to pray for a prosperous voyage when they would go across the sea, homeward.  They were from the first a fighting race; and decade by decade the cloud of war grew heavier on each horizon, southward from Syracuse and northward from Messina, and swords beat fiercer and stronger with the rivalries of growing states—­battles dimly discerned now.  A single glimpse flashes out on the page of Thucydides.  He relates that when once the Messenians threatened Naxos with overthrow, the mountaineers rushed down from the heights in great numbers to the relief of their Greek neighbours, and routed the enemy and slew many.  This is the first bloodstain, clear and bright, on our Taorminian land.  Shall I add, from the few relics of that age, that Pythagoras, on the journey he undertook to establish the governments of the Sicilian cities, wrought miracles here, curing a mad lover of his frenzy by music, and being present on this hill and at Metaponto the same day—­a thing not to be done without magic?  But at last we see plainly Alcibiades coasting along below, and the ill-fated Athenians wintering in the port, and horsemen going out from Naxos toward Etna on the side of Athens in the death-struggle of her glory.  And then, suddenly, after the second three hundred years, all is over, the Greek city betrayed, sacked, destroyed, Naxos trodden out under the foot of Dionysius the tyrant.

Other fortune awaited him a few years later when he came again, and our city (which, one knows not when, had been walled and fortified) stood its first historic siege.  Dionysius arrived in the dead of winter.  Snow and ice—­I can hardly credit it—­whitened and roughened these ravines, a new ally to the besieged; but the tyrant thought to betray them by a false security in such a season.  On a bitter night, when clouds hooded the hilltop, and mists rolled low about its flanks, he climbed unobserved, with his forces, up these precipices, and gained two outer forts which gave footways to the walls; but the town roused at the sound of arms and the cries of the guards, and came down to the fray, and fought until six hundred of the foe fell dead, others with wounds surrendered, and the rest fled headlong, with Dionysius among them, hard pressed, and staining the snow with his blood as he went.  This was the city’s first triumph.

Not only with brave deeds did Taormina begin, but, as a city should, with a great man.  He was really great, this Andromachus.  Do you not remember him out of Plutarch, and the noble words that have been his immortal memory among men?  “This man was incomparably the best of all those that bore sway in Sicily at that time, governing his citizens according to law and justice, and openly professing an aversion and enmity to all tyrants.”  Was the defeat of Dionysius the first of his youthful exploits, as some say?  I cannot determine; but it is certain that he gathered the surviving exiles of Naxos, and gave them this plateau to dwell upon, and it was no longer called Mount Taurus, as had been