THE ANCIENT MARVELS OF THE PHLEGRAEAN FIELDS
It is a morning of alternate sun and shadow. The clouds are flying low
across the city, so that now one dome and now another flashes into
light and the orange groves shine green and gold among the square
white houses. All the high range of the Sorrento mountains lies in
shadow, but on the sea the colours are glowing warm and bright, here a
tender blue, there deepening into grey, and again, nearer into shore,
a marvellous rich tint which has no name, but is azure and emerald in
a single moment. Away across the crescent of the gulf a crowd of
fishing boats are putting forth from Torre del Greco or Torre dell'
Annunziata. Even at this distance one can see how they set their huge
triangular sails and scatter, some one way, some another, searching
each perhaps for his favourite volcanic shoal; for the largest fish
lurk always in the hollows of those lava reefs which have from time to
time burst out of the bottom of the bay. Some, perhaps, are sailing
for the coral fishery upon the coast of Africa, to which great numbers
go still in this month of April out of all the harbours beneath
Vesuvius, though the profits are not what they were, and the trade is
falling upon evil days. As for the mountain, he has cleared himself of
clouds, and from his summit a heavy coil of smoke uncurls itself
lazily and spreads like a pennant stretching far across the sky.
All these things and more I have time to notice while I trudge along
above the housetops of the city, those flat roofs named _astrici_
which are such pleasant lounges on the summer evenings when the blue
bay is dotted over with white sails and the shadows deepen on the
flanks of Vesuvius or the distant line of the Sorrento coast. At
length the road approaching the ridge of hill whose point forms the
headland of Posilipo drops swiftly, and I find myself in face of a
short ascent leading to the mouth of the very ancient grotto by which,
these two thousand years and more, those who fared from Naples unto
Pozzuoli have saved themselves the trouble of the hill.
It is absolutely necessary to pause and consider this hill, to which
so much of the rare beauty of Naples is to be attributed. For the
moment I set aside its legends and traditions, and turn my attention
to the eminence itself. It is a cliff of yellow rock, whose
consistency somewhat resembles sandstone, evidently worked without
much difficulty, since it has been quarried out into vast cavities.
The rock is tufa. It is a volcanic product, and forms the staple not
only of the headland, but also of all the site of Naples and the
rising ground behind it up to the base of the blue Apennines, which
are seen continually towering in the distance beyond Vesuvius.
Thus at Naples one may distinguish between the eternal hills and those
which have no title to the name. Of the latter is Posilipo, formed as
I said out of volcanic ash. That ash was ejected underneath the sea,
and having been compacted into rock by the action of the water was
upreared by some convulsion long since forgotten. It is an intrusion
on the landscape--a very ancient one, certainly--but it has nothing
to do with the great mountain-chain which hems in the Neapolitan
Campagna and ends at last in the Sorrento peninsula and Capri. All the
most fertile plain which lies within that barrier was once beneath the
sea, which flowed up to the bases of the mountains. There is no doubt
about it. The rock of Posilipo contains shells of fish now living in
the bay. From Gaeta to Castellammare stretched one wide inlet of the
sea. But underneath the water volcanic ash was being cast out, as it
is still at certain spots within the bay; the heaps of ash and pumice
stone grew into shoals and reefs, were uplifted into hills, the sea
flowed back from its uptilted bed, and the coasts of Naples and of
Baiae assumed some outline roughly similar to that which they possess
at present.
Of course all this is very ancient history, far beyond the ken of
written records, or even the faintest whisper of tradition, unless,
indeed, in the awe with which ancient writers alluded to the Phlegraean
fields, fabled in old time to be the gate of hell, we may detect some
lingering memory of the horrible convulsion which drove back the sea,
and out of its deserted bed reared up this wilderness of ash and
craters. But speculations of this kind are rather idle. We had better
turn towards the grottoes, which are, at least in part, the work of
men whose doings on this earth are known to history. The one, of
course, is wholly modern, a construction of our own age for the
accommodation of the steam tramway; but the other, through which one
walks or drives, is certainly as old as the Emperor Augustus, and has
sometimes been supposed to possess an antiquity far greater than that.
It seems remarkable that the Romans should have esteemed it easier to
bore through the cliff than to make a road across the headland.
Indeed, there were villas on Posilipo, and there must surely have been
a road of some sort from very early times, though it must be admitted
that the founders of Naples did not go to Pozzuoli by the coast as we
do. The old road climbed up directly from the city to Antignano, in
the direction of Camaldoli, and kept along the ridge as far as
possible. The coast road began to be used when the tunnel had been
made. Still there must have been at least a track across the headland,
and one wonders why the Romans did not improve it, in preference to
boring underground. The ease with which the soft stone can be worked
may account partially for their choice; but it is not to be forgotten
that numberless caves, whether natural or artificial, exist in the
cliffs at Posilipo and Pizzofalcone, giving occasion to the quick
fancy of the Neapolitans to devise wild tales of buried treasure and
of strange fierce beasts which guard it from the greed of men. The old
legends of the Cimmerians who dwelt in dark caverns of the Phlegraean
fields present themselves to mind in this connection, and without
following out this mysterious subject further into the mists which
envelope it, we may recognise the possibility that some among these
caverns are far older than is commonly believed. Of course the
preference of the Romans for tunnelling is explained at once, if we
may suppose that by enlarging existing caverns they found their tunnel
already partly made.
