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In one side chapel there was some sort of office being read aloud by a young sleek priest. His only congregation consisted of two old washerwomen who seemed to be half-asleep. But in the duskier hinterland of the church there were children skirmishing and their sharp little voices made the priest half cock a reproachful eye in their direction. But the reading went on with a suavity which suggested not only his pleasure in language but also the knowledge that he had a fine voice for poetry. He was clad all in green, a color which I usually associated with Byzantine robes. He looked like a slim and self-possessed green lizard standing at the elaborately carved lectern.

But while we were all marching about the great cathedral, full of the pleasant inner disturbance which comes from a shock of aesthetic pleasure, it was Miss Lobb who hit upon the most appropriate gesture with which to acknowledge it. She walked quietly away into the body of the church and, kneeling down in a pew, covered her face to pray. It was rather moving, the simple inevitability of the act. After a moment of hesitation the dentist and his lady followed suit. It was then that I saw the Bishop's throat contract with sympathetic emotion, and he gave a distinct sob on a funny juvenile note—like a boy of fourteen. It was another revelatory moment of insight, the little gesture of concern and affection sketched by his wife in taking his arm. That sob of a choirboy with an unbroken voice somehow made me see in a flash that he had been wrestling with weighty inner stresses, problems, in a word, Doubts. Later when Roberto told me about his nervous breakdown—his losses of memory, nagging insomnia, bursting into tears in the pulpit … it all related itself back to that moment of stress and the little sob. Yet—am I wrong?—I felt that he had an overwhelming desire to imitate Miss Lobb and kneel down in prayer but was held back by some unconscious and unformulated scruples against the heathen relics embedded in the church walls; the presence of Athena, in fact. But perhaps not, perhaps I am just romancing. At any rate the fact remains that he watched Miss Lobb with a kind of hungry envy, but just stood there,
with his wife's sympathetic and restraining and comforting hand on his arm.

I was not too sophisticated to follow suit though what prayers I had to offer up were addressed rather in the direction of Athena than in that of the Virgin. But the pleasure in the graciousness of the building persisted. And it was here that Martine had tried to interest her children in the history of Greek Sicily—which is really to say Syracuse, for everything started here on this queer little island. At first she was exasperated by the flatness of the guidebook accounts, but gradually as she went on trying to make the history come alive to the children she began to “see” it herself as something real and full of color. It is not the fault of the guides for they are forced to be dryly accurate; they cannot afford the coloring matter which gives such pith and vision to master journalists like Suetonius, who knows exactly when to add that small distinguishing visual touch which brings the subject alive. With a harelip, a mole, a squint, a tonsure … with one little attribute the whole portrait breathes. But now, in Syracuse, reading about the great Gelon of Gela all the guide book is allowed to do is to repeat the name of this remarkable but unknown man—the man who began everything here that gathered weight and shaped itself into the great efflorescence of Greek culture which even today as a relic quickens and moves us. Who the devil was Gelon when all is said and done?

The ambitious and energetic tyrant of Gela had already shown his restlessness and administrative skill by
making a diplomatic marriage to Damarete, the beautiful daughter of a neighboring tyrant at Akragas, Theron by name. But his real chance came when he received an invitation from the aristocratic party in Syracuse to come and govern the city. He seized it with both hands, happy to see his powers extended further still in a three-cornered diplomatic federation which was to stand the acid test of the Carthaginian assault at Himera.

The numerologists insist that both in individual lives and in the lives of nations there are fateful days and fateful years; for England 1066, 1588, 1814, 1940.… For ancient Greek culture there came such a day in 480
BCE
when the Greek spirit asserted once and for all its powers of light and its resolve to flower into its prime. On this same day while Gelon and his confederation were securing for Sicily almost a century of peace and security, the Athenian forces were defeating the Persian armies and clearing themselves a same sort of space in which to grow and flower and assume their birthright as a mature nation. It is not recorded whether the astrologers played any part in predicting these two immortal victories. Even at this remove in time they seem by no means a predictable thing—when one considers the massive forces ranged against the Greeks, both Sicilian and metropolitan. Yet the historians do not seem to be unduly surprised, or perhaps we do not catch their tone correctly. But nothing more decisive could be imagined, and in the aftermath of victory there came a flush of triumphant and
triumphal building, of which this fine cathedral is one of the late results. Thousands of slaves were taken prisoner after Himera and set to work on these projects. The new temple of Athena was especially designed to reflect and celebrate the decisive battle. Gelon's reign was astonishingly short—as short as it was decisive. Yet he had burst open the doors of Greek history.

