Skirting Sunium again, our ship of fancy, sailing westward, finds Cythera, island haunt of Aphrodite, and therefore the goal of Watteau's Embarkation. There, about a.d. 160, Pausanias saw "the most holy and ancient of all the temples that the Greeks have built to Aphrodite"; and there, in 1887, Schliemann dug its ruins out of the earth. Cythera was the southernmost of the Ionian Islands that bordered the west coast of Greece, and so named because Ionian immigrants settled them; Zacynthos, Cephallenia, Ithaca, Leucas, Paxos, and Corcyra made the rest. Schliemann thought that Ithaca was the island of Odysseus, and vainly sought under its soil some confirmation of Homer's tale; but Diirpfeld believed that Odysseus home was on rocky Leucas. From the cliffs of Leucas, as an annual sacrifice to Apollo, the ancient Leucadians, says Strabo, were in the habit of hurling a human victim; but being men as well as theologians, they mercifully attached to him powerful birds whose wings might break his fall: probably the story of Sappho's leap is bound up with memories of this rite. Corinthian colonists occupied Corcyra (Corfu) about 734 b.c., and soon became so strong that they defeated Corinth's navy and established their independence. From Corcyra some Greek adventurers sailed up the Adriatic as far as Venice; some made small settlements on the Dalmatian coast and in the valley of the Po; others crossed at last through fifty miles of stormy water to the heel of Italy.

They found a magnificent shore line, curved into natural harbors and backed by a fertile hinterland that had been almost neglected by the aborigines. The Greek invaders took possession of this coastal region by the ruthless law of colonial expansion – that natural resources unexploited by the native population will draw in, by a kind of chemical attraction, some other people to exploit them and pour them into the commerce and usage of the world. From Brentesium (Brindisi) the newcomers, chiefly Dorian, traversed the heel of the peninsula to establish a major city at Taras-the Roman Tarentum (Taranto). There they grew olives, raised horses, manufactured pottery, built ships, netted fish, and gathered mussels to make a purple dye more highly valued than the Phoenician.' As in most of the Greek colonies, the government began as an oligarchy of landowners, passed under dictators financed by the middle class, and enjoyed vigorous and turbulent intervals of democracy. Here the romantic Pyrrhus would land, in 281 b.c., and undertake to play Alexander to the West.

Across the Tarentine Gulf a new wave of immigrants, mostly Achaeans, founded the cities of Sybaris and Crotona. The murderous jealousy of these kindred states illustrates the creative energy and destructive passions of the Greeks. Trade between eastern Greece and western Italy had a choice of two routes, one by water, the other in part by land. Ships following the water route touched at Crotona, and exchanged many goods there; thence they passed to Rhegium, paid tolls, and moved cautiously through pirate-ridden seas and the swirling currents of the Messina Straits to Elea and Cumae-the northernmost Greek settlement in Italy. To avoid these tolls and perils, and a hundred extra miles of rowing and sailing, merchants who chose the other route unloaded their cargoes at Sybaris, carried them overland some thirty miles to the western coast at Laus, and reshipped them to Poseidonia, whence they were marketed into the interior of Italy.

Strategically situated on this line of trade, Sybaris prospered until it had (if we may believe Diodorus Siculus) 300,000 population and such wealth as few Greek cities could match. Sybarite became a synonym for epicurean. All physical labor was performed by slaves or serfs while the citizens, dressed in costly robes, took their ease in luxurious homes and consumed exotic delicacies. [Cooks or confectioners who invented new dishes or sweets – Athenaeus reports – were allowed to patent them for a year. Perhaps Athenaeus mistook caricature for history.] Men whose work was noisy, such as carpenters and smiths, were forbidden to practice their crafts within the confines of the city. Some of the roads in the richer districts were covered with awnings as a protection against heat and rain. Alcisthenes of Sybaris, says Aristotle, had a robe of such precious stuffs that Dionysius I of Syracuse later sold it for 120 talents ($720,000). Smyndyrides of Sybaris, visiting Sicyon to sue for the hand of Cleisthenes' daughter, brought with him a thousand servants.