[Illustration: POZZUOLI]
"I do not know," cries Capaccio, an ancient topographer who may yet be
read with pleasure, though the grapes have ripened three hundred times
above his tomb, "I do not know whether the Posilipo is more adorned by
the grotto or the grotto by Posilipo." I really cannot guess what he
meant. It sounds like the despairing observation of a writer at a
loss for matter. We will leave him to resolve his own puzzle and go on
through the darkness of the ill-lighted grotto--no pleasanter now than
when Seneca grumbled at its dust and darkness--sparing some thought
for that great festival which on the 7th of September every year turns
this dark highway into a pandemonium of noise and riot. The festival
of Piedigrotta is held as much within the tunnel as on the open space
outside, where stands the church whose Madonna furnishes a devotional
pretext for all the racket. Indeed it is almost more wild and whirling
within than without; for one need not become a boy again to understand
that the joys of rushing up and down, wearing a fantastic paper cap,
blowing shrieks upon a catcall, and brandishing a Chinese lantern,
must be infinitely greater in the bowels of the hill than in the open
air. Of course it is not only, nor even chiefly, a feast for children.
All the lower classes rejoice at Piedigrotta, and often with the best
of cause; for it happens not infrequently that the sky, which for many
weeks has been pitiless and brazen, clouds and breaks about that time,
the welcome rain falls, the streets grow cool again, and laughter
rises from end to end of the reviving city.
Of Fuorigrotta, the unpleasing village at the further end of the
grotto, I have nothing to say, unless it be to express the wish that
Giacomo Leopardi, who lies in the church of San Vitale, lay elsewhere.
That superb poet and fine scholar whose verses upon Italy not yet
reborn rank by their majesty and fire next after those of Dante, and
who yet could produce a poem rendering so nobly the solitude of
contemplation as that which commences--
"Che fai tu luna in ciel, dimmi, che fai,
Silenziosa luna!"
this man should have lain upon some mountain-top, among the scent of
rosemary and of fragrant myrtle, rather than in such a reeking dirty
village as Fuorigrotta.
But I forget!--the compelling interest of this day's journey is not
literary. A short walk from Fuorigrotta brings me to a point where the
road turns slightly upward to the right, leading me to the brow of a
hill, over which I look into a wooded hollow--none other than the Lago
d'Agnano, once a crater, then a volcanic lake. Oddly enough, it is not
mentioned as a lake by any ancient writer. Pliny describes the Grotta
del Cane, which we are about to visit, but says not a word of any
lake. This fact, with some others, suggests that the water appeared in
this old crater only in the Middle Ages; though it really does not
matter much, for it is gone now. The bottom has been reft from the
fishes and converted into fertile soil. The sloping heights which wall
the basin have a waste and somewhat blasted aspect; but I was not
granted time to muse on these appearances before a smiling but
determined brigand, belonging to the class of guides, sauntered up
with a small cur running at his heels and made me aware that I had
reached the entrance of the Dog Grotto.
I might have known it; for, in fact, through many centuries up to that
recent year when it pleased the Italians to drain the lake, the life
of the small dogs dwelling in this neighbourhood has been composed of
progresses from grotto to lake and back again, first held up by the
heels to be stifled by the poisonous gas, then soused head over ears
in the lake with instructions to recover quickly because another
carriage was coming down the hill. Thus lake and grotto were twin
branches of one establishment, now dissolved. Perhaps the lake was the
more important of the two, since it is easier to stifle a dog or man
than to revive him; and on many occasions there would have been
melancholy accidents had not the cooling waters been at hand. For
instance it is related by M. de Villamont, who came this way when the
seventeenth century was very young indeed, that M. de Tournon, a few
years before, desiring to carry off a bit of the roof of the grotto,
was unhappily overcome by the fumes as he stood chipping off the piece
he fancied, and tumbled on the floor, as likely to perish as could be
wished by the bitterest foe of those who spoil ancient monuments. His
friends promptly dragged him out and tossed him into the lake. It is
true the cure found so successful with dogs proved somewhat less so
with M. de Tournon, for he died a few days later. Yet had the lake
been dry, as it is to-day, he would have died in the cave, which would
surely have been worse.
The little dog--he was hardly better than a puppy--looked at me and
wagged his tail hopefully. I understood him perfectly. He had detected
my nationality; and I resolved to be no less humane than a
countrywoman of my own who visited this grotto no great while ago, and
who, when asked by the brigand whether he should put the dog in,
answered hastily, "Certainly not." "Ah!" said the guide, "you are
Englees! If you had been American you would have said, 'Why,
certainly.'" I made the same condition. The fellow shrugged his
shoulders. He did not care, he knew another way of extorting as many
francs from me; and accordingly we all went gaily down the hill,
preceded by the happy cur, running on with tail erect, till we reached
a gate in the wall through which we passed to the Grotta del Cane.
