Part 17

To return, however, from this digression, which has nothing to excuse it except the interest which clings even to often-repeated stories respecting the popular old volcano. Other features in that wonderful panorama, seen from Capri, have undergone scarcely inferior changes since the time of Tiberius. Yonder rich tract of level land at the mouth of the Sarno, between Torre dell’ Annunziata and Castellamare, did not exist. The sea has retreated from it. Tiberius saw, instead of it, a deep bay washing the walls of the compact little provincial city of Pompeii. But the neighbouring port of Stabiæ is gone: not a vestige of its site remains. Above it to the right, Monte Sant’Angelo, and the limestone sierra of which it forms a part, remain, no doubt, unchanged by time. Only that marvellous range of Roman villas and gardens which lined its foot for leagues, almost rivalling the structures of the opposite Bay of Baiæ for magnificence, has disappeared, no one knows how or when. The diver off the coast of Sorento can touch with his hand the long ranges of foundation-work, brick and marble, which now lie many feet beneath the deep clear water. It was a strange fit of short-lived magnificence, that which induced the grandest of millionnaires, the chiefs of the Augustan age, to raise their palaces, all round the Gulf of Naples, on vaulted ranges of piles laid within the sea, so that its luxurious ripple should be heard under the rooms in which they lived. Niebuhr, who, with all his curious insight into the ways of antiquity, was not superior to the temptation of finding a new reason for everything, asserts that they did so in order to escape the _malaria_. But that mysterious evil influence extended some way beyond the shore. The country craft will, to this day, keep as far as they can, in the summer nights, off the coast of the Campagna, while the quiet land-breeze is wafting death from the interior. The real causes were, doubtless, what the writers of the time disclose. The land close to the shore was dear and scanty, and ill-accommodated for building, from its steepness. The first new-comer who set the fashion of turning sea into land, was imitated by others in the mere wantonness of wealth, until the whole shore became lined with palatial edifices, like the Grand Canal of Venice; but not so durably. These classical structures, frequently delineated with more or less detail in the Pompeian frescoes, were as beautiful and as transitory as those of our dreams; or like the vision which Claude Lorraine transferred to canvass in the most poetical of landscapes, his ‘Enchanted Palace.’ Judging from the singular phenomena exhibited by the ‘Temple of Serapis,’ and by other topographical records, geologists have concluded that land and sea, in this volcanic region, wax and wane in long successions of ages. Thus the sea rose (or rather the land sank) on the coast of the Bay of Naples for about eleven centuries previous to A.D. 1000; then the reverse movement took place until about A.D. 1500: and the land is now sinking again. If so, these marine palaces must have gradually subsided into the sea, and their owners may have been driven out by the invasion of cuttle-fish and sea-hedgehogs, and other monsters of the Mediterranean shallows, in their best bedrooms, even before Norman or Saracen incursions had reduced them to desolation. But whatever the cause of their disappearance, they had vanished before modern history began: nor has modern luxury, in its most profuse mood, ever sought to reproduce them. Their submarine ruins remain as memorials of ages when men were at all events more daring and earnest in their extravagance, and the “lust of the eye and the pride of life” were deified on a grander scale, than at any other epoch of the world’s history.

