by a talent for invective, was given to sharp censure, and loved the bitter part of truth.  He introduced precision and detail into his art, and is credited with being the first to realize the importance of chronology and to seek exactness in it.  He never saw again his lovely birthplace, and I easily forgive to the exile and the son of Andromachus the vigour with which he depicted the crimes of Agathocles and others of the tyrants.  In our city, meanwhile, the Greek genius waning to its extinction, Tyndarion ruled; and in his time Pyrrhus came hither to repulse the ever invading power of Carthage.  But he was little more than a shedder of blood; he accomplished nothing, and I name him only as one of the figures of our beach.

The day of Greece was gone; but those two clouds of war still hung on the horizon, north and south, with ever darker tempest.  Instead of Syracuse and Messina, Carthage and the new name of Rome now sent them forth, and over this island they encountered.  Our city, true to its ancient tradition, became Rome’s ever faithful ally, as you may read in the poem of Silius Italicus, and was dignified by treaty with the title of a confederate city; and of this fact Cicero reminded the judges when in that famous trial he thundered against Verres, the spoiler of our Sicilian province, and with the other cities defended this of ours, whose people had signalized their hatred of the Roman praetor by overthrowing his statue in the market-place and sparing the pedestal, as they said, to be an eternal memorial of his infamy.  From the Roman age, however, I take but two episodes, for I find that to write this town’s history were to write the history of half the Mediterranean world.  When the slaves rose in the Servile War, they intrenched themselves on this hill, and in their hands the city bore its siege by the Roman consul as hardily as was ever its custom.  Cruel they were, no doubt, and vindictive.  With horror Monsignore relates that they were so resolved not to yield that, starving, they ate their children, their wives, and one another; and he rejoices when they were at last betrayed and massacred, and this disgrace was wiped away.  I hesitate.  I cannot feel regret when those whom man has made brutal answer brutally to their oppressors.  I have enough of the old Taorminian spirit to remember that the slaves, too, fought for liberty.  I am sorry for those penned and dying men; their famine and slaughter in these walls were least horrible for their part in the catastrophe, if one looks through what they did to what they were, and remembers that the civilization they violated had stripped them of humanity.  After the slave, I make room—­for whom else than imperial Augustus?  Off this shore he defeated Sextus Pompey, and he thought easily to subdue the town above when he summoned it.  But Taormina was always a loyal little place, and it would not yield without a siege.  Then Augustus, sitting down before it, prayed in our temple of Guiding Apollo