The Emperors, on their part,seem to have been grateful for the loyal attachment of this people. Thus, Imp: Cæs. Vespasianus Aug. Pontifex Max. Again upon a public weight. And upon another public weight. And upon a brass Sextarius. D. D. P. P. Herc. That is, Decurionum Decreto Præfecti ponderibus Herculanensium. These three inscriptions inform us of another municipal right enjoyed by the Herculanenses in their Ponderale, or House of Public Weights. There was an earthquake, Anno Christi 63, sixteen years previous to that eruption of Vesuvius, which destroyed Herculaneum, Anno Christi 79. Seneca declares, that in this earthquake, Herculanensis oppidi pars ruit, dubièque stant etiam, quæ relicta sunt. Nonis Februarii fuit terræ motus. In an inclosure behind the great theatre, a heap of tiles, respectively numbered, together with the trunk of a marble statue, and the fragments of several columns, was excavated under the volcanic materials. Another earthquake, indeed, immediately preceded, or rather attended, that eruption. Some houses were thrown to the ground by the severe concussion. Their ruins are partly spread upon the original soil, partly upon the pumice stones discharged from the mountain. Pliny, in his account addressed to Tacitus, says, "Præcesserat per multos dies tremor terræ minus formidolosus, qui Campaniæ non solum castella, verum etiam oppida vexare solitus: illà vero nocte ita invaluit, ut non moveri omnia, sed everti crederentur." In this letter, as well as in the 16th of the same book, to the same friend, Pliny has proved himself to have "Omnia verè prosecutum," although, with great modesty, he remarks, "Aliud est Epistolam, aliud Historiam scribere." Conformably to his faithful description, the excavated stratum is not lava, as has been often said, but " Pumices nigrique et ambusti, et fracti igne lapides," to the depth of nearly seventy feet in many places. All the wood in Herculaneum was reduced to coals, and every thing combustible was not only injured by the extreme heat, but, as was the case with the manuscripts, was violently compressed, and contracted by the ponderous pressure of the volcanic materials. In one of his best poetical efforts, Statius justly says, Pater exemtum terris ad sidera montem Sustulit, et latè miseras dejecit in urbes. Upon this stratum of stones, first liquified, and then hardened and incorporated into prodigious masses, there has been raised a second press what has been asserted by the opponents of this total destruction. In the annals of literature few persons have attained more celebrity than Scipio Maffei, among the Italians; and, among the French, Barthelemi. Both these men have influenced the opinion of some to a great degree, with regard to the loss of this city: seconded by Ioannes Larnius, both of them have pronounced, that the antiquities deposited in the Museum of Portici, by King Charles III. bad not the least to do with Herculaneum; that the Augustana Tabula, commonly called Peutingeriana, from Peutinger, and written in the time of Theodosius the Younger, mentions Herculaneum; that (which is their only argument not perfectly vague) some coins inscribed Domitianus Cæsar in that collection of Portici, even if you acknowledge the identity of those ruins with Herculaneum, would announce the prolongation of its existence after the reign of Titus, and of the eruption, 79. Upon these two alledged proofs their heretical dogma rests. At the same time it must be confessed, that my Brethren of the Royal Herculaneum Society reply with some force, by representing the Greek name of Herculaneum in the Peutingerian Tables, as nothing more than the name of a temple, dedicated to Hercules, or, as a translation of Porticus Herculis, afterwards corrupted into Portici : that in the Greek capital, at a distance from the spot, the compiler might easily mistake one for the other: that, with respect to the coins, the title of Cæsar was often, or rather usually, bestowed upon the sons of the Emperor, during the life-time, or reign, of the Sovereign. For my own part, if it could be vouchsafed me to address, upon such a question, a reference to so elevated authority, I am sure your Royal Highness would not hesitate to determine, that a most conclusive argument against Maffei, &c. may be drawn from the manuscripts themselves, because all the names of the writers, hitherto discovered in those manuscripts, are those of writers, not only who lived, but are generally known to have lived, a considerable time before the said eruption, except in the case of one writer, whose title of the work is Kapveloxov Pixiora. This Carneiscus, of whom no mention is made in any extant author, may have lived before, or after, that eruption; but certain expressions in his manuscript