(Persian captives) that supported walls, and enormous architraves. These were on such a scale in one instance that a man, we are told, could stand within one of the flutings of a pillar.
Yet this mass of buildings, to have erected which might seem beyond the resources, pecuniary and mechanical, of Paris or London, stands upon a desert plain; for the modern city, as if awe-struck by those giants below, has shrunk under the shelter of the ancient citadel. It is surrounded by no lesser ruins, no pigmy habitations.
Did the men who built the temples reserve for themselves none of their immense wealth, to enjoy in homes proportioned to the ideas exhibited in their public buildings? We cannot imagine it; and, indeed, it would be contrary to fact to suppose it. On the contrary, Agrigentum displayed a luxury not equalled in any modern capital. Its inhabitants lived sumptuously, and employed silver for their water-tanks. They prided themselves on the fleetness and beauty of their horses, and the brilliancy of their ivory equipages. When Exa3netus, their fellow - citizen, had won a prize at the Olympian games, his chariot, upon entering into his native town, was followed, as Diodorus tells us, by three hundred others, each drawn by milk-white coursers.
That men of this character built themselves good houses we cannot doubt; but we have the strongest authority for the fact. Pindar calls it the fairest of cities. Empedocles, himself a citizen of Agrigentum, is said to have remarked, "that they built their
