“Clodius the Prætor, with three thousand men, besieged them in a mountain, having but one narrow and difficult passage, which Clodius kept guarded; all the rest was encompassed with broken and slippery precipices, but upon the top grew a great many wild vines: they cast down as many of these boughs as they had need of, and twisted them into ladders long enough to reach from thence to the bottom, by which, without any danger, all got down save one, who stayed behind to throw them their arms, after which he saved himself with the rest.” A dozen learned statements of a scientific nature as to the ancient appearance and slumbering condition of the Mountain could not impress our imagination more vividly with its subsequent natural changes than the account of this episode of Spartacus and his handful of rebels, beleaguered by Clodius within the very crater of the volcano. We can see the Mountain in the last years of the Roman Republic before us, with its truncated cone encircled by a low rampart of rock half hidden by wild vine, ivy, eglantine, honeysuckle and all the creeping plants whose tough trailing stems enabled the besieged gladiators to effect their escape from the snare into which they had unwittingly fallen. We can understand from this event how utterly remote was the idea of any upheaval of nature to the dwellers on these shores, whose ancestors remembered the crest of the mountain as the scene of a military operation. The first warning of a coming eruption after unnumbered centuries of quiet was given by a series of earthquakes which did an immense amount of damage at Herculaneum and Pompeii; yet in a district which had from time immemorial been subject to similar convulsions of nature, the shocks, though unusually distressing and destructive to life and property, were evidently unconnected in the popular mind with their true cause: the reawakening to life of the mountain overhead. The mischief done by the earthquakes was accordingly repaired as quickly as possible, and the normal course of life was resumed until the terrific and wholly unexpected outbreak of August 24th 79, during the reign of the Emperor Titus. Of this, the first recorded eruption of Vesuvius, we are exceptionally fortunate in possessing the testimony of a credible eye-witness, who was no less a personage than Caius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, better known to the modern world as Pliny the Younger, who wrote two lengthy letters to Tacitus on the subject of this event, the first describing the fate of his uncle, the Elder Pliny, most eminent of Roman naturalists, who perished during this period of terror; and the second containing a more detailed account of the eruption itself. For it so happened—luckily for posterity—that at the time of this sudden outburst of Mons Summanus, the Elder Pliny was in command of the Roman fleet at Misenum on the Bay of Naples, where his young nephew (who was also his adopted son) was living with his mother in a villa.