persuade me, that he too lived a considerable time before the said eruption. “Εν γὰρ σοφὸν βούλευμα τὰς πολλὰς χέρας Νικα. This verse of Euripides was found, written with ochre, upon the walls of a room, which, from other circumstances, is supposed to have been in a house belonging to a pedagogue. The accents, and the minuscule figure of the letters, although they were not employed in transcribing for public use any books in the Greek language, might naturally be employed in a grammar or writing-school, where Roman, i. e. foreign, scholars were taught the different characters of that language, and could not have learned accentual intonation without the assistance and guide of some visible marks. Upon this subject, it would be unjustifiable in me to enlarge, because it would be unnecessary, and, also, an act of presumption. One of the best Greek scholars, whom this country has ever produced, the late most deeply, and most accurately, learned Dr. Foster, Upper Master of Eton, in his Treatise upon Accent and Quantity, has established the true account of this subject, with historical and erudite precision. If any additional statement were wanting, the valuable work of Mr. Mitford would clear every doubt, and satisfy the queries of the most sceptical investigation; and most certainly would serve to refute any objections, which the before-mentioned cavillers could raise, upon the accents of the cited Greek iambic inscription, against the date of the total destruction of Herculaneum. In defence of the same date, and consistently with the well-founded proposition of Casley, in his most able performance," the Catalogue, &c." the observation of Dr. Taylor, upon this very inscription, seems to be unanswerable. After referring to an inscription in Greek, as well as Latin, at Rome, and of the age of Tiberius, he observes, that, "In the Greek, according to Manutius, though neglected by Gruter, the little, the , the 8, the w, are all remarkable. The small characters were, therefore, we see, known at that time, but reserved for private use, like the visible accentual marks, and rarely mixed with their public monuments." With regard to the Latin part of this inscription, where accents are found upon the long vowels, for instance, Tu qui secúra procédis mente parumper; in a fragment of a Latin poem, which is among the fac simile copies of the Herculaneum manuscripts, now at Oxford, and attributed, conjecturally by me, to Varius, the author exhibits in the same manner the same accent upon a long vowel, as constituting a syllable, or part of a metrical foot. It may not be improper to close this summary account of Herculaneum with a curious passage of the Sibylline Oracle in Plutarch, respecting the eruption so fatal to that city. "To these remarkable and recent evils,” (he writes,) "the ancient theme of Sibylline song, and prophecy, has not time done justice, and correspondently brought to pass? I mean the eruption of fire from the mountain, the boiling effervescence of sea-water, and the violent dispersion of massy stones, and combustion itself, with the assistance of the wind, and the total ruin of so many and so great cities, in such a manner, that the whole country was defaced, and the very site became undistinguishable." ON ULYSSES. TO THE EDITOR OF THE CLASSICAL JOURNAL. A Young Lady of my acquaintance, who, though not a classical scholar, has had a more liberal education than usually falls to the lot of her sex, lately showed me a paragraph of your learned Journal. It is in the Tenth Number, page 311, where M. Brent, from Edinburgh, proposes, as a philological difficulty, a passage in Plutarch's Life of VOL. VII. NO. XIII. D Solon, in which that legislator is stated to have said, that Homer's Ulysses wounded himself to deceive his enemies. Now, says she, what difficulty is there? Does not Homer tells us that Ulysses wounded himself? Or did M. Brent never read Homer? Perhaps, indeed, so great a scholar as he never read Mr. Pope's translation, and the Greek may be very different. But I remember well, that in the fourth Book of the Odyssey, when Helen, after having been received back again by her husband, (which, by the way, I think she did not deserve to be) is giving an account to him and his guests, Telemachus and Pisistratus, of what she knew of the achievements of Ulysses in the Trojan war, mentions, among other things, that he disfigured himself with scars, and disguised himself like a slave, and so entered Troy as a spy. Do not you remember that Pope says: "Seam'd o'er with wounds which his own sabre gave, "In the vile habit of a village slave, "The foe deceived, he pass'd the tented plain, I took your Tenth Number from her hand, and was, I confess, much amused while I read the appendix, as I may call it, to "Biblical Criticism." If M. Brent, who seems to be a profound scholar, as well as an acute critic, in both sacred and profane literature, will take the trouble of turning to his Greek Odyssey, lib. IV. 1. 