All went well with Sybaris until it slipped into war with its neighbor Crotona (510). We are unreliably informed that the Sybarites marched out to battle with an army of 300,000 men. The Crotoniates, we are further assured, threw this force into confusion by playing the tunes to which the Sybarites had taught their horses to dance. The horses danced, the Sybarites were slaughtered, and their city was so conscientiously sacked and burned that it disappeared from history in a day. When, sixty-five years later, Herodotus and other Athenians established near the site the new colony of Thuru, they found hardly a trace of what had been the proudest community in Greece.

Crotona lasted longer; founded about 710 b.c., it is, as Crotone, still noisy with industry and trade. It had the only natural harbor between Taras and Sicily, and could not forgive those ships that discharged their cargoes at Sybaris. Enough trade remained t0 give the citizens a comfortable prosperity, while a wholesome defeat in war, a long economic depression, a brisk climate, and a certain Dorica-Puritan mood in the population conspired to keep them vigorous despite their wealth. Here grew famous athletes like Milo, and the greatest school of medicine in Magna Grecia [The name given by the Romans to the Greek cities in southern Italy].

Perhaps it was its reputation as a health resort that drew Pythagoras to Crotona. The name means "mouthpiece of the Pychian" oracle at Delphi; many of his followers considered him to be Apollo himself, and some laid claim to having caught a flash of his golden thigh' Tradition assigned his birth to Samos about 580, spoke of his studious youth, and gave him thirty years of travel. "Of all men," says Heracleitus, who praised parsimoniously, "Pythagoras was the most assiduous inquirer." He visited, we are told, Arabia, Syria, Phoenicia, Chaldea, India, and Gaul, and came back with an admirable motto for tourists: "When you are traveling abroad look not back at your own borders"; prejudices should be checked at every port of entry. More surely he visited Egypt, where he studied with the priests and learned much astronomy and geometry, and perhaps a little nonsense. Returning to Samos and finding that the dictatorship of Polycrates interfered with his own, he migrated to Crotona, being now over fifty years of age.

There he set up as a teacher; and his imposing presence, his varied teaching, and his willingness to receive women as well as men into his school, soon brought him several hundred students. Two centuries before Plato he laid down the principle of equal opportunity for both sexes, and did not merely preach it but practiced it. Nevertheless he recognized natural differences of function; he gave his women pupils considerable training in philosophy and literature, but he had them instructed as well in maternal and domestic arts, so that the "Pythagorean women" were honored by antiquity as the highest feminine type that Greece ever produced.

For the students in general Pythagoras established rules that almost turned the school into a monastery. The members bound themselves by a vow of loyalty, both to the Master and to one another. Ancient tradition is unanimous that they practiced a communistic sharing of goods while they lived in the Pythagorean community. They were not to eat flesh, or eggs, or beans. Wine was not forbidden, but water was recommended – a dangerous prescription in lower Italy today. Possibly the prohibition of flesh food was a religious taboo bound up with the belief in the transmigration of souls: men must beware of eating their ancestors. Probably there were dispensations, now and then, from the letter of these rules; English historians in particular find it incredible that the wrestler Milo, who was a Pythagorean, had become the strongest man in Greece without the help of beef – though the calf that became a bull in his arms managed well enough on grass. The members were forbidden to kill any animal that does not injure man, or to destroy a cultivated tree. They were to dress simply and behave modestly, "never yielding to laughter, and yet not looking stern." They were not to swear by the gods, for "every man ought so to live as to be worthy of belief without an oath." They were not to offer victims in sacrifice, but they might worship at altars that were unstained with blood. At the close of each day they were to ask themselves what wrongs they had committed, what duties they had neglected, what good they had done.

Pythagoras himself, unless he was an excellent actor, followed these rules more rigorously than any student. Certainly his mode of life won for him such respect and authority among his pupils that no one grumbled at his pedagogical dictatorship, and autos epha – ipse dixi – "he himself has said it" – became their formula for a final decision in almost any field of conduct or theory. We are told, with touching reverence, that the Master never drank wine by day, and lived for the most part on bread and honey, with vegetables as dessert; that-his robe was always white and spotless; that he was never known to eat too much, or to make love; that he never indulged in laughter, or jests, or stories; that he never chastised any one, not even a slave. Timon of Athens thought him "a juggler of solemn speech, engaged in fishing for men"; but among his most devoted followers were his wife Theano and his daughter Damo, who had facilities for comparing his philosophy with his life. To Damo, says Diogenes Laertius, "he entrusted his Commentaries, and charged her to divulge them to no person out of the house. And she, though she might have sold his discourses for much money, would not abandon them, for she thought obedience to her father's injunctions more valuable than gold; and that, too, though she was a woman."

