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Updated: June 4, 2025
These statues represented Hercules and Cleopatra, and the theatre proved to be that of the long-lost city of Herculaneum. The site of Pompeii was not discovered until forty years afterward, but work there proved far easier than at Herculaneum, and more progress was made in bringing it back to the light of day.
Consequently the middle classes and many cities grew rich, especially the cities of the Campania, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Naples, Pozzuoli, through which passed all the trade between Italy and Egypt. In addition, Italy found an abundant source of income in the exportation of wine and oil.
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 object of such committees is to do for the good of mankind what a single nation is powerless or unwilling to do. Your behaviour at Herculaneum is identical with that of the Turks at Nineveh. The system adopted should likewise be the same. I shall never see that consummation.
At frequent intervals rose square towers, whose summits broke in picturesque rudeness the regular line of the wall, and contrasted well with the modern buildings gleaming whitely by. The curving road, which in that direction leads from Pompeii to Herculaneum, wound out of sight amidst hanging vines, above which frowned the sullen majesty of Vesuvius.
But much of the city itself has yet hardly been touched since the days when it was destroyed in the reign of Titus, so that far below the squalid lanes of Portici and Resina there must still exist acres upon acres of undisturbed buildings, public and private, many of them perhaps filled with priceless works of Greek and Roman art, for Herculaneum, unlike Pompeii, was never tampered with by the ancients themselves, for the coating of volcanic mud, which filled the whole area of the city, made impracticable a systematic searching of its ruins by the despoiled citizens.
In succeeding eruptions much lava was poured out; and in A. D. 472, ashes were cast over a great part of Europe, so that much fear was caused at Constantinople. The buried cities were more and more covered up, and it was not until about A. D. 1700 that, as above stated, the city of Herculaneum was discovered, the peasants of the vicinity being in the habit of extracting marble from its ruins.
No antiquarian, unfolding with trembling hand the calcined leaves of an Herculaneum manuscript, and hoping to discover some lost lines of the Aeneis in Virgil's own autograph, or at least some unutterable abomination of Petronius or Martial, happily elucidatory of the mysteries of the Spintriae, or the orgies of the Phallic worshipers, ever pored with more luckless diligence, or shook a head of more hopeless despondency over his task.
Pompeii and Herculaneum were not great cities in the first place, and in the second, they were completely covered, smothered as it were, with the ashes and molten lava of the adjoining volcano, and nearly all of their inhabitants perished.
About 17OO years ago, during the reign of the Roman Emperor Titus, there happened a terrible eruption of Mount Vesuvius; and a large city called Herculaneum, which was situated at about four miles' distance from the volcano, was overwhelmed by the streams of lava which poured into it, filled up the streets, and quickly covered over the tops of the houses, so that the whole was no more visible.
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