It Appears Rather To Have
Been Caused By The Showers Of Ashes And Ecroulement Of The Mountain,
Which Covered It Up And Buried It For Ever From The Sight Of Day.
The first
place our guide took us to see was a superb Amphitheatre about half as
large as the Coliseum:
The arena and seats are perfect, and all the
interior is perfectly cleared out: so are the dens where the wild beasts
were kept; so that you look down into this amphitheatre as into a vast
basin standing on its brink, which is on a level with the rest of the
ground around it, and by means of the seats and passages you may descend
into the arena. This Amphitheatre is at a short distance from the rest of
the town. What is at present discovered of this city consists of a long
street with several off-sets of streets issuing from it: a temple, two
theatres, a praetorium, a large barrack, and a peculiarly large house or
villa belonging probably to some eminent person, but no doubt when the
excavation shall be recommenced many more streets will be discovered, as
from the circumstance of there being an amphitheatre, two other theatres
and a number of sepulchral monuments outside the gates, it must have been a
city of great consequence. Most of the houses seem to have had two stories;
the roofs fell in of course by the act of excavation, but the columns
remain entire. I observe that the general style of building in Pompeii in
most of the houses is as follows:
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