Initiation into the Pythagorean society required, in addition to purification of the body by abstinence and self-control, a purificatiop of the mind by scientific study. The new pupil was expected to preservefor five years the "Pythagorean silence" – i.e., presumably, to accept instruction without questions or argument – before being accounted a full member, or being permitted to "see" (study under?) Pythagoras. The scholars were accordingly divided into exoterici, or outer students, and esoterici, or inner members, who were entitled to the secret wisdom of the Master hirlself. Four subjects composed the curriculum: geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. (Mathematics came first; [The Pythagoreans appear to have been the first to use the word mathematike with the meaning of mathematics; before them it had been applied to the learning (mathema) of anything.] not as the practical science th;;t the Egyptians had made it, but as an abstract theory of quantities, and an ideal logical training in which thinking would be compelled to order and clarity by the tcst of rigorous deduction and visible proof. Geometry now delnitely re:-eived the form of axiom, theorem, and demonstration; each step in the se;luence of propositions raised the studenr to a new platform, as the Pythagoreans put it, from which he might view more widely the secret structure of the world. Pythagoras himself, according to Greek tradition, discovered many theorems: above all, that the sum of the angles within any triangle equals two right angles, and that the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Apollodorus tells us that when the Master discovered this theorem he sacrificed a hecatomb-a hu° --:- ' discovered this theorem he sacrificed a hecatomb – a hundred animals – in thanksgiving; but this would have been scandalously un-Pythagorean.

From geometry, inverting the modern order, Pythagoras passed to arithmetic – not as a practical art of reckoning, but as the abstract theory of numbers. The school seems to have made the first classification of numbers into odd or even, prime or factorable;' it formulated the theory of proportion, and through this and the "application of areas" created a geometrical algebra. Perhaps it was the study of proportion that led Pythagoras to reduce music to number. One day, as he passed a blacksmith's shop, his ear was attracted by the apparently regular musical intervals of the sounds that came from the anvil. Finding that the hammers were of different weights, he concluded that tones depend upon numerical ratios. In one of the few experiments which we hear of in classical science, he took two strings of equal thickness and equal tension, and discovered that if one was twice as long as the other they sounded an octave when he plucked them; if one was half again the length of the other they gave a fifth (do, sol); if one was a third longer than the other they gave a fourth (do, fa); in this way every musical interval could be mathematically calculated and expressed. Since all bodies moving in space produce sounds, whose pitch depends upon the size and speed of the body, then each planet in its orbit about the earth (argued Pythagoras) makes a sound proportioned to its rapidity of translation, which in turn rises with its distance from the earth; and these diverse notes constitute a harmony or "music of the spheres," which we never hear because we hear it all the time.

The universe, said Pythagoras, is a living sphere, whose center is the earth. The earth too is a sphere, revolving, like the planets, from west to east. The earth, indeed the whole universe, is divided into five zonesaretic, antarctic, summer, winter, and equatorial. More or less of the moon is visible to us according to the degree in which that half of it which is facing the sun is also turned toward the earth. Eclipses of the moon are caused by the interposition of the earth, or some other body, between the moon and the sun. Pythagoras, says Diogenes Laertius, "was the first person to call the earth round, and to give the name of kosmos to the world.

