of Edinburgh , Session 1881-82. 
427 
Reiske assigns this latter treatise, on reasonable grounds of pro- 
bability, to a.d. 80-90, when the author was between 30 and 40. 
Plutarch has written strongly against superstition. I suspect that 
the Epicureans of his day must have considered many of his treatises, 
and these two among them, to be replete with superstition. It will 
be time for us to find fault with his inconsistency, when we have 
quite agreed among ourselves where we draw the line of demarcation 
between true religion and superstition. 
In both of these essays Plutarch makes reference to the subject now 
before us. As a Greek, though a travelled Greek, he calls the 
districts by the names most familiar to him, viz., the parts about 
Cume and Dicsearchia. This need not surprise us. We say of such 
an one that he is a native of Germany, and the French tell us that he 
comes from Allemagne, — neither pausing to reflect that the gentleman 
would himself call his native country Deutschland. 
Plutarch’s reference in the more elaborate and better known 
treatise, the one on Divine Chastisements, is of the briefest. He 
relates that a man heard the voice of a Sibyl in the moon singing 
certain prophecies, among which was that concerning Mount Vesuvius 
and Dicsearchia. But in the other treatise, which is in the form of 
a dialogue, he makes one of the speakers claim it as a proof of the 
real prophetic power of the Sibyl, that she had distinctly foretold 
the coming catastrophe. His words translated run thus ' “ These 
recent and strange calamities of the region around Cume and 
Dicsearchia, hymned long ago and sung in the Sibylline verses, 
time, as if paying a debt, has issued forth ; outbursts of mountain 
fire, seethings of ocean, heavings up of rocks and of burning masses 
by the violence of the wind, and withal a destruction of so many and 
so great cities , that men, who subsequently came to the spot, were 
reduced to a state of uncertainty and ignorance respecting their own 
dwelling-place, as the region was in a state of entire confusion. The 
occurrence of such events is difficult to credit ; prediction of them 
could not possibly have been made without divine assistance.” 
3. Thus far Plutarch. His testimony, important and weighty as 
it is, may, X fancy, be considered less cogent than that of the next 
witness I have to summon, namely, the poet Statius. Of the life of 
this writer we are exceedingly ignorant. He was a native of Neapolis, 
probably somewhat senior to the younger Pliny, who tells us that he 
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