Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T05:39:19.364Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

XIX.—The City of Cumæ, and the recent Excavations there

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2012

Arthur Ashpitel Esq.
Get access

Extract

There is scarcely a district in the world endowed with such singular beauty, and possessing such deep points of interest, as that extending about ten or twelve miles westward from Naples. A sky of such brilliancy as only Italy can shew; a sea of colours like the transparent hues of the sapphire and emerald; mountains on land and mountainous islands rising from the sea twice and thrice the height of those in Wales, and crowned with snow for a third of the year. The air of extraordinary clearness and purity, and redolent with the odours of the myrtle, orange, and citron. The earth covered with rich crops of maize, the vine hanging in a cordage of festoons from tree to tree, huge groves of figs and olives twisted in every fantastic form, and interspersed with the feathery palm, forests of pine, leccio, and cypress, all form a scene of beauty difficult to describe. But how is the interest heightened when we reflect on the history of the spot! We are in the scene so exquisitely described by Virgil in the Æneid. Here are the Isles of the Sirens and of Circe, the Tomb of Misenus, the Grotto of the Sibyl, the mysterious River Cocytus, the Lake Avernus, and the Elysian Fields. Here, too, the great poet is supposed to have been interred. The heights are crowned with the remains of sumptuous villas, where Caesar, Crassus, Pompey, Lucullus, and Augustus feasted, and where Cicero penned his best philosophical works.

Type
Research Article
Information
Archaeologia , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , 1858 , pp. 316 - 334
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1858

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

page 317 note a Horat. Epist. i. 1. 83.

page 317 note b Horat. Carm. i. 20, 10; ii. 3, 8. See also Pliny, xiv. 6, 8.

page 317 note c Juven. Sat. iii. 2.

page 317 note d Statius, Sylv. iv. 3, 65.

page 317 note e The best account of these eruptions is given by Simone Porzio, a physician, in a tract, called “De Conflagratione Agri Puteolani,” afterwards reprinted in his collected works. There are also three MSS. in the collection presented to the British Museum by Sir William Hamilton, written by Francisco di Nero, Marcantonio dei Falconi, and Pietro di Toledo.

page 318 note a See paper by Sir Edmund Head, read at the Society, Dec. 10, 1857, hereafter printed.

page 318 note b Sinus Caietanus.

page 318 note c Supposed to be the “Literna Palus ” of Silius Italicus, vii. 278 (though the passage is vague), and of Statius, Sylv. iv. 3, 66, immediately following the passage supra.

page 318 note d There is little doubt, from Pliny, iii. 9, that the Lago Fusaro must be the Palus Acherusia, as he says the Acherusian Marsh, or Lake, is near Cumæ.

page 318 note e Now called “La Rocca di Cuma.”

page 318 note f Æneid, vi. 41.

page 320 note a Cicero ad Atticum, xvi. 5.

page 320 note b See vignette, p. 316.

page 320 note c These exactly resemble the interments found near York in 1768 by Dr. Burton, and given in the Archæologia, vol. II. p. 177, with this exception, that the sloping tiles at Cumæ are quite straight on the face, and not curved or bent, as those described above. The sizes are just the same. The Italians still call such tiles tegola, and the ridge-tiles imbrice—the old Roman tegula and imbrex.

page 321 note a See vignette at the end of this paper, p. 334.

page 322 note a Pliny, xxxv. 2. The passage is very curious, and, though often cited, has hardly ever been given at length. After, describing a great number of ways of making likenesses, as pictures, bronzes, &c. he says, “It was otherwise with our ancestors of those things which we see in their halls (apud majores in atriis); they are not statues (signa) of foreign artists, nor bronze, nor marble, but their faces pressed in wax are disposed in separate closets (singulis armariis), so that they may be images which may accompany the funerals of those of gentle blood” (gentilitia funera). We have no exact word in English to express “gens:” it is more analogous to the Scotch word “clan” than any phrase we have.

page 322 note b Polybius, Hist. vi. 51. He gives a long account of the Roman funerals and the images carried there in procession, and an eloquent appeal to the feelings of those who witness the procession of the representation of departed greatness. He says, “When they have buried them, and have performed all the rites, they place the images of the departed in the most conspicuous parts of the houses, surrounding them with small wooden shrines” ξυλινα ναϊδια.

page 323 note a We should gather from the passage in Pliny, that sometimes the “stemmata” or pedigrees were placed on or under the “imagines.”

page 323 note b Juvenal, viii. 18, x. 58; Tacitus, Annal. vi. 2, alluding to the fall of Sejanus.

page 324 note a There are many other authorities among classic writers.

page 324 note b Juvenal, Satir. i. 102.

page 325 note a Plut. in Vita Cic.; Dion Cass. 46.

page 328 note a See section, page 327.

page 329 note a See vignette at the end of this paper.

page 329 note b See vignette, page 331.

page 332 note a The bronze helmet of an Etruscan form, dedicated by Hiero to Jupiter Olympius, from the spoils of the battle off Cumse, was found at Olympia, and is now preserved in the British Museum. See Rose, Inscriptiones Græcæ, p. 66.

page 332 note b The first.

page 333 note a Vell. Pater, i. 4. Cumanos Osca mutavit vicinia.

page 333 note b I have stated that the devices on this pottery seem to betoken an Eastern origin, and accordingly we find vases with very similar designs near Corinth, and in other parts of Greece proper, the Greek Islands and even in Asia Minor itself. They also occur not unfrequently at Nola, which I have already mentioned as probably a colony from Cumæ.