, so that
in the pages of the old chronicler Florus we obtain an interesting
description--especially interesting because it was not given for scientific
purposes--of the condition of the mountain top at that period. The brave
gladiator Spartacus and his intrepid band of revolted slaves, seeking a
place of safety from the pursuing Roman legions, not very wisely selected
the top of this isolated peak, which, although affording a good position
of defence and possessing a wide outlook over the Campanian plain, had
only one narrow passage in its rocky rim to serve as entrance or outlet.
Followed hither by the Roman forces and caught like rats in a trap,
Spartacus and his men were doomed either to be reduced by starvation, or
else to run the gauntlet of the sole narrow exit, which the Senate's
commander, Clodius Glabrus, was already guarding. The story of Spartacus'
escape from his terrible dilemma is told in the history of Florus, and
repeated with further details by Plutarch in his Life of Crassus.

"Clodius the Praetor, with three thousand men, besieged them in a mountain,
having but one narrow and difficult passage, which Clodius kept guarded;
all the rest was encompassed with broken and slippery precipices, but upon
the top grew a great many wild vines: they cast down as many of these
boughs as they had need of, and twisted them into ladders long enough to
reach from thence to the bottom, by which, without any danger, all got
down save one, who stayed behind to throw them their arms, after which he
saved himself with the rest."

A dozen learned statements of a scientific nature as to the ancient
appearance and slumbering condition of the Mountain could not impress our
imagination more vividly with its subsequent natural changes than the
account of this episode of Spartacus and his handful of rebels,
beleaguered by Clodius within the very crater of the volcano. We can see
the Mountain in the last years of the Roman Republic before us, with its
truncated cone encircled by a low rampart of rock half hidden by wild
vine, ivy, eglantine, honeysuckle and all the creeping plants whose tough
trailing stems enabled the besieged gladiators to effect their escape from
the snare into which they had unwittingly fallen. We can understand from
this event how utterly remote was the idea of any upheaval of nature to
the dwellers on these shores, whose ancestors remembered the crest of the
mountain as the scene of a military operation.