A low entrance, hardly more than a man's height, a long tubular
passage of uniform dimensions sloping backwards into the bowels of the
hill--such is all one sees on approaching the Dog Grotto. A misty
exhalation rises from the floor and maintains its level while the
ground slopes downwards. Thus, if a man entered, the whitish vapour
would cling at first about his feet. A few steps further would bring
it to his knees, then waist high, and in a little more it would rise
about his mouth and nostrils and become a shroud indeed; for the gas
is carbonic acid, and destroys all human life. King Charles the Eighth
of France, who flashed across the sky of Naples as a conqueror, came
here in the short space of time before he left it as a fugitive,
bringing with him a donkey, on which he tried the effects of the gas.
I do not know why he selected that animal; but the poor brute died. So
did two slaves, whom Don Pietro di Toledo, one of the early Spanish
viceroys, used to decide the question whether any of the virtue had
gone out of the gas. That question is settled more humanely now. The
guide takes a torch, kindles it to a bright flame, and plunges it into
the vapour. It goes out instantly; and when the act has been repeated
some half-dozen times the gas, impregnated with smoke, assumes the
appearance of a silver sea, flowing in rippling waves against the
black walls of the cavern.
With all its curiosity the Dog Grotto is a deadly little hole, in
which the world takes much less interest nowadays than it does in many
other objects in the neighbourhood of the Siren city, going indeed by
preference to see those which are beautiful, whereas not many
generations ago it rushed off hastily to see first those which are
odd. For that reason many visitors to Naples neglect this region of
the Phlegraean fields and are content to wait the natural occasion for
visiting the mouth of Styx, over which all created beings must be
ferried before they reach the nether world. It is a pity; for, judged
from the point of beauty solely, there is enough in the shore of the
Bay of Baiae to content most men. The road mounts upon the ridge which
parts the slope of Lago d'Agnano from the sea. One looks down from
the spine over a broken land of vineyards to a curved bay, an almost
perfect semicircle, bounded on the left by the height of Posilipo,
with the high crag of the Island of Nisida, and on the right by Capo
Miseno, the point which took its name from the old Trojan trumpeter
who made the long perilous voyage with AEneas, but perished as he
reached the promised land where at last the wanderers were to find
rest. The headland, which, like every other eminence in sight, is
purely volcanic, is a lofty mass of tufa, united with the land by a
lower tongue, like a mere causeway; and on the nearer side stands the
Castle of Baiae, with the insignificant townlet which bears on its
small shoulders the burden of so great a name. Midway in the bay the
ancient town of Pozzuoli nestles by the water's edge, deserted this
long while by all the trade which brought it into touch with
Alexandria and many another city further east, filling its harbour
with strange ships, crowding its quays with swarthy sailors, and with
silks and spices of the Orient. All that old consequence has gone now
like a dream, and no one visits the cluster of old brown houses for
any other reason than to see that which is still left of its ancient
greatness. But before going down the hill, I turn aside towards a
gateway on my right, which admits me to a place of strange and curious
interest. It is the Solfatara, and is nothing more or less than the
crater of a half-extinct volcano, which, having lain torpid for full
seven centuries, is now a striking proof of the fertility of volcanic
soil, and the speed with which Nature will haste to spread her lushest
vegetation even over a thin crust which covers seething fires. It was
so once with the crater of Vesuvius, which, after five centuries of
rest, filled itself with oaks and beeches, and covered its slopes with
fresh grass up to the very summit.
Indeed, on entering the inclosure of the Solfatara, one receives the
impression of treading the winding alleys of a well-kept and lovely
park. The path runs through a pretty wood. The trees are scarcely more
important than a coppice; but under their green shade there grows a
wealth of flowers of every colour, glowing in the soft sunshine which
filters through the boughs. There is the white gum-cistus, which is so
strangely like the white wild rose of English hedges, and the
branching asphodel, with myriads of those exquisite anemones, lilac
and purple, which make the woods of Italy in springtime a perpetual
joy to us who come from colder climates; and among these, a profusion
of smaller blossoms trailing on the ground, crimson, white and orange,
making such a mass of colour as the most cunning gardener would seek
vainly to produce. One lingers and delays among these woods, doubting
whether any sight which may be shown one further on can compensate for
the loss of the cool glades.
But already over the green coppice bare grey hillsides have come in
sight. They are the walls of the old crater, and here and there a puff
of white smoke curling out of a cleft reminds me that the flowers are
only here on sufferance, and that the whole hollow is in fact but
waiting the moment when its hidden fires will break forth again, and
vomit destruction over all the country. A few yards further on the
coppice falls away. The flowers persist in carpeting the ground; but
in a little way they too cease, the soil grows grey and blasted. Full
in front there rises a strange scene of desolation. The wall of the
crater is precipitous and black. At its base there are openings and
piles of discoloured earth which suggest the debris of some factory of
chemicals, an impression which is driven home by the yellow stains of
sulphur which lie in every direction on the grey bottom of the crater.
From one vast rent in the soil a towering pillar of white smoke pours
out with a loud hissing noise, and blows away in wreaths and coils
over the dark surface of the cliff.
