Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/564

560 the Lipari Islands, the date of which is said to have coincided with Hannibal's death, 183 B. C.

So far Cassiodorus. In Procopius (fl. 495-565) we are confronted with a very different sort of personage, yet one recognized as chief authority for the events of the reign of Justinian. His position in literature is defined by Hodgkin, in his 'Italy and her Invaders,' in following terms:

After so many generations of decline, here, at length, the intellect of Hellas produces a historian, who, though not equal doubtless to her greatest names, would certainly have been greeted by Herodotus and Thucydides as a true brother of their craft. Procopius has a very clear idea of how history ought to be written. Each of his books, on the Persian, the Vandal, and the Gothic wars, is a work of art, symmetrical, well proportioned, and with a distinct unity of subject. His style is dignified but not pompous, his narrative vivid, his language pure. . . . He exhibits a considerable amount of learning, but without pedantry: and resembles Herodotus in his eager, almost child-like interest in the strange customs and uncouth religions of barbarian nations.

Such appears to be a conservative estimate of Procopius the Cæsarean. He has transmitted to us a vivid pen picture of Vesuvius as observed by him during a four months' sojourn at Naples in 537, at which time an eruption was threatened, though none actually occurred until nearly a century and a half thereafter. Thus it happens that the value of Procopius lies in his excellent topographic description (de Bello Gothico, ii., 4), together with hearsay accounts of the two preceding disturbances (ibid., iii., 35). One of the features of the last which we gather from him is that ashes were carried as far as Tripoli. Lava flows are distinctly mentioned both by him and by Cassiodorus as an accompaniment of these eruptions, a fact often overlooked by modern geologists. The Byzantine historian will have further claim to our attention later on.

Following close upon the fall of the Gothic kingdom came the Lombard invasion, which marks the most ill-starred period of Italian history. But little direct and contemporary testimony to historical facts has come down to us from the Lombards, but as their rule approached its end, a native historian arose who preserves the memory of foreign mastery, and ranks as the most distinguished writer of this early part of the middle ages in Italy. This historian is Paul the Deacon (720-c. 787), to whom we are chiefly indebted for a history of the Lombards and a revision of Eutropius. Both of these writings contain mention of Vesuvian eruptions, and it is interesting to note that we find in them the earliest suggestion that the original Somma crater had been shattered by the Plinian catastrophe. Paulus Diaconus, in his 'Historia Langobardorum,' and the Roman 'Liber Pontificalis,' a compilation due to many hands and extending over a number of