The weekly miner. [volume] (Butte, Mont.) 1878-1881, 1879-10-07
Y
L'nd'n.N. Y.
The Lost City.

~
out of existence by the great Chicago fire of
| 1881, was the statue of a Pompeian maiden
that stood in the parlor of the late II. H. Ma
gio-the ,"Nidia"-the beautiful girl in mar
BILE, forever fleeing from the wrath to come.
Perhaps it would not lIave occurred to any
people less given to festivities than the Italian
to commemorate so sad an event, but last
Sunday the Neapolitans celebrated the ami
versary of the destruction. of the cities of
"Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stable, across
the bay, and it is 1900 years to-day since
darkness began to clear way to reveal the
desolate plain of stones and ashes which
stretched away along the southern shore
from Vesuvius, with not a hillock TO mark
where they had stood. Those who remember
how multitudes of our own people, on that
terrible October night and day, eight years
ago, fled from their homes to seek a place of
safety, through the he'll of fire and dust and
confusion, can have some idea of how the
inhabitants of Pompeii ran into the fields
when the storm of destruction came, holding
pillows over their heads to ward off the fall
ing stones. and SO left their city forever.
Pompeii was a little town by the sea, five
miles from the Vesuvius, which had been girt
about with a wall long before the military
PoWOi - tIS Olilh puuSIU tlCIA " uCSplSC
such feeble defenses. Its gateways and tow
ers we've already crumbling when Naples was
indeed a'New City," and its great road that
led through Herculaneum and along the
shore to Naples, between Vesuvius and the
sea, paved with hard, volcanic rock from an
eruption of which there was no history or ira
ditiOn, was worn into deep ruts by the traffic
of unnumbered years. Over it came those
wealthy Roman citizens-Cicero was one of
them-who were went in summer time to
escape from the eternal miasmas that hang
around the Tiber, and journeyed southwark
over the Appian Way, to that beautiful water
ing place between the sea and the river and
the mountain which lay on the further curve
of the Gulf of Cuma. For those who pre-
ferred to go by ship-alas! there was no
steamboat to take Cicero to his villa-it was
a pleasant sail from Ostia to the water gate of
Pompeii, now more than a mile inland.
The old Pompeians were every bit as fond
of amusement as their happy-go-lucky de-
scendants are, and on the 24th day of August,
in the year 70, they were assembled, as was
their wont of a fine day, in the great ampi-
theatre, to witness one of those contests
which were perhaps almost as brutal as our
modern prize fights. Twenty years BEFORE in
the year SO, they had got into a row in the
same place, with a parcel of neighboling Nj
cerian boys, who had come over to see the
show, and, as Tacitus says, "trom provincial
sarcasms arose mutual reproaches, and from
stones recourse was had to arIns;;'' and as the
Nucerians got the worst of it in the serim-
mage, they complained to the Emperor Nero,
and as a punishment the theatre was shut up
for ten years. But everything was working
well in 70, and public displays were at their
highest pitch throughout Italy. No doubt
many of the Pompeian youth had gone up to
Rome, eight years before, to see the great tri-
umphal procession, when Vespian and Titus
returned from the siege Of Jerusalem, and
bore the golden table and the golden candle
stick, and the laws from the Temple, through
The streets, amid a vast army of captives, and
dragged Simon, the son of Giora, the corr
quered Jewish general, to the place of execu-
ton, with a cord around his neck, while the
soldiers scourged him with rods as he went,
and perhaps they looked upon the beautiful
Berenice, the daughter Of Agrippa Herod
l, whom Titus took as his mistress in Rome.
The people of Pompeii knew what a good
performance was, as times were, and we may
suppose they were having one of the first
class, when the sudden b%lackening of the
heavens from the first eruption of Vesuvius
that had occurred within historic times,
warned them of some impending and un-
known danger, and scattered them in a panic
to their homes. From that day no human
eye looked upon that magnificent amphlthea-
tire for a period of 1876 years, until it was I'M
covered in 1855 by excavations undertaken
by Charles H., of Naples. During that in
terval the Pompeian plain had remained a
desolate and uninhabited waste, and up to
1S4S, wheR some remains of statues were
discovered in sinking a well, the very site Of
the city was unknown.-Inter- Ocean.
H.