There is something curiously arresting in this quick passage from a
green glade carpeted with flowers to the calcined ash and the grey
desolation of this broken hillside. Of vegetation there is almost
none, except a stunted heather which creeps hardily towards the blast
hole. A little way off, towards the right, lies a level space sunk
beneath the surrounding land, not unlike the fashion of an asphalt
skating rink, so even in its surface that it resembles the work of
man, and one strolls towards it to discover with what purpose anyone
had dared to tamper with the soil in a spot where so thin a crust lies
over bottomless pits of fire. But when one steps out upon the level
flat, it reveals itself at once to be no human work. The guide stamps
with his foot, and remarks that the sound is hollow. It is indeed,
most unpleasantly so. He jumps upon it, and the surface quivers. You
beg him to spare you further demonstrations, and walking gingerly on
tiptoe, wishing at each step that you were safe in Regent Street once
more, you follow him out towards the middle of this devilish crust,
which rocks so easily and covers something which you hope devoutly you
may never see. Midway in the expanse the fellow pauses in triumph--he
has reached what he is confident will please you. He is standing by a
hole, just such an opening as is made in a frozen lake in winter for
the watering of animals. From it there emerges a little vapour and a
curious low sound, like that which a child will make with pouting
lips. The guide grins, crouching by the opening; you, on the other
hand, hang back, in doubt whether the crust may not break off and
suddenly enlarge the hole. You are encouraged forwards, and at last,
peering nervously down the hole, you see with keen and lively interest
that the crust appeared to have about the thickness of your
walking-stick, at which depth there is a lake of boiling mud. The grey
mud stirs and seethes in the round vent-hole, rising and falling,
while on its surface the gas collects slowly into a huge bubble, which
forms and bursts and then collects again.
For my part I do not deny that the sight fascinated me, but it
deprived me of all wish to tread further on that shaking crust, and I
sped back as lightly as I might, wishing all the way for wings, to
where there was at least sound, green earth for a footing, in place of
pumice stone and hardened mud, which some day, surely, will fly into
splinters, and leave the seething, steaming lake once more open to the
heavens.
[Illustration: POZZUOLI]
From the hillside just beyond the gate of the Solfatara one gazes down
on the town of Pozzuoli, brown and ancient, looking, I do not doubt,
much the same unto this hour as when the Apostle Paul landed there
from the _Castor and Pollux_, a ship of Alexandria which had wintered
in the Island of Melita. But if the town itself, the very houses
clustered on the hill, preserve the aspect which they bore twenty
centuries ago, so much cannot be said for the sea-front, which is
vastly changed. Pozzuoli in those days must have rung with the noise
of ships entering or departing. Its quays were clamorous with all
the speeches of the East; its great trade in corn needed long
warehouses near the water's edge; its amphitheatre was built for the
games of a people numbering many thousands. But now the little boats
which come and go are too few to break the long silence of the city,
and there are scarce any other noises in the place than the shout of
children at their games, or the loud crack of the vetturino's whip as
the strangers rattle through the streets on their way to Baiae.
It was the fall of Capua which made the trade of Pozzuoli, and it was
the rise of Ostia that destroyed it. Capua, long the first town of
Italy by reason of its commerce and its luxury, lost that pre-eminence
in the year 211 B.C., when the Romans avenged the adhesion of the city
to the cause of Hannibal. That act of punishment made Rome the chief
mart of merchants from the East, and the nearest port to the Eternal
City being Pozzuoli, the trade flowed thither naturally. Naples no
doubt had a finer harbour; but Naples was not in Roman hands, while
Pozzuoli was. Ostia, before the days of the Emperor Claudius, who
carried out great works there, was a port of smallest consequence.
Thus the harbour of Pozzuoli was continually full of ships. They came
from Spain, from Sardinia, from Elba, bringing iron, which was wrought
into fine tools by cunning workmen of the town; from Africa, from
Cyprus, and all the trading ports of Asia Minor and the isles of the
AEgean. Thither came also the merchants of Phoenicia, bringing with
them all those gorgeous wares which moved the prophet Ezekiel to utter
so great a chant of glory and its doom. "Tarshish was thy merchant by
reason of the multitude of all kinds of riches; with silver, iron,
tin, and lead they traded in thy fairs.... These were thy merchants in
all sorts of things, in blue clothes and broidered work and in chests
of rich apparel, bound with cords and made of cedar among thy
merchandise. The ships of Tarshish did sing of thee in thy market.
Thou wast replenished and made very glorious in the midst of the
seas." All that most noble description of the commerce of Tyre returns
irresistibly upon the mind when one looks back on the greatness of
Pozzuoli, where the Tyrians themselves had a mighty factory and all
the nations of the East brought their wares for sale. Most of all the
town rejoiced when the great fleet hove in sight which came each year
from Egypt in the spring. Seneca has left us a description of the
stir. The fleet of traders was preceded some way in advance by light,
swift sailing ships which heralded its coming. They could be known a
long way off, for they sailed through the narrow strait between Capri
and the mainland with topsails flying, a privilege allowed to none but
ships of Alexandria. Then all the town made ready to hasten to the
water's edge, to watch the sailors dancing on the quays, or to gloat
over the wonders which had travelled thither from Arabia, India, and
perhaps even far Cathay.
