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.
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