Having with these contributions to mathematics and astronomy done more than any other man to establish science in Europe, Pythagoras proceeded to philosophy. The very word is apparently one of his creations. He rejected the term sophia, or wisdom, as pretentious, and described his own pursuit of understanding as philosophia – the love of wisdom. In the sixth century philosopher and Pythagorean were synonyms. Whereas Thales and the other Milesians had sought the first principle of all things in matter, Pythagoras sought it in form. Having discovered numerically regular relations and sequences in music, and haring postulated them in the planets, he made the philosopher's leap at unity by announcing that such numerically regular relations and sequences existed everywhere, and that the essential factor in everything was number. Just as Spinoza would argue [In the fragment "on the Improvement of the intellect."] that there were two worlds – one the people's world of things perceived by sense, the other the philosopher's world of laws and constancies perceived by reason – and that only the second world was permanently real; so Pythagoras felt that the only basic and lasting aspects of anything were the numerical relationships of its parts. [Science tries to reduce all phenomena to quantitative mathematical, veritable statements; chemistry describes all things to terms of symbols and figures, arranges the elements mathematically in a periodic law, and reduces them to an intro-atomic arithmetic of electrons; astronomy becomes celestial mathematics, and physicists seek a mathematics! formula to cover the phenomena of electricity, magnetism, and gravitation; some thinkers of our brae have vied to express Philosophy itself in mathematical form.] Perhaps health was a proper mathematical relationship, or proportion, in the parts or elements of the body. Perhaps even the soul was number.

At this point the mysticism in Pythagoras, nurtured in Egypt and the Near East, disported itself freely. The soul, he believed, is divided into three parts: feeling, intuition, and reason. Feeling is centered in the heart, intuition and reason in the brain. Feeling and intuition belong to animals as well as men; reason belongs to man alone, and is immortal. [We should note, m passing, that Pythagoras, slightly anticipating Pasteur, denied spontaneous generation, and taught that all animals are born from other animals through "seeds."] After death the soul undergoes a period of purgation in Hades; then it returns to earth and enters a new body in a chain of transmigration that can be ended only by a completely virtuous life. Pythagoras amused, or perhaps edified, his followers by telling them that he had been in one incarnation a courtesan, in another the hero Euphorbus; he could remember quite distinctly his adventures at the siege of Troy, and recognized, in a temple at Argos, the armor that he had worn in that ancient life. Hearing the help of a beaten dog, he went at once to the rescue of the animal, saying that he distinguished in its cries the voice of a dead friend. We catch again a glimpse of the trade in ideas that bound sixth-century Greece, Africa, and Asia when we reflect that this idea of metempsychosis was at one and the same time capturing the imagination of India, of the Orphic cult in Greece, and of a philosophical school in Italy.

We feel the hot breath of Hindu pessimism mingling, in the ethics of Pythagoras, with the clear, bright air of Plato. The purpose of life in the Pythagorean system is to gain release from reincarnation; the method is through virtue; and virtue is a harmony of the soul within itself and with God. Sometimes this harmony can be artificially induced, and the Pythagoreans, like Greek priests and doctors, used music to heal nervous disorders. More often harmony comes to the soul through wisdom, a quiet understanding of underlying truths; for such wisdom teaches a man modesty, measure, and the golden mean. The opposite way – the way of discord, excess, and sin – leads by inevitable fate to tragedy and punishment; justice is a "square number," and sooner or later every wrong will be "squared" with an equivalent penalty. Here in germ are the moral philosophies of Plato and Aristotle.

Pythagorean politics is Plato's philosophy realized before its conception. According to the common tradition of antiquity the school of Pythagoras was a communistic aristocracy: men and women pooling their goods, educated together, trained to virtue and high thinking by mathematics, music, and philosophy, and offering themselves as the guardian rulers of the state. Indeed it was Pythagoras' effort to make his society the actual government of his city that brought ruin upon himself and his followers. The initiates entered so actively into politics, and took so decidedly the aristocratic side, that the democratic or popular party of Crotona, in an ecstasy of rage, burned down the house in which the Pythagoreans were gathered, killed several of them, and drove the rest out of the city. Pythagoras himself, in one account, was captured and slain when, in his flight, he refused to tread upon a field of beans; another story lets him escape to Metapontum, where he abstained from food for forty days and-perhaps feeling that eighty years were enough-starved himself to death.

His influence was lasting; even today he is a potent name. His society survived for three centuries in scattered groups throughout Greece, producing scientists like Philolaus of Thebes and statesmen like Archytas, dictator of Taras and friend of Plato. Wordsworth, in his most famous ode, was an unconscious Pythagorean. Plato himself was enthralled by the vague figure of Pythagoras. At every turn he takes from him – in his scorn of democracy, his yearning for a communistic aristocracy of philosopherrulers, his conception of virtue as harmony, his theories of the nature and destiny of the soul, his love of geometry, and his addiction to the mysticism of number. All in all, Pythagoras was the founder, so far as we know them, of both science and philosophy in Europe-an achievement sufficient for any man.