Well, all this is an old story now--too old, perhaps, to be of any
striking interest--yet here upon the shore is still the vast old
Temple of Serapis, the Egyptian deity whom the strangers worshipped.
One knows not by what slow stages the Egyptians departed and the
ancient temple was deserted. The only certain fact is that at some
period the whole inclosure was buried deep beneath the sea, and after
long centuries raised up again by some fresh movement of the swaying
shore.
[Illustration: COLUMNS IN THE SERAPEON, POZZUOLI]
Strange as this seems to those who have not watched the perpetual
heavings and subsidences of a volcanic land, the testimony of the fact
is unmistakably in sight of all. For the sacred inclosure once
hallowed to the rite of Serapis is still not allotted to any other
purpose; and the visitor who enters it finds many of the ancient
columns still erect. It is a vast quadrangle, once paved with squares
of marble. There was a covered peristyle, and in the centre another
smaller temple. Many of the columns of fine marble which once adorned
the abode of the goddess were reft from her in the last century, when
the spot was cleared of all the soil and brushwood which had grown up
about it; but three huge pillars of cipollino, once forming part of
the pronaos, are still erect; and what is singular about them is that,
beginning at a height of some twelve feet from the ground and
extending some nine feet further up, the marble is honeycombed with
holes, drilled in countless numbers deep into the round surface of the
columns.
There is no animal in earth or air which will attack stone in this
destructive manner; but in the sea there is a little bivalve, called
by naturalists "lithodomus," whose only happiness lies in boring. This
animal is still found plentifully in the Bay of Baiae. His shells still
lie in the perforations of the columns; and it is thus demonstrated
that the ancient temple must have been plunged beneath the sea, that
it lay there long ages, till at length some fresh convulsion reared it
up once more out of the reach of fish. Surely few buildings have
sustained so strange a fate!
The holes drilled by the patient lithodomus, as I have said, do not
extend through the whole height of the column, but have a range of
about nine feet only, which is thus the measure of the space left for
the operations of the busy spoiler. Above the ring of perforations one
sees the indications of ordinary weathering, so that the upper edge
of the holes doubtless marks the level of high water, and the summit
of the columns stood up above the waves. But one does not see readily
what protected the lower portion of the marble. Possibly, before the
land swayed downwards something fell which covered them.
In the twelfth century the Solfatara broke forth into eruption for the
last time. The scoriae and stones fell thick in Pozzuoli, and they
filled the court of the Serapeon to the height of some twelve feet.
Probably the sea had then already stolen into the courtyard; and it
may be that the earthquakes attending the eruption caused the
subsidence which left the lithodomus free to crawl and bore upon the
stones which saw the ancient mysteries of Serapis. At any rate it was
another volcanic outburst which raised the dripping columns from the
sea in 1538, since which time the land has been swaying slowly down
once more, so that now if anyone cares to scratch the gravel in the
courtyard he will find he has constructed a pool of clear sea water.
It is a strange and terrible thing to realise the existence of hidden
forces which can sway the solid earth as lightly as a puff of wind
disturbs an awning; none the less terrible because the ground has
risen and fallen so very gently that the pillars stand erect upon
their bases. Once more, as at the Solfatara, one has the sense of
treading over some vast chasm filled with a sleeping power which may
awake at any moment. Let us go on beyond the city and see what has
happened elsewhere upon this bay, so beautiful and yet so deadly, a
strange dwelling-place for men who have but one life to pass on the
surface of this earth.
In passing out of Pozzuoli one sees upon the right the vine-clad
slopes of Monte Barbaro. That also is a crater, the loftiest in the
Phlegraean fields, but long at rest. The peasants believe the mountain
to contain vast treasures--statues of kings and queens, all cast of
solid gold, with heaps of coin and jewels so immense that great ships
would be needed to carry them away. These tales are very old. I
sometimes wonder whether they may not have had their source in dim
memory of the great hoard of treasure which the Goths stored in the
citadel of Cumae, and which, when their power was utterly broken, they
were supposed to have surrendered to the imperial general Narses.
Perhaps they did not; perhaps--but what is the use of suppositions?
Petrarch heard the stories when he climbed Monte Barbaro in 1343. Many
men, his guides told him, had set out to seek the treasure, but had
not returned, lost in some horrible abyss in the heart of the
mountain. They must have neglected the conditions of success. They
should have watched the moon, and learnt how to catch and prison down
the ghosts which guard the precious heaps, otherwise the whole mass,
even if found, will turn to lumps of coal!
What a wilderness of craters! Small wonder if wild tales exist yet in
a district which in old days, and even modern ones, has been
encompassed with fear. One volcano is enough to fill the country east
of Naples with terror. But here are many--active, doubtless, in very
different ages--Monte Barbaro, Monte Cigliano, Monte Campana, Monte
Grillo, which hems in the more recent crater of Avernus much as Somma
encircles the eruptive crater of Vesuvius. What terrible sights must
have been witnessed here in those far-distant days when these and
other craters were in action!--"affliction such as was not from the
beginning of the creation which God created" until then! But a few
miles away across the sea is Monte Epomeo, towering out of Ischia.
