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Monsignore, indeed, believes that Ham, the son of Noah, who drove Japhet out of Sicily, was the first builder; but I do not doubt its antiquity was very great, and it seems likely that this was the original Siculian stronghold before the coming of the Greeks, and the building of the lower city of Taormina.

In the darkness I seem to hear vaguely arising, half sense, half thought, the murmur of many tongues that have perished here, Sicanian and Siculian and the lost Oscan, Greek and Latin and the hoarse jargon of barbaric slaves, Byzantine and Arabic confused with strange African dialects, Norman and Sicilian, French and Spanish, mingling, blending, changing, the sharp battle-cry of a thousand assaults rising from the low ravines, the death-cry of twenty bloody massacres within these walls, ringing on the hard rock and falling to silence only to rise more full with fiercer pain century after century of the battle-wrath and the battle-woe.

Cassius is mentioned more than once as "antiquissimus auctor," a term of compliment as well as chronological reference. Of him Niebuhr says: "He wrote about Alba according to its ancient local chronology, and synchronised the earlier periods of Rome with the history of Greece. He treated of the age before the foundation of Rome, whence we have many statements of his about Siculian towns in Latium.