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Hardly any vestige of a temple can now be made out, but the remains of the Pelasgic walls that protected the city in prehistoric ages are still to be seen near the Trapani gate. After the fall of Troy, some of the Trojans, who had escaped the Greeks, migrated to Sicily, settled in the neighbourhood of the Sicans and were all together called Elymi, their cities being Eryx and Segesta.
I had picnicked in the temple of Segesta, climbed up through the site of the ancient city to the theatre and seen Garibaldi's monument over and over again and in all kinds of weather, before I knew anything of the processions which occur at Calatafimi early in May. I was there one year when the annual festa was conducted with more than the usual ceremony.
Segesta was at feud with Selinus; as the latter city applied to Syracuse for aid, the former bethought her of her ancient alliance with Athens. Next year the Sicilian ambassadors arrived with tales of unlimited wealth to finance an expedition.
These were Segesta and Halicyae, which were the first towns of Carthaginian Sicily that joined the Roman alliance; Centuripa, an inland town in the east of the island, which was destined to keep a watch over the Syracusan territory in its neighbourhood; Halaesa on the northern coast, which was the first of the free Greek towns to join the Romans, and above all Panormus, hitherto the capital of Carthaginian, and now destined to become that of Roman, Sicily.
The mighty Doric of Paestum, Selinus, and Segesta, the Theseion and the Parthenon, remains for all time the perfect expression of the soul of ancient Greece.
Finally, I would suggest that the strange and still unexplained omen of Acestes' burning arrow in 11. 520 ff. probably refers to some event of importance to Segesta in the same year, 46 B.C. We are told by the author of the Bellum Africanum that Caesar mustered his troops for the African campaign at Lilybaeum in the winter of 47.
The Sicilian cities were not better able to protect their possessions than were private individuals. Segesta was a town that had early ranged itself on the side of the Romans, with whom its people had a legendary relationship. When Carthage fell, Scipio its conqueror restored the spoils which had been carried off from the cities of Sicily.
At Segesta the temple is enthroned in a perfect mountain solitude, and it is like a beautiful tomb of its religion, so stately, so entire; while around, but for one solitary house of the keeper, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to disturb the apparent reign of Silence and of Death.... The temples enshrine a most pure and salutary principle of art, that which connects grandeur of effect with simplicity of detail; and, retaining their beauty and their dignity in their decay, they represent the great man when fallen, as types of that almost highest of human qualities silent yet not sullen, endurance."
He had come from Palermo and spent the morning at the Temple of Segesta which had pleased him very much and given him no difficulty. It was architecture a branch of painting.
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