That was the chief vent of the volcanic forces in Roman times; and
then the Phlegraean fields were still. Epomeo has been silent for five
centuries; but that proves nothing, and there are people who suggest
that the awful earthquake which destroyed Casamicciola may be just
such a prelude to the awakening of Epomeo as was the convulsion which
shook Pompeii to its foundations sixteen years before its final
destruction. _Di avertite omen!_
We need not, however, go back five centuries for facts that bid men
heed what may be passing underground about the shores of this blue
bay. Here is one too large to be overlooked, immediately in front of
us--no other than the green slope of Monte Nuovo, a hill of aspect
both innocent and ancient, ridged with a few pine trees by whose aid
the mountain contrives to look as if it had stood there beside the
Lucrine Lake as long as any eminence in sight. This is a false
pretension. There was no such mountain when Petrarch climbed the
neighbouring height, nor for full two centuries afterwards. What
Petrarch saw exists no longer. He looked down upon the Lucrine Lake
connected with the sea by a deep channel, and formed with Lake Avernus
into one wide inlet fit for shipping. This was the Portus Julius, a
harbour so large that the whole Roman fleet could manoeuvre in it.
The canals and piers were in existence less than four centuries ago;
and this great work, so remarkable a witness to the sea power of the
Romans, would doubtless have lasted unto our day had it not been for
the intrusion of Monte Nuovo, which destroyed the channels and
reduced the Lucrine Lake to the dimensions of a sedgy duck pond.
The catastrophe is worth describing, for no other in historic times
has so greatly changed the aspect of this coast or robbed it of so
large a portion of its beauty. For full two years there had been
constant earthquakes throughout Campania. Some imprisoned force was
heaving and struggling to release itself, and all men began to fear a
great convulsion. On the 27th of September, 1538, the earth tremors
seemed to concentrate themselves around the town of Pozzuoli. More
than twenty shocks struck the town in rapid succession. By noon upon
the 28th the sea was retreating visibly from the pleasant shore beside
the Lucrine Lake, where stood the ruined villa of the Empress
Agrippina, and a more modern villa of the Anjou kings, who were used,
like all their predecessors in Campania, to take their ease in summer
among the luxuriant vegetation of the hills whose volcanic forces were
believed to be lulled in a perpetual sleep.
For three hundred yards the sea fell back, its bottom was exposed, and
the peasants came with carts and carried off the fish left dry upon
the strand. The whole of the flat ground between Lake Avernus and the
sea had been heaved upwards; but at eight o'clock on the following
morning it began to sink again, though not as yet with any violence.
It fell apparently at one spot only, and to a depth of about thirteen
feet, while from the hollow thus formed there burst out a stream of
very cold water, which was investigated cautiously by several persons,
some of whom found it by no means cold, but tepid and sulphurous. Ere
long those who were examining the new spring perceived that the sunken
ground was rising awfully. It was upreared so rapidly that by noon
the hollow had become a hill, and as the new slopes swelled and rose
where never yet had there been a rising ground, the crest burst and
fire broke out from the summit.
"About this time," says one Francesco del Nero, who dwelt at Pozzuoli,
"about this time fire issued forth and formed the great gulf with such
a force, noise, and shining light that I, who was standing in my
garden, was seized with great terror. Forty minutes afterwards, though
unwell, I got upon a neighbouring height, and by my troth it was a
splendid fire, that threw up for a long time much earth and many
stones. They fell back again all round the gulf, so that towards the
sea they formed a heap in the shape of a crossbow, the bow being a
mile and a half and the arrow two-thirds of a mile in dimensions.
Towards Pozzuoli it has formed a hill nearly of the height of Monte
Morello, and for a distance of seventy miles the earth and trees are
covered with ashes. On my own estate I have neither a leaf on the
trees nor a blade of grass.... The ashes that fell were soft,
sulphurous, and heavy. They not only threw down the trees, but an
immense number of birds, hares, and other animals were killed."
Amid such throes and pangs Monte Nuovo was born, and the events of
that natal day suggest hesitation before we label any crater of the
Phlegraean fields with the word "extinct." It is granted that in the
course of geologic ages volcanic forces do expend themselves. The
British Isles, for instance, contain many dead volcanoes, once at
least as formidable as any in the world. But the exhaustion has been
the work of countless ages, and many generations of mankind will come
and go upon this planet before the coasts of Baiae and Misenum are as
safe as those of Cumberland.
While speaking of these terrors, I have been halting by the wayside at
a point, not far beyond the outskirts of Pozzuoli, where two roads
unite, the one going inland beneath the slope of Monte Barbaro, the
other following the outline of the curved shore on which Baiae stands.
The inland road is the one which goes to Cumae, and is entitled to
respect, if not to veneration, as being among the oldest of Italian
highways, the approach to the most ancient Greek settlement in Italy,
mother city of Pozzuoli and of Naples, not to mention the mysterious
Palaeopolis, whose very existence has been disputed by some scholars.
