Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 11, 2025
Nowhere was the state of political relations more inviting for such enterprises than in Sicily. Already the Campanian captains who came to Sicily during the Peloponnesian war had insinuated themselves in this way into Entella and Aetna.
Some of them had a hundred arms, others breathed out fire. They were finally subdued and buried alive under Mount Aetna, where they still sometimes struggle to get loose, and shake the whole island with earthquakes. Their breath comes up through the mountain, and is what men call the eruption of the volcano.
Naxos in its turn sent out colonists, who built the cities of Leontini and Catana, the former on an inland site, commanding the great plain which extends southwards from Aetna, the latter on the coast, in a line with the centre of the same plain. We have now to enumerate the principal Dorian cities.
As the poem further shows some resemblances to an essay on Aetna, published by Seneca himself, the conclusion is almost irresistible that Lucilius is its author. Though by no means equal to the reputation it once had, the poem is not without merit.
His wife is said to have assisted in the composition of the poem, but in what part of it her talents fitted her to succeed we cannot even conjecture. To Nero's reign are probably to be referred the seven eclogues of T. CALPURNIUS SICULUS, and the poem on Aetna, long attributed to Virgil.
On the slopes of Mount Aetna dwelt, they thought, hideous, one-eyed giants, the Cyclops, who fed their fierce appetites with the quivering flesh of many captives. Later these colonists entered the bay and founded the "new city," or Neapolis, which we call Naples. Finally there were so many Greek cities in southern Italy that it was named "Great Greece."
It speaks well for his love of Rome that despite these influences it was he who produced the most thoroughly nationalistic epic ever written. The first fruit of Vergil's studies in evolutionary science at Naples was the Aetna, if indeed the poem be his. The problem of the authorship has been patiently studied, and the arguments for authenticity concisely summarized by Vessereau make a strong case.
One of them was Enceladus, who lay bound under Aetna; and one, Atlas, was made to stand and bear up the weight of the sky on his giant shoulders. Zeus was left King of gods and men. Like any young ruler, he was eager to work great changes with his new power. Among other plans, he proposed to destroy the race of men then living, and to replace it with some new order of creatures.
The kind of sponge-stone taken from this region is not produced everywhere else, but only about Aetna and among the hills of Mysia which the Greeks call the "Burnt District," and in other places of the same peculiar nature.
"The greater part of the nights was employed at it," says Madame de Stael, at that time Mdlle. do Launay, a person of much wit, half lady's maid, half reader to the duchess. "The huge volumes, heaped up on her bed like mountains overwhelming her, caused her," she used to say, "to look, making due allowances, like Enceladus, buried under Mount AEtna.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking