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Claudia had been enjoying an unusually gay round of excitement while at Baiæ, and she had but just come up to Præneste, to recover herself after the exertions of a score of fashionable suppers, excursions on the Lucrine Lake, and the attendant exhausting amusements. When her brother-in-law entered the room, she raised her carefully tinted eyebrows, and observed with great languor:
'Here, at my right hand, reclines my estimable comrade of a thousand former feasts, Furius Balburius Placidus, who, when we sailed on the Lucrine Lake, was wont to complain of intolerable hardship if a fly settled on the gilded folds of his umbrella; who languished for a land of Cimmerian darkness if a sunbeam penetrated the silken awnings of his garden-terrace; and who now wrangles for a mouthful of horseflesh with the meanest of his slaves, and would exchange the richest of his country villas for a basket of dirty bread!
This eruption took place near the town of Puzzuoli, a place which was then the seat of a university, the people of which have left us records of the accident. The outbreak which formed Monte Nuovo was slight but very characteristic. It occurred in and beside a circular pool known as the Lucrine Lake, itself an ancient crater.
This region, which is still shaky from fires bubbling under the thin crust, through which here and there the sulphurous vapor breaks out, is one of the most sacred in the ancient world. Here are the Lucrine Lake, the Elysian Fields, the cave of the Cumean Sibyl, and the Lake Avernus.
But she outraged the notions and sentiments of the people more by her unfeminine usurpation of public honors, than by her cruelty or her dissoluteness. She seated herself by the side of the emperor in military festivals. She sat by him at a sea-fight on the Lucrine Lake, clothed in a soldier’s cloak.
Here was the haunt of the sybarites, whose gay barks skimmed the shallow waters of the Lucrine lake; and not far off slumbered in its volcanic hollow that other lake, Avernus, renowned in legend and poetry, through whose caverns, fable had it, lay the entrance to the world of the dead.
A portion of the base of the cone is considered partly to occupy the site of the Lucrine Lake, which was itself nothing more than the crater of a pre-existent volcano, and was almost entirely filled up during the explosion of 1538.
The fountains were frozen, icicles hung from the locks of the marble statues in the Chiaia. And yet the oranges glowed like gold among their green leaves; the roses, the heliotrope, the geraniums, bloomed in all the gardens. It is the most contradictory climate. We lunched one day, sitting in our open carriage in a lemon grove, and near at hand the Lucrine Lake was half frozen over.
It contains a crater in a state of subdued activity, called the Solfatara; an extinct volcano having a large crater called Monte Barbaro; and Lake Avernus, also supposed to be an extinct volcanic crater. Between Monte Barbaro and the sea, there was formerly a fiat piece of ground bordering on the Lucrine Lake, which is separated from the Bay of Baiae by a narrow strip of shingle.
This region, which is still shaky from fires bubbling under the thin crust, through which here and there the sulphurous vapor breaks out, is one of the most sacred in the ancient world. Here are the Lucrine Lake, the Elysian Fields, the cave of the Cumean Sibyl, and the Lake Avernus.
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