Ischia is a small island measuring about five miles from east to west, and three miles from north to south. There were such terrific volcanic eruptions on this island long before the Christian Era, that several Greek colonies were forced to abandon it. A colony established long afterwards, about 380 B. C., by the king of Syracuse also had to depart. Strabo, the Grecian geographer (born about 63 B. C.), states that, according to tradition, terrific earthquakes occurred on the island a little before his time, and its principal mountain threw out large quantities of molten rock, which flowed into the sea. At the time of this eruption there were earthquake waves in the sea, the waters of which slowly receded, leaving large portions of the bottom uncovered, and rushing, afterwards, violently over the land, caused great destruction. It was during this disturbance, so Strabo asserts, that the island of Procida was formed by being violently torn from Ischia. [Illustration: FIG. 13. THE VOLCANIC DISTRICT AROUND VESUVIUS] The Phlegræan Fields was a name given by the ancients to some of the lowlands in the neighborhood of Naples; they were believed to be under the special protection of the Roman gods. When the frequent earthquake shocks shook these fields, the Roman people believed that conflicts were taking place between their gods and slumbering giants confined in the regions below the surface. It is more than probable that Mt. Vesuvius has always been the centre of these volcanic disturbances. Long before the Christian Era, however, Vesuvius, or Somma, the name given to the old crater that then occupied the summit of the mountain, had been an extinct crater. Indeed, it had been so quiet that the people who lived on its slopes did not appear to know they were living on the slopes of a slumbering volcano. Their knowledge of volcanic mountains must have been very limited, for this mountain with the huge pit at its summit had all the appearance of a volcanic crater. When they climbed to the top of the mountain, which, of course, they frequently did to look after the vineyards they were cultivating on the slopes, and looked down into the deep pit from the rocks on its edge, they could see at the bottom of a great central pit three miles in diameter, a lake, with room here and there to enable one to walk along its borders. The walls of the precipice were covered with luxuriant vines.