its date is given with a melancholy certainty; for it, as well as the Akragas temple, was never finished. It may well have taken a small community like this as much as the “forty and six years” which the Temple of Jerusalem required to put up such a colossal building. An especial interest attaches to it because we see it, as it were, stopped midway in a lively process of coming into being. Some of the huge drums are combined into columns, a few of which are fluted from top to bottom, while others have a little start of fluting at the top and bottom, and still others are only cut in the form of a twenty-sided polygon. But one must go to Campo Bello, about five miles distant, to feel in a still more lively manner the interruption of the building process. Here one sees a cliff where in one case workmen had just marked out, with a circular groove, a column-drum to be detached from its bed. In another place is one around which workmen have hewn for months, so that it is almost ready to be detached. Hard by are some already detached and rolled a little distance toward Selinus; still others are found transported half-way or more to the temple. The people of the country are filled with wonder at the sight. They recognize the fact that all these blocks were meant for the great temple; and some of them told an early traveller that the women of Selinus used to carry these stones on their heads from the quarry to the temple, spinning flax all the way as they went, adding, with naïveté: “But, you know, it was a race of women much larger than ours.”
These interesting temples show, as they stand side by side, great freedom in the application of the rules of Doric style. For instance, the number of columns on the side of a hexastyle temple varies from thirteen to seventeen. The number of steps also varies from two to six, instead of the canonical three.
When we visited Segesta the next day and saw its temple, also unfinished, as it was when the city was stricken down by the Greek Agathocles, we felt little pity for this city which had stirred up so much mischief for its foe, Selinus, and for its friend, Athens. But perhaps, after all, this Elymian city’s greatest crime was saying, “I must live.” If Selinus refused to accept this proposition, Segesta called in Athens or Carthage, regardless of the woes that might in consequence come upon those who disputed her right to live.
In shooting down from Segesta to the northern shore, without further exploration of what may be called the country of Æneas, we got glimpses of Mount Eryx, the favorite haunt of Venus; and later in the day the train brought us to Palermo, “that wonderful cross-section of history.” But as it was not rich in Greek history our tour in western Hellas was at an end.