No. V. — Temple of Jupiter Serapis. -26T 



the former, if indeed no earlier catastrophe, of which we are 

 not informed, was the agent ; for, in the first place, the crater of 

 the Solfatara is only one-third of the distance of that of Monte 

 Nuovo from Pozzuoli ; and besides it is hardly to be presumed, 

 that had this temple existed in all the magnitude and splen- 

 dour in which it was dug out, we should have received no 

 tradition from a period less than three centuries since, when 

 the Monte Nuovo was formed, when the arts, and the study 

 of antiquities especially, were rapidly rising to vigour from the 

 deep oblivion of the middle ages. This seems impossible. We 

 may therefore more naturally refer the event to the obscure 

 and barbarous period of the twelfth century. 



A question, has, however, arisen as to whether no portion of 

 the edifice remaining unburied excited the curiosity of anti- 

 quaries previous to its disinterment in the middle of the last 

 century ; and I am decidedly of opinion that the upper portion 

 of the three great pillars, which now form the most striking 

 features of the ruins, were never entirely covered. That they 

 were not sooner excavated can be considered a matter of no 

 surprise in a country so full of those " fragments, " not na- 

 tural, but symptomatic of civilization and of refinement " of 

 an earlier world," that satiety blunts the keenness of research. 

 This opinion has, however, been strongly opposed by the 

 Italian geologist Pini, in one of his papers, * who, though he 

 admits that Capaccio and Mazzella mention three pillars which 

 they supposed to belong to the temple of Neptune, but might 

 be those of the temple of Serapis, which lies at the foot of an 

 eminence on which the former building stood, adopts the opi- 

 nion, that these were some other columns, since they are spoken 

 of by Ferrante Loffredo in 1570, an attentive and diligent 

 observer, as having fallen from the temple of Neptune. But 

 if Loffredo speaks of the same columns, it is easy to see from 

 the relative situation of the buildings just mentioned, how he 

 might have fancied them to have come from the higher site. 

 But my authority is more conclusive than any description, 

 being a map in another work by Capaccio,-f" in which the ob- 



* Memorie di Matematica e di Fisica delta Socieid Italiana deUe Scienze, 

 4.to, torn ix. p. 211. 



t Pini quotes the *' Antiguiiates et Historia CampanicE." This is the 

 work on Pozzuoli. 



