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 that he might have the victory; and as he walked by the beach afterward a fish threw itself out of the water before him--an omen, said the diviners, that even so the Pompeians, who held the seas, after many turns of varied fortune, should be brought to his feet. Pompey returned with a fleet, and in these waters again the battle was fought and Augustus lost it, and the siege was raised. But when a third time the trial of naval strength was essayed, and the cause of the Pompeians ruined, Augustus remembered the city that had defied him, sent its inhabitants into exile, and planted a Roman colony in its place. Latin was now the language here. The massive grandeur of Roman architecture replaced the old Greek structures. The amphitheatre was enlarged and renewed in its present form, villas of luxury bordered the coasts as in Campania, and coins were struck in the Augustan name.