West of Grotona lies the site of ancient Locri. The colony was founded, says Aristotle, by runaway slaves, adulterers, and thieves from Locris in mainland Greece; but perhaps Aristotle had an Old World disdain for the New. Suffering disorder from the defects of their qualities, the colonists applied to the oracle at Delphi for advice, and were told to get themselves laws. Possibly Zaleucus had instructed the oracle, for about 664 he gave to Locri ordinances which, as he said, Athena had dictated to him in a dream. This was the first written code of laws in the history of Greece, though not the first to be handed down by the gods. The Locrians liked it so well that they required any man who wished to propose a new law to speak with a rope around his neck, so that, if his motion failed, he might be hanged with a minimum of public inconvenience. [The Greeks were so fond of this fable that they told it also of the laws of Catana and Thurii. The plan was especially pleasing to Michel de Montaigne, and may not have outlived its utility.]

Rounding the toe of Italy northward, the traveler reaches flourishing Reggio, founded by the Messenians about 730 under the name of Rhegion, and known to the Romans as Rhegium. Slipping through the Straits of Messina – probably the "Scylla and Charybdis" of the Odyssey – one comes to where Laus stood; and then to ancient Hyele, the Roman Velia known to history as Elea because Plato wrote it so, and because only its philosophers are remembered. There Xenophanes of Colophon came about 510, and founded the Eleatic School

He was a personality as unique as his favorite foe, Pythagoras. A man of dauntless energy and reckless initiative, he wandered for sixty-seven years, he tells us, "up and down the land of Hellos," making observations and enemies everywhere. He wrote and recited philosophical poems, denounced Homer for his impious ribaldry, laughed at superstition, found a port in Elea, and obstinately completed a century before he died. Homer and Hesiod, sang Xenophanes, "have ascribed to the gods all deeds that are a shame and a disgrace among men – thieving, adultery, and fraud." But he himself was not a pillar of orthodoxy.

There never was, nor ever will be, any man who knows with certainty the things about the gods . .. .114ortals fancy that gods are born, and wear clothes, and have voice and form like themselves. Yet if oxen and lions had hands, and could paint and fashion images as men do, they would make the pictures and images of their gods in their own likeness; horses would make them like horses, oxen like oxen. Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; Thracians give theirs blue eyes and red hair . . . . There is one god, supreme among gods and men; resembling mortals neither in form nor in mind. The whole of him sees, the whole of him thinks, the whole of him hears. Without toil he rules all things by the power of his mind.

 

This god, says Diogenes Laertius, was identified by Xenophanes with the universe. All things, even men, taught the philosopher, are derived from earth and water by natural laws. Water once covered nearly all the earth, for marine fossils are found far inland and on mountaintops; and at some future time water will probably- cover the whole earth again. Nevertheless all change in history, and all separateness in things, are superficial phenomena; beneath the flux and variety of forms is an unchanging unity, which is the innermost reality of God.

From this starting point Xenophanes' disciple, Parmenides of Elea, proceeded to that idealistic philosophy which was in turn to mold the thought of Plato and Platonists throughout antiquity, and of Europe even to our day.

Twenty miles north of Elea lay the city of Poseidonia – the Roman Paestum – founded by colonists from Sybaris as tile main Italian terminus of Milesian trade. Today one reaches it by a pleasant ride from Naples through Salerno. Suddenly, by the roadside, amid a deserted field, three temples appear, majestic even in their desolation. For the river, by blocking its own mouth here with centuries of silt, has long since fumed this once healthy valley into a swamp, and even the reckless race that tills the slopes of Vesuvius has fled in despair from these malarial plains. Fragments of the ancient walls remain; but better preserved, as if by solitude, are the shrines that the Greeks raised, in modest limestone but almost perfect form, to the gods of the corn and the sea. The oldest of the buildings, lately called the "Basilica," was more likely a temple to Poseidon; men who owed their living to the fruit and commerce of the Mediterranean dedicated it to him towards the middle of this amazing sixth century b.c., which created great art, literature, and philosophy from Italy to Shantung. The inner as well as the outer colonnades remain, and attest the columnar passion of the Greeks. The following generation built a smaller temple, also Dorically simple and strong; we call it the "temple of Ceres," but we do not know what god sniffed the savor of its offerings. A yet later generation, just before or after the Persian War, erected the greatest and best-proportioned of the three temples, probably also to Poseidon – fittingly enough, since from its porticoes one gazes into the inviting face of the treacherous sea. Again almost everything is columns: a powerful and complete Doric peristyle without, and, within, a two-storied colonnade that once upheld a roof. Here is one of the most impressive sights in Italy; it seems incredible that this temple, better preserved than anything built by the Romans, was the work of Greeks almost five centuries before Christ. We can imagine something of the beauty and vitality of a community that had both the resources and the taste to raise such centers for its religious life; and then we can conjure up less inadequately the splendor of richer and vaster cities like Miletus, Samos, Ephesus, Crotona, Sybaris, and Syracuse.

