d as the Christian era;--"it is a variable heap
thrown up from time to time, and again, not seldom, by a greater effort of
the same force, tossed away into the air, and scattered in clouds of dust
over far-away countries. Thus it has happened often, in the course of
these variations of energy, that Vesuvius has risen to a conical height
exceeding that of Somma by 500 or 600 feet, and again, the top has been
truncated to a level as low as Somma, or even as much below that mountain
as we now behold it above."(3)

To understand the story of the Mountain, therefore, it is necessary for us
to travel back in retrospect to ancient Roman days. In the first place,
however, one word as to its present name that we use to-day, for all are
familiar with Vesuvius, but comparatively few, until they visit Naples,
have heard mention made of Monte Somma. The name of Vesuvius, then, though
strictly applicable only to the volcanic and modern portion of the
Mountain, is not a recent appellation; on the contrary, it is probably of
far more ancient origin than _Mons Summanus_ by which the whole was known
to the Romans. The point is by no means unimportant, for etymologists
derive Vesuvius from the Syriac "Vo Seevev, the abode of flame," thereby
proving to us that whatever opinions may have been held as to the nature
of the Mountain in the century preceding the Christian era, its volcanic
nature must have been perfectly well understood by those who gave it this
suggestive title in a more remote age. But the secret locked up in Mons
Summanus was not altogether unsuspected by the Roman scientists. Strabo,
the geographer, writing about thirty years before the birth of Christ,
made a careful examination of the crest of Mons Summanus, then a
saucer-shaped hollow surrounded by a steep rocky edge and occupied by a
flat plain covered with cinders and void of grass, although the flanks of
the Mountain were extraordinarily fertile. From what he saw during his
visit, Strabo conjectured the Mountain to be an extinct volcano, in which
surmise he was destined to be proved partly in the right and partly in the
wrong; whilst Vitruvius, the famous architect of the Emperor Augustus,
"who found Rome of brick and left it of marble," as well as Tacitus the
historian, shared the same opinion. About a century and a half before the
first recorded eruption in 79, Mons Summanus figures prominently in Roman
history as the scene of a curious incident during the Servile War