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of Edinburgh, Session 1881-82. 
find? The historian was about nineteen years of age when the 
catastrophe took place, and he doubtless intended to leave us a full 
and detailed record of the event. This intention, however, was not 
carried out. In the prefatory chapter of his Histories , which were 
meant to embrace a period of some one-and-twenty years, beginning 
with the accession of Galba in a.d. 68, our author describes this era 
as one which, in the conversational language of our day, might be 
described as abounding in sensational events ( opimum casibus). The 
assassinations, the wars civil and foreign, with other startling 
casualties, are briefly summed up ; and amidst them we come upon 
the following sentence, — “ Haustx aut obrutx urbes foecundissima 
Co.mpanix ora ” (lib. i. cap. 2). 
My own rendering of these words would be as follows : — Cities 
in the most fertile district of Campania were engulfed or overwhelmed.” 
The date is left uncertain ; and if I might venture for a moment to 
regard Vesuvius in the light of a culprit, I can see nothing in the 
language of Tacitus, as it has come down to us, to connect the accused 
with the destruction of the unnamed cities to which the historian 
refers. I submit that the term obrutx (overwhelmed) might 
naturally be supposed to indicate an inundation or a landslip. The 
preceding participle is somewhat less clear. Haurio primarily means 
to draw ; and as the water thus obtained from a well, or the wine 
from a cask, may be drunk, the verb acquires in a secondary sense 
the significations to drink in , to imbibe , to engidf, or swallow up. 
Thence it may be applied to the effect of an earthquake, and we find 
it so employed in the works of the elder Pliny: U hauriri urbes terrx 
hiatibus , that cities were swallowed up by gapings of the earth.” 
Pompeii had suffered terribly from an earthquake in a.d. 63. This 
we learn from an earlier work of Tacitus, the Annals (xv. 22) : — “A 
notable city of Campania, Pompeii, was to a great extent overthrown 
by an earthquake. Motu terrx celebre Campanix oppidum Pompeii 
magnd ex parte proruit.” Indeed Seneca, though dating the event 
one year later, heard that it had settled down ( desedisse ), and, I 
presume, actually disappeared. This was an exaggeration ; but 
what had almost happened, in a.d. 63, might really have come to 
pass some sixteen years later. 
I am bound to confess that very high authority appears to be against 
me as regards the evidence of Tacitus. That Lipsius, in his notes 