As for the famous temple, he did not live to see it completed as he died in 478, but he bequeathed all he had to his brother Hieron I who had been his deputy at Gela. His was not a long rule either but such had been the decisiveness of the victory over the Carthaginians at Himera that he could afford to draw breath. A period of peaceful prosperity and culture dawned in Syracuse; Hieron showed himself a discriminating patron of the arts and the list of visiting luminaries is impressive; it allows one to have some reservations as to the appalling portrait of Hieron painted by worthy Diodorus, who says he was as avaricious as he was violent, and an utter stranger to sincerity and nobility of character. We must weigh this bit of character assassination against the fact that Pindar, Aeschylus, and Simonides all found a generous welcome at his court. Pindar (am I wrong to think of him as a somewhat laborious poet?) stayed a whole year and extolled his host's skills in several unusual domains like chariot racing. Aeschylus seems to have had quite a love affair with Sicily; it is believed that he had the luck to get his
Prometheus Bound
and
Prometheus Freed
produced in
the theater here, presumably at a time when his work was still felt to be modern and rather revolutionary in style. But then there is so much that we don't know, presumably may never know. Eighty of his plays are known only by title, and a mere seven survive. In the puzzling epitaph he wrote upon himself he seems to extol his military service at the expense of his art—which makes Deeds rather distrustful of his sincerity. The soldier has an absurdly high opinion of men who can write, and not much use for the “service mentality” as he calls it. But then civilians are always prouder of having borne arms than regulars are. At any rate the dramatist actually retired to Gela to live out his declining days; perhaps the very things which made old Gelon fume with impatience—the absence of a harbor, the seclusion of the quiet little town on its promontory high over the sea, its remoteness from the bustle of everyday politics … were the very things which made it precious in the eyes of Aeschylus. Or was it perhaps something else of which the tyrant himself may never have been aware? I mean the existence of the secret religious sect professing a Pythagorean life and principle? We know that there was such a sect of philosophers in Gela.

But enough of these idle imaginings; one day (I made a mental note) I would ask Martine's daughter just how much she remembered of the history of Sicily—the potted history her mother had once given her as they sat in the cool darkness of the great church
listening to the cooing of doves in the brilliant sunshine outside.

So bright indeed was it that those of us who had dark glasses must have been glad of them. Mario had gone off with the bus telling us that he would pick us up by the Fountain of Arethusa in an hour or so—leaving us time to loiter away a moment in the museum which stood just opposite the cathedral—or in any other place of our choosing. The Microscopes, for example, recoiled at the very word Museum and retired to a pleasant bar, and I may have well done the same, but as Deeds had marked the place with an “Ought” I thought I would please him by giving it a look over. To be truthful, despite its handsome rooms with their fresh and open views over the harbor it is rather disappointing—a prodigious jumble of bits and pieces of pottery and stone, for the most part without any kind of aesthetic importance but simply preserved as a historical illustration of an epoch or a trend. Yes, there is an elephant's graveyard of such vestiges and one cannot help feeling a certain sympathy with Martine's contention that “we are in danger of preserving too much worthless stuff.” However, it gave me pleasure to watch Beddoes staring vacantly at the Paleolithic fossil of a dwarf elephant and then turning to Deeds with a “I can't see any point, can you?” It was all right, I suppose.

I even did my duty by the famous Venus Anadyomene in Room Nine, which the guide assured me was remarkable for “its anatomical realism” which is a polite
way of dealing with the more vulgar aspects of its style. Haunchwise, as they would say in New York, she is anything but kallipygous. She is softer than cellulitis and her languorous pose feels debased in a fruity sort of way. She could have gone back into stock without the world needing to feel too deprived. The fame of this insipid lady is due not to the poets but to the historians.