Naples herself, the “idle” and the “learned” (for the ancients called her somewhat inconsistently by both epithets, nor had she as yet acquired her more recent soubriquet of the “beautiful”), formed a far less conspicuous object in the view than now; it was a place of some twenty or thirty thousand souls, according to Niebuhr’s conjectural estimate; confined between the modern Mole on the one hand, and the Gate del Carmine on the other; and nestling close in the neighbourhood of the sister city Herculaneum. The lofty line of the houses on the Chiaia—of which you may now almost count the windows in the top storeys from the sea-level at Capri, through that pellucid atmosphere, while the lower storeys are hidden by the earth’s curvature—did not then exist. But instead of it there extended the endless terraces and colonnades, the cypress avenues and plane groves, of that range of fortress-palaces erected by Pollio and Lucullus, enlacing island, and beach, and ridge, even to the point of Posilippo, with tracery of dazzling marble. Here, however, the mere natural changes have been small, except that an island or two (like that of the Castel dell’ Uovo) has since been joined to the continent. But farther west, round the Bay of Baiæ, fire and water have dealt most fantastically with the scenery. Scarcely a prominent feature on which the Roman eye rested remains unchanged. Quiet little Nisida was a smoking semi-volcano. Yonder level dun-coloured shore, from Pozzuoli to the Lucrine, was under water, and the waves dashed against a line of cliff now some miles inland. That crater-shaped Lake of Agnano, now the common resort of Neapolitan holiday-makers, did not exist; it must have been formed by some unrecorded convulsion of the dark ages. Yonder neatly truncated cone, rising five hundred feet above the plain, seems as permanent a feature in the landscape as any other of the “everlasting hills;” but it was the creation of a few days of violent eruption, only three centuries ago—as its name of Monte Nuovo still indicates—whether by “upheaval” or by “ejection,” philosophers dispute. But the beautiful Lucrine Lake, the station of Roman fleets and the very central point of Roman luxury, disappeared in the same elemental commotion; leaving a narrow stagnant pool behind. Only yon slight dyke or barrier of beach, between this shrunken mere and the sea, deserves respect; for that has remained, strange to say, almost unaltered throughout. It is one of the very oldest legendary spots of earth; doubtless the very road along which Hercules dragged the oxen of Geryon; the very “narrow shore” on which Ulysses landed, in order to call up the melancholy shades of the dead. Farther inland, again, Avernus remains unchanged, in shape at least; but many and strange are the revolutions which it has undergone in other respects. We first hear of it as a dark pool, surrounded by forests; the bed, doubtless, of an ancient crater filled with water, and retaining much of volcanic action; but not (as commonly supposed) fatal to the birds that flew over it. That notion is not classical; or rather, it is founded on a misconception of classical authorities. The pool is not called by the best writers “lacus Avernus” but “lacus Averni,” the lake _of_ the Avernus. What is an Avernus? Lucretius tells us that it is a spot where noxious gases escape from the earth, so that the birds which fly over it fall dead on the earth _or_ into the lake if there happens to be a lake below them.

“Si forte lacus substratus Averno est.”

And Virgil’s description, accurately construed, gives exactly the same meaning.

“Spelunca alta fuit.... ....tuta lacu nigro nemorum que tenebris, _Quam_ super” (not quem super, over the cavern, not the lake) ....“haud ullæ poterant impune volantes Tendere iter pennis.... Unde _locum_” (not _lacum_) “Graii dixerunt nomine Aornon.”

It was the exhalations from the mysterious cavern that were deadly, not those from the lake. Such an “Avernus” is the “Gueva Upas” or Valley of Death, in Java, to which condemned criminals were formerly sent to perish; whence the romance about the Upas Tree. And such an Avernus, on a small scale, still exists on the shore of the peaceful little Lake of Laach in Germany, also an extinct crater: there are spots on its beach where bird-corpses are to be found in numbers, killed by mephitic exhalations. But—to return to our lake—it must at that time have lain at or (like some other extinct craters) below the level of the sea; for Augustus’s great engineering operation consisted in letting the sea _into_ the lake.

“Tyrrhenusque fretis immittitur æstus Avernis.”