Slightly north of where Naples stands today adventurers from Chalcis, Eretria, Euboean Cyme, and Graia founded, about 750, the great port of Cumae, oldest of Greek towns in the West. Taking the products of eastern Greece and selling them in central Italy, Cumae rapidly acquired wealth, colonized and controlled Rhegium, obtained command of the Straits of Messina, and excluded from them, or subjected to heavy tolls the vessels of cities not leagued with it in trade. Spreading southward, the Cumaeans founded Dicaearchia – which became the Roman port of Puteoli (Pozzuoli) – and Neapolis, or New City, our Naples. From these colonies Greek ideas as well as goods passed into the crude young city of Rome, and northward into Etruria. At Cumae the Romans picked up several Greek gods – Apollo and Heracles especially – and bought for more than they were worth the scrolls in which the Cumaean Sibyl – the aged priestess of Apollo – had foretold the future of Rome.

Near the beginning of the sixth century the Phocaeans of Ionia landed on the southern shore of France, founded Massalia (Marseilles), and carried Greek products up the Rhone and its branches as far as Arles and Nimes. They made friends and wives of the natives, introduced tile olive and the vine as gifts to France, and so familiarized southern Gaul with Greek civilization that Rome found it easy to spread its kindred culture there in Caesar's time. Ranging along the coast to the east, the Phocaeans established Antipolis (Antibes), Nicaea (Nice), and Monoecus (Monaco). Westward they ventured into Spain and built the towns of Rhodae (Rosas), Emporium (Ampurias), Hemeroscopium, and Maenaca (near Malaga). The Greeks in Spain flourished for a while by exploiting the silver mines of Tartessus; but in 535 the Carthaginians and Etruscans combined their forces to destroy the Phocaean fleet, and from that time Greek power in the western Mediterranean waned.

We have left not quite to the last the richest of all the regions colonized by the Greeks. To Sicily nature had given what she had withheld from continental Greece – an apparently inexhaustible soil fertilized by rain and lava, and producing so much wheat and corn that Sicily was thought to be if not the birthplace at least a favorite haunt of Demeter herself. Here were orchards, vineyards, olive groves, heavy with fruit; honey as succulent as Hymettus', and flowers blooming in their turn from the beginning to the end of the year. Grassy plains pastured sheep and cattle, endless timber grew in the hills, and the fish in the surrounding waters reproduced faster than Sicily could eat them.

A neolithic culture had flourished here in the third millennium before Christ, a bronze culture in the second; even in Minoan days trade had bound the island with Crete and Greece. Towards the end of the second millennium three waves of immigration broke upon Sicilian shores: the Sicans came from Spain, the Elymi from Asia Minor, the Sicels from Italy. About 800 the Phoenicians established themselves at Motya and Panormus (Palermo) in the west. From 735 on the Greeks poured in, and in quick succession founded Naxos, Syracuse, Leontini, Messana (Messina), Catana, Gela, Himera, Selinus, and Acragas. In all these cases the natives were driven from the coast by force of arms. Most of them retired to till the mountainous interior, some became slaves to the invaders, so many others intermarried with the conquerors that Greek blood, character, and morals in Sicily took on a perceptible native tint of passion and sensuality. The Hellenes never quite conquered the island; the Phoenicians and Carthaginians remained predominant on the west coast, and for five hundred years periodic war marked the struggle of Greek and Semite, Europe and Africa, for the possession of Sicily. After thirteen centuries of domination by Rome that contest would he resumed, in the Middle Ages, between Norman and Saracen.