Some say it was more than ten centuries before Christ's birth that the
bold Greeks of Euboea came up this coast, where already their
kinsmen were known as traders, and having settled first on Ischia
moved to the opposite mainland, and built their acropolis upon a crag
of trachyte which overhung the sea. Their life was a long warfare.
More than once they owed salvation to the aid of their kinsmen from
Sicilian cities, yet they made their foundation a mighty power in
Italy. With one hand they held back the fierce Samnite mountaineers
who coveted their wealth, and gave out with the other more and more
freely that noble culture which has had no rival yet.
One must wonder why these strangers coming from the south passed by so
many gulfs and harbours shaped out of the enduring rock only to choose
a site for their new city at the foot of all these craters. It may be
that chance had its part in the matter; in some slight indication of
wind or wave they may have seen the guidance of a deity. Indeed, an
ancient legend says their ships were guided by Apollo, who sent a dove
flying over sea to lead them. But again, the fires of the district
were sacred in their eyes. The subterranean gods were near at hand,
and on the dark shore of Lake Avernus they recognised the path by
which Ulysses sought the shades. The mysteries of religion drew them
there, and the cave of the Cumaean sibyl became the most venerated
shrine in Italy. Lastly, one may perceive that the volcanic tract,
full of terrors for the Etruscan or Samnite mountaineer who looked
down upon its fires from afar, must have made attack difficult from
the land.
Greek cities, such as Cumae, studded the coast of southern Italy.
"Magna Graecia" they called the country; and Greek it was, in blood, in
art, and language. How powerful and how rich is better understood at
Paestum than it can be now at Cumae, where, with the single exception of
the Arco Felice, there remains no dignity of ruin, nothing but waste,
crumbling fragments, half buried in the turf of vineyards. Such
shattered scraps of masonry may aid a skilful archaeologist to imagine
what the city was; but in the path of untrained men they are nothing
but a hindrance, and anyone who has already in his mind a picture of
the greatness of Euboean Cumae had better leave it there without
attempt to verify its accuracy on the spot.
Observations similar to these apply justly to most of the remaining
sights in this much-vaunted district. The guides are perfectly
untrustworthy. They give high-sounding names to every broken wall, and
there is not a burrow in the ground which they cannot connect with
some name that has rung round the world. It is absolutely futile to
hope to recapture the magic with which Virgil clothed this country.
The cave of the Sibyl under the Acropolis of Cumae was destroyed by the
imperial general Narses when he besieged the Goths. The dark, wet
passage on the shore of Lake Avernus, to which the name of the Sibyl
is given by the guides, is probably part of an old subterranean road,
not devoid of interest, but is certainly not worth the discomfort of a
visit. The Lake of Avernus has lost its terrors. It is no longer dark
and menacing, and anyone may satisfy himself by a cursory inspection
that birds by no means shun it now.
The truth is that this region compares ill in attractions with that
upon the other side of Naples. In days not far distant, when brigands
still invested all the roads and byways of the Sorrento peninsula,
strangers found upon the Bay of Baiae almost the only excursion which
they could make in safety; and imbued as every traveller was with
classical tradition, they still discovered on this shore that fabled
beauty which it may once have possessed. There is now little to
suggest the aspect of the coast when Roman fashion turned it into the
most voluptuous abode of pleasure known in any age, and when the shore
was fringed with marble palaces whose immense beauty is certainly not
to be imagined by contemplating any one of the fragments that stud the
hillside, though it may perhaps be realised in some dim way by anyone
who will stand within the atrium of some great house at Pompeii, say
the house of Pansa, who will note the splendour of the vista through
the colonnaded peristyle, and will then remember that the Pompeiian
houses were not famed for beauty, while the palaces of Baiae were.
Baiae, like Cumae, is lost beyond recall. Fairyland is shattered into
fragments; and the guides who baptise them with ridiculous names know
no more than any one of us what it is they say. Really, since the
tragedy of that first great outbreak of Vesuvius did, as Goethe said,
create more pleasure for posterity than any other which has struck
mankind, one is disposed to wish that it had been more widespread. If
only the ashes had rained down a trifle harder at Misenum and at Baiae,
what noble Roman buildings might have survived unto this day,
conserved by the kind wisdom of the mountain! What matter if more of
that generation had been left houseless? It nearly happened, if
Pliny's letter is not exaggerated. "The ashes now began to fall on
us," he says, of his escape with his mother from the palace at
Misenum, "though in no great quantity. I turned my head, and observed
behind us a thick smoke which came rolling after us like a torrent. We
had scarce stepped out of the path when darkness overspread us, not
like the darkness of a cloudy night, nor that when there is no moon,
but that of a closed room when all the lights are out. Nothing was to
be heard but the shrieks of women, the screams of children, and the
cries of men, some calling for their children, others for their
parents, others for their husbands, and only distinguishing each other
by their voices.... At length a glimmering light appeared, which we
imagined to be rather the forerunner of an approaching burst of
flames, as in truth it was, than the return of day. However, the fire
fell at some distance from us. Then again we were immersed in thick
darkness, and a heavy shower of ashes rained upon us, which we were
obliged every now and then to shake off, otherwise we should have been
crushed and buried in the heap...." It is an awful tale. Anyone can
see how nearly all this region escaped the fate of Pompeii, and how
narrowly the modern world lost a greater joy than that of
contemplating the city by the Sarno.