Fifteen hundred years afterwards, and just before the Monte Nuovo eruption, the place was visited by that painful old topographer, Leandro Alberti, the Leland of Italy. The channel made by Augustus was then gone; but the lake was still on a level with the sea, for he asserts that in storms the sea broke into it: and the water, as he expressly affirms, was salt. Now, its level is several feet above that of the sea, and the water is fresh. The upheaval must have been gradual and peaceful, for the outline of the lonely mere is as perfectly rounded now as the poet Lycophron described it;—but a portion only of that bewildering succession of changes of which this coast has been the theatre: the latest vibration of that vast commotion figured in the legendary war of the Giants. Nor is it quite so wild a conjecture as some have deemed it, that the tradition which peopled this bright coast with Cimmerians—then dwellers in the everlasting mist, on the border-land between the dead and the living—had its origin in the tales of primeval navigators, who had visited the neighbourhood during some mighty and prolonged eruption, covering sea and shore with a permanent darkness which “might be felt:” like the coast of Iceland in 1783, when for a whole summer continual eruptions arose from the sea as well as the land: when “the noxious vapours that for many months infected the air, enveloped the whole island in a dense fog which obscured the sun, and was perceptible even in England and Holland.”

Still farther westward in our panoramic view, the confusion between past and present becomes even more undecipherable. Baiæ has disappeared; a stately city of pleasure, which, to judge by its remaining foundations, rose on a hillside in terraces, something like its British counterpart Bath, but with its foot washed by the Mediterranean instead of the Avon: so has Misenum, with its naval station: and not only are these towns gone, but the land on which they stood seems so to have changed its shape, through earthquakes, marine encroachments, and the labour of men, that its very outlines are altered, until the eye rests at last on the peak of Ischia, which ends the semicircle.

Thus much by way of introduction to the more immediate point of our inquiry: the changes in the general aspect and character of the earth’s vegetable covering which have taken place in the same period of two thousand years, and in the same locality.

One of the greatest features of interest to the scientific botanist, and even to the less instructed lover of nature, which Italy presents, consists in the circumstance that the northern and southern types of vegetation—to speak more closely, the northern-temperate and the sub-tropical—meet together, especially in its warmer regions, in stronger contrast than probably anywhere else. The same remark is true, no doubt, of the Mediterranean shores in general: but those of France and of Turkey approach more to the general northern aspect; those of Barbary to the tropical: in favoured Italy the two types seem sometimes to blend and sometimes to contrast in ever-changing and ever-striking variety. The same was doubtless, to some extent, the case in ancient times. But the northern character was probably far more prevalent than now. The early Greek settlers landed on a forest region, where the common deciduous trees of the north, now driven back to the scantily clothed gorges of the central Apennines, flourished in great abundance. Such a nature as this may still be observed in the few forest patches left in the higher Abruzzi, the Sila of Calabria, and so forth. “The beech-forest,” says Schouw, “is called the symbol of the Danish character. But I have wandered in Calabria through large and beautiful beech-woods, on the higher plateaux of the Apennines, where the vegetation as well as the bracing air constantly reminded me of my home.” Probably the wild shores of Corsica, or those of Dalmatia, with their shaggy growth of northern forest and their undergrowth of mixed northern and Mediterranean shrubs, present an aspect more resembling what the followers of Ulysses and Æneas beheld when they landed, than may elsewhere be found. We may notice historical traces of the continued existence of this ruder and fresher nature, not only in the agricultural writers of the Romans, who speak far more of deciduous trees than of the evergreen, now deemed so characteristic of Italy, but in the well-known pages of Virgil. There is not in general much of “local colour” in the ‘Eclogues’ and ‘Georgics:’ that is a poetical artifice of later day. But what there is, represents the physiognomy, not of the Lombard plains where he was born, but of the neighbourhood of Naples in which he lived. His sea-sand is “black,” not brown or yellow, like that of all other bards,—the volcanic sand of the bays of Baiæ and Naples—very coal-dust in appearance. When he recommends the farmer to place his hives near a tree, for the bees to swarm on, it is a “palm-tree, or huge oleaster”—advice which he might as well have tendered to a Scythian as to a _colonus_ of his native Mantua. Now, the general idea which the verses of Virgil convey of the region with which he is concerned, is that of a sylvan country—not, emphatically, the “land of the cypress and myrtle,” but of the oak, ash, linden, wych-elm, beech, citizens of the great Transalpine forests. Some of the trees of which he celebrates the grandeur are now not only become scarce in his country, but it is difficult to ascertain with accuracy their real character. The mighty æsculus, for example, the noblest denizen of Latian forests, which formed of itself great woods, “lata æsculeta,” is a mere puzzle for antiquarian botanists: no one knows what it was, and there may be some question whether it has not disappeared from the face of earth, or whether it survives only in some nearly extinct variety of oak.[5]

