Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 56, No. 345, July, 1844. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
to the thirty-six niches placed at equal distances all round the ellipse, and just over the lowest range of the CUNEI. All niches were, no doubt, for statues; but these might also have been, it pleases some to suppose, for the reverberation of applause; and they quote something about "Resonantia Vasa" from Macrobius, adding, that such niches were once probably lined with brass. Of bolder speculatists, some believe the kennel to have been made with a similar intention. Others hold that it may have been a concealed way for introducing lions and tigers to the arena! Now, what if it were a drain for the waters, which, in bad weather, soon collect to a formidable height in such a situation? Whether for voice, or wild beasts, or drainage, or none of these objects, there it is. As to the first, we cannot help being sceptical. Did it ever occur to an audience to wish the noise they make greater, and contrive expedients for making it so?
We are here high up amidst the mountains, where, we are to remember, as the ancients came not to spend, like ourselves, an idle hour, but to consume most of the day, shelter would be wanted. Two large lateral spaces, or as it were, side chambers, have received this destination at the hands of the antiquary, and have been supposed lobbies for foul weather or for shade at noon. We were made to notice by our guide, what we should else have overlooked, how the main passage described above communicates with several smaller ones in its progress, and that a small stair was a subsequent contrivance or afterthought meant to relieve, on emergency, the overcharged large one; its workmanship and style showed it plainly to have been added when the edifice had already become an antiquity. This altogether peculiar and most interesting building has also suffered still later interpolations: a Saracenic frieze runs round the wall; so that the hands of three widely different nations have been busy on the mountain theatre, which received its first audience twenty-five centuries ago! The view obtained from this spot has often been celebrated, and deserves to be. Such mountains we had often seen before; such a sky is the usual privilege of Sicily; these indented bays, which break so beautifully the line of the coast, had been an object of our daily admiration; the hoary side of the majestic Etna, and Naxos with its castellated isthmus, might be seen from other elevated situations; and the acuminated tops of Mola, with its Saracenic tower, were commanded by neighbouring sites—Taormina alone, and for its own sake, was the great and paramount object in our eyes, and possessed us wholly! We had been following Lyell half the day in antediluvian remains; but what are the bones of Ichthyosauri or Megalotheria to this gigantic skeleton of Doric antiquity, round which lie scattered the sepulchres of its ancient audiences, Greek, Roman, and Oriental—tombs which had become already an object of speculation, and been rifled for arms, vases, or gold rings, before Great Britain had made the first steps beyond painted barbarism!
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