452 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



A SECOND CENTURY CRITICISM OF VIRGIL'S ETNA. 



By Dr. CHARLES R. EASTMAN, 



HARVARD UNIVERSITY. 



CHIEF amongst natural phenomena to impose upon the imagina- 

 tion and challenge the understanding of classic authors was vul- 

 canism in its direct and associate manifestations. Speculations as to 

 the causes of earthquakes have at least as remote an antiquity as Thales 

 and Pythagoras, of the sixth century B. C, and the relation between 

 volcanic activity and proximity to the sea was clearly perceived in the 

 time of Aristotle. Descriptions of Etna and Vesuvius have ever been 

 a favorite theme for writers of both prose and poetry, the younger 

 Seneca, in fact, complaining in one of his epistles that the topic had 

 become trite and threadbare : " for this commonplace of poetry," as he 

 calls it, " was fearlessly attempted again by Cornelius Severus even 

 after it had been handled by Ovid, and more perfectly by Virgil." 



Pindar's beautiful first Pythian ode, in honor of Hiero, has pre- 

 served for us not only the earliest, but at the same time one of the most 

 graphic and altogether accurate accounts of Etna in eruption, so that 

 it is scarcely dubitable that the poet was an eye-witness of the outburst 

 whereof he speaks. The latter is in that case to be identified with the 

 second eruption mentioned by Thucydides, the date of which is referred 

 to the year 475 B. C. The odist's few masterly lines depict very clearly 

 the principal features of an active volcano, and it is to be noted that 

 some of them, such as the emission of smoke by day and flames by 

 night, were recognized as typical characteristics by later observers and 

 copyists, of whom iEschylus was the first. 



Otherwise, however, was the case with Virgil, who, whether spec- 

 tator or not of the disturbances which shook Etna shortly before the 

 Christian era, drew more upon his imagination than upon observed 

 facts for the portrayal given by him in the iEneid. Animated and 

 suggestive as is the Latin singer's description of Etna, it lacks the 

 verisimilitude of Pindar's, and this defect has given rise to the criti- 

 cism of which we are about to speak. 



The first to point out the lesser accuracy of Virgil's verse, as com- 

 pared with Pindar's, was a philosopher of Hadrian's time, named Favo- 

 rinus or Phavorinus, all of whose writings are lost. This criticism 

 of the Virgilian Etna is preserved along with a host of interesting 

 narrations in that curious scrap-book of Aulus Gellius, Nodes Atticce, 



