of Edinburgh, Session 1881-82. 
437 
George Cornewall Lewis as (at any rate in Britain) the most able and 
consistent representative. He would fain have thrown aside all 
inquiries into the earlier periods of Roman history, and have begun 
with the war of Pyrrhus against Rome in b.c. 280. It is right to 
say that, with Polybius, Lewis fully granted a man’s competency to 
record events which happened at least twenty years before his birth, 
on the ground that so many of us have received information from 
our grandfathers, or from persons of their generation, though few of 
us have any distinct personal recollections of our great-grandfathers.* 
This theory is so simple, so trenchant as to possess attractions for 
many minds ; and I must own to having been much impressed by it, 
when Lewis’ two volumes on The Credibility of Early Roman History 
first appeared in 1855. But it does not now, I fancy, represent a 
winning cause ; and I have come to regard it as decidedly too rigid 
and narrow. Accordingly, I pass onward. 
Seventy -six years after this great calamity, there was born at Nice, 
in Bithynia, one who in after life thought himself called upon by a 
dream to write the history of the Romans of his time, Dion Cassius. 
He did not begin to collect materials until 122 years after the fall of 
Pompeii, and it must have been 140 years after (four times the most 
liberal allowance for contemporary evidence) that he published his 
work. 
Dion Cassius comes before us with many drawbacks. Not merely 
does he write long after the event, but he informs us that just before 
the outburst giants (or figures like the pictures of giants) stalked on 
the mountain, were seen in the air, and visited the neighbouring 
districts by day and night ; that not only droughts, earthquakes, and 
rumblings preceded the eruption, with roarings of sea and sky, but 
that also these gigantic visions were seen amidst the smoke, and the 
sound of trumpets was heard. A plague burst upon man and beast ; 
birds and fishes also perished ; the ashes flew as far as Rome, and 
were the cause of the pestilence which undoubtedly did prevail ; and 
further, “it buried two entire cities, Herculaneum and Pompeii, 
while their inhabitants were sitting in the theatre.” 
Here then at last, when a hundred and forty years have passed away, 
after all these hints, after assertions of a vague and general character, 
* Lewis would extend this term beyond Polybius. I should be inclined to 
go as far as thirty-five years. 
