78 Rev. Mr Williams on the Force of the prefix Ve or Vce 



down upon and almost overshadowed their settlements of Nea- 

 polis, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae. The Greeks were far 

 more accurate observers of nature than the Romans. Pliny the 

 elder, though a dweller in the immediate neighbourhood of Ve- 

 suvius, and destined to perish under its renewed activity, makes 

 no further mention of this mountain in his great work, than to 

 say that it looks down upon these cities, and that it was celebrated 

 for a certain grape. But Strabo, although only a passing tra- 

 veller, has given us a graphic description of its summit, " as being 

 a barren spot, surrounded on all sides by a most fertile district, 

 having a cinderous appearance, and caverns burnt out in the rocks, 

 so that it might be safely inferred that the place had formerly 

 been an active volcano, and contained fiery craters." For such 

 a summit, what could have been a happier epithet than Vesbius, 

 parum extinctus, which must have particularly suited its state on 

 the first arrival of the Greeks, ten centuries before the famous 

 eruption in A. D. 79 ? As to the word itself, we find it written 

 Vesevus, Vesuvius, Vesvius, and Vesbius ; Greek, Ovso-voviov ogog, 

 and Bzefiiog. Lucretius seems to have softened the pronuncia- 

 tion into Vesevus, and Virgil followed him. But it is to be re- 

 marked, that all the poets who call it Vesbius or Vesvius, wrote 

 after the eruption, when public attention had been called to it, 

 and when its local name was likely to be better ascertained. 

 Nor would I willingly believe, that servile imitators of Virgil, 

 like Sinus Italicus # and Statius f, would have ventured on a 

 new form of a word already fixed by the authority of the two 

 great national poets, had it not been the local and original name. 



* " Sic ubi vi caeca tandem devictus ad astra 

 Evomuit pastos per saecula Vesbius ignes. 1 ' 



Lib. xvii. ver. 597. 



f " Chalcidis 



Littoribus fractas ubi Vesbius erigit iras." 



Silv . lib. iv. carm. 4. ver. 79. 



