My author is Monsignore Giovanni di Giovanni, a Taorminian, who flourished in the last century.  He was a man of vast erudition, and there is in his pages the Old-World learning which delights me.  He was born before the days of historic doubt.  He tells a true story.  To allege an authority is with him to prove a fact, and to cite all writers who repeat the original source is to render truth impregnable.  Rarely does he show any symptom of the modern malady of incredulity. Scripta littera is reason enough, unless the fair fame of his city chances to be at stake.  He was really learned, and I do wrong to seem to diminish his authority.  He was a patient investigator of manuscripts, and did important service to Sicilian history.  The simplicity I have alluded to affects mainly the ecclesiastical part of his narrative.  A few statements also in regard to the prehistoric period might disturb the modern mind, but I own to finding in them the charm of lost things.  In my mental provinces I welcome the cave-man, the flint-maker, the lake-dweller, and all their primitive tribes to the abode of science; but I feel them to be intruders in my antiquity.  I was brought up on quite other chronologies, and I still like a history that begins with the flood.  I will not, however, ask any one of more serious mind to go back with Monsignore and myself to the era of autochthonous Sicily, when the children of the Cyclops inhabited the land, and Demeter in her search for Proserpina wept on this hill, and Charybdis lay stretched out under these bluffs watching the sea.  It is precise enough to say that Taormina began eighty years before the Trojan War.  Very dimly, it must be acknowledged, the ancient Sicani are seen arriving and driven, like all doomed races, south and west out of the land, and in their place the Siculi flourish, and a Samnite colony voyages over the straits from Italy and joins them.  Here for three centuries these sparse communities lived along these heights in fear of the sea pirates, and warred confusedly from their mainhold on Mount Taurus, or the Bull, so called because the two summits of the mountain from a distance resemble a bull’s horns; and they left no other memory of themselves.

Authentic history begins toward the end of the eighth century before our era.  It is a bright burst; for then, down by yonder green-foaming rock, the young Greek mariners leaped on the strand.  This was their first land-fall in Sicily; that rock, their Plymouth; and here, doubtless, the alarmed mountaineers stood in their fastness and watched the bearers of the world’s torch, and knew them not, bringing daybreak to the dark island for evermore, but fought, as barbarism will, against the light, and were at last made friends with it—­a chance that does not always befall.  Then quickly rose the lowland city of Naxos, and by the river sprang up the temple to Guiding Apollo, the earliest shrine of the Sicilian Greeks, where they came ever afterward