[Illustration: CASTLE OF BAIAE]
However, it did not happen so, and there is comparatively little
satisfaction in describing all the melancholy scraps of what was
marvellously beautiful. I have nothing to say about them which is
not said as fully in the guide-books. There is, however, something
which more piques my interest in the narrow tongue of land parting the
Lucrine Lake from the sea. There is, or was, a causeway here so
ancient that even the Greeks, who settled at Cumae so many centuries
before our era, did not know who built it; and being in the dark about
the matter, put down the construction to no less a person than the god
Hercules, who made it, they declared, for the passage of the oxen
which he had taken from Geryon, the monster whom he slew in Gades. It
was no small work, even for Hercules. The dam was eight stadia long,
nearly a mile, made of large stone slabs laid with such skill that
they withstood the sea for many centuries. Who could have been the
builders of this dam in days so ancient that even the Greek settlers
did not know its origin? Rome was not in those days. There were
factories and traders on the coast,--Phoenicians perhaps. But why
guess about a question so impossible to solve? The curiosity of the
thing is worth noting; for the age of civilisation on these coasts is
very great.
At this spot beside the Lucrine Lake, where the sea is lapping slowly,
almost stealthily, on the one hand, and the diminished waters of the
lake lie still and reedy on the other, one memory, more than any
other, haunts my mind. It cannot have been far from this very spot,
certainly in sight of it, that there stood in old Roman days the villa
of the Empress Agrippina, mother of the Emperor Nero, and it was at
Baiae, lying just across the blue curved bay, that he planned her
murder, as soon as he discovered that she loved power, like himself,
and stood in the way of certain schemes on which he set great store.
The fleet which lay at Capo Miseno, the great naval station of those
days, was commanded by one Anicetus, a freedman, who, being of an
ingenious mechanical turn of mind, devised a ship of a sort likely to
prove useful to any tyrant anxious to speed his friends into the
nether world without suspicion. It had much the same aspect as other
ships when viewed from without; but a careful observer of its inward
parts might notice that the usual tight boltings were replaced by
movable ones, which could be shot back at will, so that on a given
signal the whole ship would fall to pieces. This pretty toy was of
course not designed to make long voyages--it was enough if it would
reach deep water.
Nero was delighted. He saw now how to avoid all scandal. The Empress
was at that moment on the sea, homeward bound from Antium, and
designed to land at Bauli, which lay near Baiae on the bay. The ship
was prepared, the bolts were shot, and the pretty pinnace lay waiting
on the beach at Bauli when the Empress disembarked. And there too was
Nero, come from Baiae on purpose to pay duty to his mother and invite
her to spend the Feast of Minerva with him at Baiae, whither he hoped
she would cross over in the boat which he had had the pleasure of
fitting up with the splendour which was proper to her rank.
Agrippina knew her son, and was suspicious. She would go to Baiae, but
preferred to follow the road in a litter. That night, however, when
the festivities at Baiae were over, her fears vanished. Nero had been
affectionate and dutiful. He had assured her of his love. It would be
churlish to refuse to enter the boat which he had fitted out for her,
and which having been brought over from Bauli now lay waiting for her
on the sands. It was a bright night, brilliant with stars. The bay
must have looked incomparably peaceful and lovely. On the shore there
were crowds of bathers, all the fashionable world of Rome, drawn
thither by the presence of the Emperor, and attracted out by the
beauty of the night. At such a time and place nothing surely could be
planned against her. She went on board with her attendants. The rowers
put off from land. They had gone but a little way when the canopy
under which Agrippina lay crashed down on her and killed one of her
waiting women. A moment's examination showed that it had been weighted
with pigs of lead. Almost at the same moment the murderers on board
withdrew the bolts. The machinery, however, refused to act. The planks
still held together; and the sailors despairing of their bloodmoney,
rushed to the side of the ship and tried to capsize it. They succeeded
so far as to throw the Empress and her attendants into the sea.
Agrippina retained sufficient presence of mind to lie silent on the
water, supporting herself as best she could, while the sailors
thrashed the sea with oars, hoping thus to make an end of their
victim, and one poor girl who thought to save herself by crying out
that she was the Empress had her brains beaten out for her pains. At
last the shore boats, whose owners could not know that they were
interrupting the Emperor's dearest wish, arrived upon the scene,
picked up the Empress, and carried her to her villa on this Lucrine
lake.
It would have been wiser to flee to a greater distance, if indeed
there was safety in any Roman territory for the mother of the Emperor
when he desired to slay her. That night, as she lay bruised and weak,
deserted by her attendants, a band of murderers rushed in, headed by
Anicetus, who thus redeemed his credit with his master when his more
ingenious scheme had failed. "Strike the womb that bore this monster!"
cried the Empress, and so died.
"Then," says Merivale, from whose most vivid story this is but an
outline, "began the torments which never ceased to gnaw the heart
strings of the matricide. Agrippina's spectre flitted before him....
The trumpet heard at her midnight obsequies still blared with ghostly
music from the hill of Misenum."