There were indeed one or two fine smaller pieces but truth to tell it was the cathedral which was nagging at me and I could not resist slipping away for another quick look round in it. The service was over but there were still candles burning in the side chapels with their characteristic odor of waxen soot. A fly flew into the flame of one and was burnt up—it expired with the noise of a match being struck. What was it that was really intriguing me? It was the successful harmonization of so many dissimilar elements into a perfected work of art. It didn't ought to be a work of art but it was. It is true that the builders of the great cathedrals did not live to see their work completed but they were operating to an agreed ground plan; here the miracle had been achieved by several sheer accidents. And with such unlikely ingredients, too. Start with a Greek temple, embed the whole in a Christian edifice to which you later add a Norman facade which gets knocked down by the great earthquake of 1693. Undaunted by this, you get busy once more and, completely changing direction, replace the old facade with a devilish graceful Baroque composition dated around 1728–1754.
And the whole thing, battered as it is, still smiles and breathes and manifests its virtue for all the world as if it had been thought out by a Leonardo or a Michelangelo. I caught them up in a side street wending their desultory way to the point of rendezvous with Mario.

Not many had taken advantage of the pause which we had devoted to culture; the French ladies had bought thousands of postcards, and were clucking with pleasure like hens because they were so cheap. The Bishop—where was the Bishop? I had not noticed him in the museum, and I wondered if he had really stroked the haunches of Venus in passing. Beddoes swore that he had seen him do it, but then he was not really to be trusted. But when we got down to the little square where the fountain stands we found that they were all already there, hanging over the railings. It was here that tragedy was to overtake them. The Bishop, like a sensible man, had brought along a tiny pair of opera glasses with which he examined architectural details with scrupulous attention—”standing off,” as he would put it, from them, and taking up a special stance, as he gazed up at the gargoyles and saints in remote corners of the edifices we visited. It was really sensible; how else, for example, can one really take in places like Chartres? I regretted my own heavy binoculars as being too big and clumsy for this function; they were good on landscape, yes, but too unwieldy for niceties.

His meek wife had already been down to touch the waters of the fountain and proclaim them rather cold;
for my part I had lively regrets that the Italians were in danger of turning the place into a rubbish tip—I exaggerate, but there was a Coke bottle and a newspaper floating about in the swirl of the fountain, which had quite a strong central jet and must obviously have been rather pretty when kept in better trim. I leave aside all the nympholeptic legends concerning it for they can be found in all the guidebooks. But there were some large darkish fish with speckles—they looked rather like trout—which sported with the brisk current, turning and twisting and taking it on their flanks with obvious pleasure. There were also clumps of healthy papyrus growing in the fountain. The site was also charming, being as low as a reef at the sea level, which suggested that the slightest wave would bounce into the fountain and disturb the peace of Arethusa, if indeed she still lived there. But leaning over the parapet in a trance of pleasant sunlight the poor wife of the Bishop suddenly let slip the little opera glasses and, stiff with horror, saw them roll down the stairs and tumble into the fountain. No one spoke. She turned pale and the Bishop had a look of uncomprehending rage—as if this injustice had been wished upon him by the Gods, perhaps by Arethusa herself. His wife had simply been a passive instrument of the Nymphs. (Perhaps it was a punishment for stroking the amenities of Anadyomene?)

The silence of doom fell over us. It was clear that here was a matter for at least a divorce. The poor lady, her face worked, as they say in the popular press: she opened her
mouth to speak but nothing came save a terrified smile of pure fright and idiocy.

Our hearts went out to her as we turned our gaze upon the Bishop and saw his own grim expression. All this, which takes so long to describe, passed in a second. Then came Mario to the rescue with a whoop of joy—as if he had waited for a half-century for the event. He clattered down the steps and, tucking up his trousers, shed shoes and socks and waded into the place, wincing with cold but grinning with pleasure. He restored the glasses to the Bishop who thanked him warmly and declared that they would have to be dried out, and even
then
one could not be sure (a glare at his wife) whether they would ever work again without being completely taken down and cleaned. It remained to be seen.