Not surprisingly, Randall-MacIver devotes almost as many pages to Syracuse as to the other cities combined.
By far the greatest number of Greek architectural sites on Sicily are the remains of Doric temples devoted to gods, but probably the most famous Greek remains are those of the theater at Syracuse. Paraphrasing again - "(The theater was)...probably built by Hieron I, who reigned (in Syracuse) from 478 B.C. to 467 B.C....(and it was)...certainly enlarged and restored...two hundred years later. It is one of the finest Greek buildings in the whole world...,hewn out of the native rock, (and) measures 440 feet in maximum diameter. Originally it had sixty-one tiers of seats, divided into nine wedge-shaped blocks. At the back of the theater is the well-known "street of tombs", which leads up to a cemetery on the plateau just behind. This cemetery contains a mixture of tombs of all dates, some of them as late as the Christian period. There is no mixture, however, in the "street of tombs." The great caverns on either side of the way are all post-Hellenic; they are not Greek, still less are they Sicilian, but they belong to the period of the Roman Empire; and this fact must be emphasized, because even our best writers have been misled by an erroneous interpretation which has been current for half a century." Regarding some of the "many historic memories" of the theater at Syracuse, Randall-MacIver writes - "When Aeschylus visited Syracuse we are told by an anonymous commentator that he witnessed in this theater a performance of his own Persae....Plays of Sophocles, Euripides, and many less famous dramatists were performed in this theater before distinguished visitors from Sparta, Corinth, and every part of Greece. Pindar and Plato must have sat at various times in the audience, and Theocritus almost certainly came here..." The immortal Archimedes was born in Syracuse, and Randall-MacIver writes - "Cicero, when he visited Syracuse in 75 B.C., discovered the real tomb of Archimedes, read the inscription and pointed it out with justifiable pride to the local authorities. But its place has never been rediscovered and is probably lost forever."
Other famous Greeks mentioned in the book who visited Sicily or lived there include Parmenides, Empedocles, Pythagoras, and Xenophanes.
Very much on Sicily as everywhere, the Greeks were constantly at war, when not with the Carthaginians from north Africa or the Romans then with themselves. The following brief passage mentions the Sicilian Greek city of Segesta's alliance with Carthage against the Sicilian Greek city of Akragas (Girgenti) in 409 B.C., then describes who bears most responsibility for the destruction of Sicily's Greek architecture. Randall-MacIver writes: "The friendship with Carthage which saved the Segestans in 409 B.C. was the cause of their ruin a hundred years later, when Agathokles, foiled in Africa, turned savagely on the philo-Carthaginians in Sicily and crushed Segesta. From the Romans, however, the Segestans received unusual favor, and...Cicero (mentions Segesta) as a place of some importance. That its temple survived when the city was devastated by the Saracens shows once again that the worst destroyers of ancient buildings were not Carthaginians, Romans, or Mohammedans. It was Christian fanatics of the first few centuries after Christ, it was the plundering kings, barons, and prelates of the Middle Ages, and their successors the money-grubbing materialists of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, who destroyed the great monuments of antiquity in Sicily and Southern Italy."
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