Man has doubtless done much towards the effecting of this change, the more valuable plants of the south having been gradually introduced, and the indigenous woods cleared for their reception; but Nature has done much of herself. In the remaining woodland districts of maritime Italy—such as the Maremme of Tuscany and the Latian Campagna—the evergreen species seem to be gradually supplanting the deciduous, the foreign the indigenous. We talk familiarly of the hardy vegetation of the North; but, where the two meet on conditions of climate endurable by both, the children of the tropical sun seem to show the greater hardihood, and to come out survivors in the great battle for existence. Their every aspect, their rough bark and leathery leaves, seem indicative of a stronger vitality than that which animates the more majestic but more delicate structure of the leafy giants of the northern temperate zone. A similar law—if the analogy does not appear too fanciful—seems to govern the migrations of trees and shrubs, and of the human family itself. The North produces the races of more commanding aspect: it sends them forth conquering and to conquer; they establish empires, they subjugate the so-called feebler races of the South; but, in the midst of their conquests, they sicken and perish, and become extinct. The children of the South gradually penetrate northwards, and by their own more prolific multiplication, as well as by crossing or intermixture, in which their more essentially vigorous nature attains predominance, they efface the type of the Northern race, and cause it ultimately to disappear. What has become of the descendants of those hordes which swarmed from the populous North, in the decline of the Roman Empire, over all the regions adjacent to the Mediterranean? They have vanished, or are scarcely recognised by antiquaries in a few problematical instances, where small insulated communities, thought to be of Teutonic or Gothic origin, maintain a precarious existence among the descendants of their former subjects. Where are the historical Gauls, with their tall figures, their fleshy frames, their golden hair, and eyes of truculent blue? A few of them, possibly, to be found in Flanders; but anything less like the Gaul of antiquity than the sinewy, nervous, agile, undersized, brown-skinned, and black-haired biped, who now inhabits some eighty out of the eighty-five departments of France, can hardly be imagined. What is become even of the purer Northern breed of Germany itself? Scarcely to be found, except on the shores of the Baltic: elsewhere the ordinary European type prevails, olive skin and _cheveux châtains_. “I sought for the fair population of classical Germany in vain,” says Niebuhr, “until I found it in Scandinavia.” On the other hand, the Greek in Provence, the Moor in Spain, Southrons, transplanted into those countries in no very great numbers, have impressed their type on the general population, and, as it were, changed the very breed. When dark and fair intermix, the odds seem to be greatly in favour of the dark complexion prevailing in the offspring. We heard lately of a society formed in France for the conservation of the “Xanthous,” or yellow-haired variety of the human race, which they regard as the true aristocracy of nature, and rightly conceive to be threatened with extinction: their object to be attained by portioning from time to time blonde maidens who might take to themselves husbands of the same complexion. Even so—to return to our trees—the meridional vegetation gradually drives back that of the North in the battlefield of species. If we figure to ourselves the appearance of the plains of England two thousand years ago, with their indigenous vegetable covering only—without the common elm, the linden, plane, sycamore, poplar, acacia, chestnut, fruit-trees of every kind, and cultivated plants in general—without, probably, a single species of pine or fir, or indeed any evergreen but box, yew, and holly—and remember that every foreign plant has displaced a native, we may gather some idea of the conquests which the South has effected even here, not indeed without the aid of human industry, but in part by sheer physical superiority. But on the Mediterranean coast these conquests have been much more marked. Take the following description of the change which two thousand years have made in the common flora of Greece, from the work of a German botanist (Fraas, Klima und Pflanzenwelt):—

