the Third Book to
several early eruptions of the mountain in the following terms: "In the
first days of this spring, the stream of fire issued from Etna, as on
former occasions, and destroyed some land of the Catanians, who live
upon Mount Etna, which is the largest mountain in Sicily. Fifty years,
it is said, had elapsed since the last eruption, there having been three
in all since the Hellenes have inhabited Sicily."[3]

[3] Translated by E. Crawley.

Virgil's oft-quoted description of the mountain (_Eneid_, Bk. 3) we give
in the spirited translation of Conington:

"But Etna with her voice of fear
In weltering chaos thunders near.
Now pitchy clouds she belches forth
Of cinders red, and vapour swarth;
And from her caverns lifts on high
Live balls of flame that lick the sky:
Now with more dire convulsion flings
Disploded rocks, her heart's rent strings,
And lava torrents hurls to-day
A burning gulf of fiery spray."

Many other early writers speak of the mountain, among them Theokritos,
Aristotle, Ovid, Livy, Seneca, Lucretius, Pliny, Lucan, Petronius,
Cornelius Severus, Dion Cassius, Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, and Lucilius
Junior. Seneca makes various allusions to Etna, and mentions the fact
that lightning sometimes proceeded from its smoke.

Strabo has given a very fair description of the mountain. He asserts
that in his time the upper part of it was bare, and covered with ashes,
and in winter with snow, while the lower slopes were clothed with
forests. The summit was a plain about twenty stadia in circumference,
surrounded by a ridge, within which there was a small hillock, the smoke
from which ascended to a considerable height. He further mentions a
second crater. Etna was commonly ascended in Strabo's time from the
south-west.

While the poets on the one hand had invested the mountain with various
supernatural attributes, and had made it the prison-house of a chained
giant, and the workshop of a swart god, Lucretius endeavoured to show
that the eruptions and other phenomena could be easily explained by the
ordinary operations of nature. "And now at last," he writes, "I will
explain in what ways yon flame, roused to fury in a moment, blazes forth
from the huge furnaces of Aetna. And, first, the nature of the whole
mountain is hollow underneath, underpropped throughout with caverns of
basalt rocks. Furthermore, in all caves are wind and air, for wind is
produced when