Catana was distinguished for its laws, the Lipari Islands for their communism, Himera for its poet, Segesta, Selinus, and Acxagas for their temples, Syracuse for its power and wealth. The laws that Charondas gave to Catana, a full generation before Solon, became a model far many cities in Sicily and Italy, and served to create public order and sexual morality in communities unprotected by ancient mores and sacred precedents. A man might divorce his wife, or a wife hex husband, said Charondas, but then he or she must nor marry anyone younger than the divorced mate. Charondas, according to a typically Greek tale, forbade the citizens to enter the assembly while armed. One day, however, he himself came to the public meeting forgetfully wearing his sword. When a voter reproached him for breaking his own law he answered, "I will rather confirm it," and slew himself.

If we wish to visualize the difficulties of fife in colonies carved out by violent conquest we need only contemplate the curious communism of the Lipari – i.e., the Glorious – Islands, which lie to the north of eastern Sicily. Here, about 580, some adventurers from Cnidus organized a pirate's paradise. Preying upon the commerce about the Straits, they brought the booty to their island lairs and shared it with exemplary equalize. The land was owned by the community, a part of the population was assigned to till it, and the products were distributed in like shares to all the citizens. In time, however, individualism reasserted itself: the land was divided into plots individually owned, and life resumed the uneven tenor of its competitive way.

On the northern coast of Sicily lay Himera, destined to be the Plataea of the West. There Stesichorus, "Maker of Choruses;" at a time when the Greeks were tiring of epics, recast into the form of choral lyrics the legends of the race, and gave even to Helen and Achilles the passing novelty of "modem dress." As if to bridge the gap between the dying epic and the future novel, Stesichonrs composed love stories in verse; in one of these a pure and timid lass dies of unrequited love, in the style of Provengal madrigals or Victorian fiction. At the same time he opened a pathway for Theocritus by writing a pastoral poem on the death of the shepherd Daphnis, whose love for Chloe was to be the main business of the Greek novel in the Roman age. Stesichorus had his own romance, and with no less a lady than Helen herself. Having lost his sight, he attributed this calamity to his having handed down the tale of Helen's infidelity; to atone to her (for she was now a goddess) he composed a "palinode," or second song, assuring the world that Helen had been kidnaped by force, had never yielded to Paris, had never gone to Troy, but had waited intact in Egypt until Menelaus came to rescue her. In his old age the poet warned Himera against giving dictatorial power to Phalaris of Acragas. [He cast his warning into the form of a fable. A horse, annoyed by the invasion of a stag into its pasturege, asked a man to help it punish the poacher. The man promised to do this if the horse would allow him to bestride it javelin in hand. The horse agreed, the stag was frightened away, and the horse found that he was now a slave to the man.] Being unheeded, he moved to Corona, where his monumental tomb was one of the sights of Roman Sicily.

West of Himera lay Segesta, of which nothing remains but a peristyle of unfinished Doric columns weirdly rising amid surrounding weeds. To find Sicilian architecture at its best we must crass the island southward to the once great cities of Selinus and Acragas. During its tragic tenure of life from its establishment in 651 to its destruction by Carthaginians in 409, Selinus raised to the silent gods seven Doric temples, immense in size but of imperfect workmanship, covered with painted plaster and decorated with crude reliefs. The demon of earthquake destroyed these temples at a date unknown, and little survives of them but broken columns and capitals sprawling on the ground.

Acragas, the Roman Agrigentum, was in the sixth century the largest and richest city in Sicily. We picture it rising from its busy wharves through a noisy market place to the homes on the slope of the hill, and the stately acropolis whose shrines almost lifted their worshipers to the sky. Here, as in most of the Greek colonies, the landowning aristocracy yielded power to a dictatorship representing chiefly the middle class. In 570 Phalaris seized the government, and secured immortality by roasting his enemies in a brazen bull; he was particularly pleased by a contrivance that made the agonized cries of his victims sound through a mechanism of pipes like the bellowing of the animal." Nevertheless it was to him and a later dictator, Theron, that the city owed the political order and stability that permitted its economic development. The merchants of Acragas, like those of SeIinus, Crotona, and Sybaris, became the American millionaires of their time, upon whom the lesser plutocrats of older Greece looked with secret envy and compensatory scorn; the new world, said the old, was interested in size and show, but had no taste or artistry. The temple of Zeus at Acragas unquestionably sought size, for Polybius describes it as "second to none in Greece in dimensions and design"; we cannot directly judge its beauty, for wars and earthquakes destroyed it. A generation later, in the age of Pericles, Acragas raised more modest structures. One of them, the temple of Concord, survives almost completely, and of the temple of Hera there remains an impressive colonnade; enough in either case to show that Greek taste was not confined to Athens, and that even the commercial west had learned that "size is not development." – In Acragas the great Empedocles would be born; and perhaps it was there, and not in Etna's crater, that he would die.