244. Clarke's edition, he will find ample materials to assist him in the removal of his difficulty. He will see that Homer there makes Helen say, speaking of Ulysses: Αυτόν μιν πληγῇσιν ἀεικελίησι δαμάσσας, Σπεῖρα κάκ' ἀμφ' ώμοισι βαλών, οἰκῆς ἐοικώς, *Ανδρων δυσμενέων κατέδυ πόλιν εὐρυάγυιαν. Which may be thus translated: Disfiguring himself with unsightly wounds, and putting on the habit of a slave, he entered the city of the enemy. It appears then, that the difficulty which occurred to M. B., in reading Plutarch's life of Solon, is easily removed; and that it could only have occurred to a reader, whose memory was, at the time at least, a little defective. No wonder, therefore, that the difficulty has not been "before noticed," for in truth none exists. Plutarch evidently alludes to the above-cited passage in the Odyssey, and we have no need, in the words of M. Brent, "to attempt to investigate, whether or not this circumstance, in the life of Ulysses, was recorded in some part of Homer's poem, not now extant; nor to inquire whether any allusions to this part of his character are to be found in other ancient writers; or whether from the general features of the anecdote, it may not be accounted one of those mistakes, into which Plutarch was apt to fall, partly from inaccuracy of recollection, and partly from confusion in the references which he was accustomed to make in his Common Place Book." The inaccuracy of recollection and confusion seem to be all on the part of M. Brent, and not of Plutarch. That great writer knew well what he was about, and appears to have read the poems of Homer with as distinct a recollection, and with as accurate a knowledge of what they contain, as any of our modern critics. Whether he had read the New Testament with the same care as M. Brent, may not be so easy to determine. In this department of criticism, the latter, indeed, if I may use a vulgar phrase, seems to be at home, and I can see no objection to the adoption of his proposed amendments on our English translation in most of the ten passages on which he has animadverted. The word cropped, however, which he proposes to substitute instead of shorn, in the 6th verse of the 11th chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, appears to me to be of rather too light a cast to suit the grave style of the sacred writer; and to be liable to a similar objection to that which has been made to an expression of the celebrated Dr. Campbell in his translation of the Gospels, when,/ instead of Children, have ye any meat," as it stands in our common translation, he renders the words, Παιδία, μή τι προσφάγιον ἔχετε; Lads, have ye got any victuals? Besides, if we look into Dr. Johnson's Dictionary, we shall see that shorn is not synonymous with shaved, and therefore I do not perceive the tautology of which M. B. complains. But admitting his criticisms on the New Testament to be all legitimate and important, I do confess it appears to me not easy to explain why a person of his attainments should not have looked into Clarke's Index. He would there have seen, under the word Ulysses, the following satisfactory reference-verberibus casus urbem Trojam dolosè ingreditur, d. 244. One is almost tempted to think, Sir, that this learned gentleman has been only playing the wag with his difficulties, and trying the strength of our classical memories. If this was his object, the joke may do well enough; for I dare say there are many to be found within the extensive range of the circulation of your Journal, who, though they may have read Homer's Odyssey oftener perhaps than M. B. himself, do not yet remember every incident which happened to the hero of that poem. It is certainly necessary, Mr. Editor, to offer some apology for detaining you and your learned readers so long on so plain a subject. But observing that no notice is taken of M. B's speculations in any of the two Numbers of your Journal that have come out since they were published, I have deemed it right to trouble you with the foregoing pages, lest any of your readers should imagine, that because the difficulty discovered by M. B. has not been attempted to be removed, therefore it is important; or that in this part of the island we are so ignorant as to find difficulties where other men of ordinary learning readily perceive that there are none. Had this circumstance not been pointed out to me by my young friend, I should probably have overlooked it, as I suppose has been the case with your other corre spondents. Edinburgh, Jan. 1813. J. R. L. |