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These letters, which are models of style and of accurate description, are too long to be inserted here; but he recounts how the dense cloud which hung over the mountain spread over the whole surrounding region, sometimes illuminated by flashes of light more vivid than lightning; how showers of cinders, stones, and ashes fell in such quantity that his uncle had to flee from Stabiæ, and that even at so great a distance as Misenum they encumbered the surface of the ground; how the ground heaved and the bed of the sea was upraised; how the cloud descended on Misenum, and even the island of Capreæ was concealed from view; and finally, how, urged by a friend who had arrived from Spain, he, with filial affection, supported the steps of his mother in flying from the city of destruction.
With him originated the poetical outlines of this fable as thenceforward fixed, especially the group of the hero and his wife, his little son and his aged father bearing the household gods, departing from burning Troy, and the important identification of the Trojans with the Sicilian and Italian autochthones, which is especially apparent in the case of the Trojan trumpeter Misenus who gave his name to the promontory of Misenum.
Return of the commissioners to Nero. Nero is convinced of his mother's innocence. Nero's course of life. Riots in the street. Agrippina lives in seclusion. Poppæa. Her influence over Nero. Her taunts and reproaches. Effect of them on Nero's mind. Nero begins to desire the death of his mother. Great naval celebration at Misenum. Anicetus. Proposal of Anicetus. Nero is pleased with it.
"As soon as it was light again, which was not till the third day after this melancholy accident, his body was found entire, and without any marks of violence upon it, exactly in the same posture as that in which he fell, and looking more like a man asleep than dead. During all this time my mother and I were at Misenum.
He formed two fleets, one at Ravenna, and the other at Misenum; the former to command the eastern, the latter the western division of the Mediterranean: each of these had its own proper commanders, and to each was attached a body of several thousand mariners.
It had already surrounded and concealed the island of Capreae, and had made invisible the promontory of Misenum.
Let me recall to your remembrance all the particulars, and then you shall judge yourself on the difference of your behaviour and mine. I was the Prefect of the Roman fleet, which then lay at Misenum.
Those who visited her in her villa at Misenum, where she kept her intellectual court, surrounded by all that was best in letters, and exchanging greetings or gifts with the potentates of the earth, were amazed at the composure with which she spoke of the lives and actions of her sons. The memory drew no tear, her voice conveyed no intonation of sorrow or regret.
With these moderate views, Augustus stationed two permanent fleets in the most convenient ports of Italy, the one at Ravenna, on the Adriatic, the other at Misenum, in the Bay of Naples. Experience seems at length to have convinced the ancients, that as soon as their galleys exceeded two, or at the most three ranks of oars, they were suited rather for vain pomp than for real service.
A sweet and peaceful scene in the foreground, it must have been, and a whole horizon of enchantment beyond the sunny peninsula over which it lorded: the Mediterranean, with poetic Capri, and Ischia, and all the classic shore from Cape Misenum, Baiae, and Naples, round to Vesuvius; all the sparkling Bay of Naples; and on the other side the Bay of Salerno, covered with the fleets of the commerce of Amalfi, then a republican city of fifty thousand people; and Grecian Paestum on the marshy shore, even then a ruin, its deserted porches and columns monuments of an architecture never equaled elsewhere in Italy.
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