Syracuse began as it is today-a village huddled on the promontory of Ortygia. As far back as the eighth century Corinth had sent colonists, armed with righteousness and superior weapons, to seize the little peninsula, which was then perhaps an island. They built or widened the connection with the mainland of Sicily, and drove most of the Sicels into the interior. They multiplied with all the rapidity of a vigorous people on a resourcefull soil; in time their city became the largest in Greece, with a circumference of fourteen miles and a population of half a million souls. An aristocracy of landholders was overthrown about 495 by a revolt of the unfranchised plebs in alliance with the enslaved Sicels. The new democracy, if we may believe Aristotle, proved incapable of establishing an orderly society, and in 485 Gelon of Gela, by a program of enlightened treachery, set up a dictatorship. Like many of his kind he was as able as he was unscrupulous. Scorning all moral codes and political restraints, he transformed Ortygia into an impregnable fortress for his government, conquered Naxos, Leontini, and Messana, and taxed all eastern Sicily to make Syracuse the most beautiful of Greek Capitals. "In this way," says Herodotus, sadly, "Gelon became a great king." ["Gelon of Syracuse," says Lucian, "had disagreeable breath, but did not find it out himself for a long time, no one venturing to mention such a circumstance to a tyrant. At last a foreign woman who had a connection with him dared to tell him; whereupon he went to his wife and scolded her far never having, with all her opportunities of knowing, warned him of it; she put in the defense that as she had never been familiar or at close quarters with any other man, she hod supposed all men were like that" He was disarmed.]

He redeemed himself, and became the idolized Napoleon of Sicily when, as Xerxes' fleet moved upon Athens, the Carthaginians sent an armada only less numerous than the Persian to wrest the island paradise from the Greeks. The fate of Sicily was joined with that of Greece when in the same month – tradition said on the same day – Gelon faced Hamilcar at Himera, and Themistocles confronted Xerxes at Salamis.

The Carthaginians had reason to be disturbed, for even on the north coast of Africa the Greeks had established cities and were capturing trade. As early as 630 the Dorians of Theta had sent a numerous colony- to Cyrene, midway between Carthage and Egypt. There, on the desert's edge, they found good soil, with rain so abundant that the natives spoke of the site as the place where there was a hole in the sky. The Greeks used part of the land for pasturage, and exported wool and hides; they grew from the silphium plant a spice that all Greece teas eager to buy; they, sold Greek products to Africa, and developed their own handicrafts to such a point that Cyrenaic vases ranked among the best. The city used its wealth intelligently, and adorned itself with great gardens, temples, statuary, and gymnasiums. Here the first famous epicurean philosopher, Aristippus, was born, and here, after much wandering, he returned to found the Cyrenaic School.

Within Egypt itself, normally hostile to any foreign settlement, the Greeks gained a foothold, at fast an empire. About 650 the Milesians opened a "factory," or trading post, at Naucratis on the Canopic branch of the Nile. Pharaoh Psamtik I tolerated them because they made good mercenaries, while their commerce provided rich prey for his collectors of customs revenues. Ahmose II gave them a large measure of self-government. Naucratis became almost an industrial city, with manufactures of pottery, terra cotta, and faience; still more it became an emporium of trade, bringing in Greek oil and wine, and sending out Egyptian wheat, linen, and wool, African ivory, frankincense, and gold. Gradually, amid these exchanges, Egyptian lore and techniques in religion, architecture, sculpture, and science flowed into Greece, while in return Greek words and ways entered Egypt, and paved the way for Greek domination in the Alexandrian age.