the air has been stirred and put in motion. When this air
has been thoroughly heated, and, raging about, has imparted its heat to
all the rocks around, wherever it comes in contact with them, and to the
earth, and has struck out from them fire burning with swift flames, it
rises up and then forces itself out on high, straight through the
gorges; and so carries its heat far, and scatters far its ashes, and
rolls on smoke of a thick pitchy blackness, and flings out at the same
time stones of prodigious weight--leaving no doubt that this is the
stormy force of air. Again, the sea, to a great extent, breaks its waves
and sucks back its surf at the roots of that mountain. Caverns reach
from this sea as far as the deep gorges of the mountain below. Through
these you must admit [that air mixed up with water passes; and] the
nature of the case compels [this air to enter in from that] open sea,
and pass right within, and then go out in blasts, and so lift up flame,
and throw out stones, and raise clouds of sand; for on the summit are
craters, as they name them in their own language, what we call gorges
and mouths."[4]

[4] _De Natura Rerum_, Book 6, p. 580. Translated by E. Munro 1864.

These ideas were developed by Lucilius Junior in a poem consisting of
644 hexameters entitled _Aetna_. The authorship of this poem has long
been a disputed point; it has been attributed to Virgil, Claudian,
Quintilius Varus, Manilius, and, by Joseph Scaliger[5] and others, to
Cornelius Severus. Wensdorff was the first to adduce reasons for
attributing the poem to Lucilius Junior, and his views are generally
adopted. Lucilius Junior was Procurator of Sicily under Nero, and, while
resident in the Island, he ascended Etna; and it is said that he
proposed writing a detailed history of the mountain. He adopted the
scientific opinions of Epicurus, as established in Rome by Lucretius,
and was more immediately a disciple of Seneca. The latter dedicated to
him his _Quaestiones Naturales_, in which he alludes more than once to
Etna. M. Chenu speaks of the poem of Lucilius Junior as "sans doute
tres-poetique, mais assez souvent dur, heurte, concis, et parcela meme,
d'une obscurite parfois desesperante."[6] At the commencement of the
poem, Lucilius ridicules the ideas of the poets as regards the
connection of Etna with Vulcan and the Cyclops. He has no belief in the
practice, which apparently prevailed in his time, of ascending to the
edge of the crater and