“The following species from the flora known to Theophrastus have either entirely disappeared from Greece, or have emigrated from the habitations which he assigns to them, and withdrawn into the moister climate of more northerly regions; the varieties commonly known to the ancients of the Linden; the Yew, that child of damp and shady hillsides, of which rare and dwarfed specimens only are now to be found on the highest mountains; the Hornbeam, the Beech, and Alder of Homer; and, with scanty exceptions, the ‘spear-furnishing’ Cornel and the tall Ash. Instead of these, another class of plants has conquered for itself greater space in the vegetable realm—thick-leaved, hard-leaved, down-covered, thorny and prickly bushes, evergreen for the most part, and adding, by their rich flowers, great beauty to the spring. This vegetation, analogous to that of the American savannas and Asiatic steppes, has now replaced the ancient flowery meadows, resembling those of middle Europe, with wastes of heath and pines, carob-trees and grey oleasters. Together with these we have the various kinds of arbutus, myrtle, oleander, philyreæ, pistachios, kermes-oaks, rosemary, thyme, and the flora of dry mountain regions in general.”

Let us now see how far the historical indications furnished by the Pompeian relics corroborate what has been already said respecting this “intrusion of the climate of the South,” as Fraas terms it, into the regions north of the Mediterranean.

In order to ascertain the plants known to the citizens of Pompeii, says Schouw, two records remain to us—namely, the pictures discovered in its ruins, and the remnants of plants themselves. But, he adds, the use of the first requires some care:—“Many representations of plants are naturally so little precise that their particular species cannot be ascertained, as would be the case in modern pictures of the same kind. And, if the plant be recognisable, it does not follow as certain that it was known at Pompeii, for the plants of foreign countries are also occasionally represented. Thus the Nile-nature is often delineated—marshy landscapes, with the lotus and the _nelumbium_, the hippopotamus, ichneumon, flocks of geese, and date-palms at the water’s edge; as, for instance, in the lower rim of the famous mosaic supposed to represent Alexander and Darius. Frequently, also, the representations are fanciful—for instance, a laurel growing out of a date-palm, and even appearing to rise out of it as a shoot from the same root—a physiological impossibility, unless, perhaps, it has reference to that strange practice of the ancients—the planting of different kinds so close to each other that they might appear to the eye connected.”

After making these allowances, we may safely arrive at the following conclusions. Among the trees which gave the Neapolitan landscape its character were then (as now) the stone-pine and the cypress. The former is frequently represented, with its peculiar branchless stems and cloud-like head—the product not only of close planting but of actual pruning in nurseries, as may now be noticed in the neighbourhood of Naples. This tree was cultivated for its edible nuts; and pine cones have been found among the charred objects in the shops of Pompeii. The beautiful cypress often occurs in the Pompeian frescoes, not unfrequently mingled with the pine, and gracefully combining with the outlines of the fanciful villas and temples represented. It is Gilpin, we think, who points out the peculiar adaptation, by contrast, of the spiral cypress and poplar to the long horizontal lines of southern buildings; while the square masses of the lime and elm combine well with the pointed Gothic. The “_Pinus halepensis_,” adds Schouw (the common maritime pine of Italy), is also found in these pictures. The vine, of course, occurs constantly—so does the olive. They were, no doubt, as universal then as now; and preferred respectively, as they do now, the volcanic and the calcareous hills in the vicinity of Naples. Preserved olives were found in Pompeii, which even retained something of their taste. The myrtle, and the beautiful oleander, or laurel-rose, as the French call it—common shrubs of to-day—also appear in the frescoes. Add to these the laurel and bay tribe, the ilex, fig, pomegranate, the “arundo donax” or gigantic reed—cultivated then as now for its various uses, and covering the marshy grounds with its dense brake, strange to the northern eye, are most of them recognisable also in these pictures. And we are enabled to say that the common vegetable forms on which the eye of the Pompeian citizen rested were, to this extent, similar to those on which his descendant gazes now.