We
Alighted To Take A Dejeuner A La Fourchette At Puzzuoli, And Then Went To
Visit The Temple Of Jupiter Serapis, Which Is A Vast Edifice And Tho' In
Ruins Very Imposing.
On wandering thro' the enceinte of this famous temple,
I thought of Apollonius of Tyana and his sudden appearance
To his friend
Damis at the porch of this very temple, when he escaped from the fangs of
Domitian and when it was believed that, by means of magic art, he had been
able at once to transport himself from the Praetorium at Rome to Puteoli.
As I said before, the bay included by cape Misenus and Puzzuoli is what is
called Baiae. The land is low and marshy from Puzzuoli to a little beyond
the lake Avernus; but from Monte Nuovo it begins to rise and form high
cliffs nearly all way to Cape Misenus. It was on these high cliffs that the
opulent Romans built their villas and they must have been as much crowded
together as the villas at Ramsgate and Broadstairs. We embarked in a boat
at Puzzuoli to cross over to Baiae (i.e., the place where the villas
begin), but we stopped on our way thither at a landing place nearly in the
centre of the bay in order to visit the lake Avernus and the Cave of the
Cumaean Sybil, described by Virgil, as the entrance into the realm of
Pluto. The lake Avernus, in spite of its being invested by the poets with
all that is terrible in the mythology as a river of Hell, looks very like
any other lake, and tho' it is impregnated with sulphur, and emits a most
unpleasant smell, birds do not drop down dead on flying over it as
formerly. The ground about it is marshy and unwholesome. The silence and
melancholy appearance of this lake and its environing groves of wood are
not calculated to inspire exhilarating ideas. Full of classic souvenirs we
went to descend into the Cave of the Sybil, and as we descended I could not
refrain from repeating aloud Virgil's lines:
Di quibus imperium est animarum umbrasque silentes,[98] etc.
This descent really is fitted to give one an idea of the descent to the
shades below, and what added to the illusion was that when we arrived at
the bottom of the descent and just at the entrance of the cave where the
Sybil held her oracles, we discovered four fierce looking fellows with
lighted torches in their hands standing at the entrance. My friend cried
out Voila les Furies, and these proved to be our boatmen who, while we
were contemplating the bolge d'Averno, had run on before to provide
torches to shew us the interior of the grotto of the Sybil. As this grotto
is nearly knee-deep filled with water we got on the backs of the boatmen to
enter it. It is about twenty-five feet long, fifteen broad and the height
about thirteen feet.
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