in the cities, wandering over the earth day and night and also traversing the air.  After this fearful droughts and earthquakes sudden and violent occurred, so that all the level ground in that region undulated and the heights gave a great leap.  Reverberations were frequent, some subterranean resembling thunder and some on the surface like bellowings.  The sea joined the roar and the sky resounded with it.  Then suddenly a portentous crash was heard, as if the mountains were tumbling in ruins.  And first there were belched forth stones of huge size that rose to the very summits before they fell; after them came a deal of fire and smoke in inexhaustible quantities so that the whole atmosphere was obscured and the whole sun was screened from view as if in an eclipse. [Sidenote:—­23—­] Thus night succeeded day and darkness light.  Some thought the giants were rising in revolt (for even at this time many of their forms could be discerned in the smoke and moreover a kind of sound of trumpets was heard), while others believed that the whole world was disappearing in chaos or fire.  Therefore they fled, some from the houses into the streets, others from without into the house; in their confusion, indeed, they hastened from the sea to the land or from the land to the sea, deeming any place at a distance from where they were safer than what was near by.  While this was going on an inconceivable amount of ashes was blown out and covered the land and the sea everywhere and filled all the air.  It did harm of all sorts, as chance dictated, to men and places and cattle, and the fish and the birds it utterly destroyed.  Moreover, it buried two whole cities, Herculaneum and Pompeii, while the populace was seated in the theatre.  The entire amount of dust was so great that some of it reached Africa and Syria and Egypt, and it also entered Rome, where it occupied all the air over the city and cast the sun into shadow.  There, too, no little fear was felt for several days, since the people did not know and could not conjecture what had happened.  They like the rest thought that everything was being turned upside down, that the sun was disappearing in the earth and the earth was bounding up to the sky.  This ashes for the time being did them no great harm:  later it bred among them a terrible pestilence.

[Sidenote:  A.D. 80 (a.u. 833)] [Sidenote:—­24—­] Another fire, above ground, in the following year spread over a very large portion of Rome while Titus was absent on business connected with the catastrophe that had befallen in Campania.  It consumed the temple of Serapis, the temple of Isis, the Saepta, the temple of Neptune, the Baths of Agrippa, the Pantheon, the Diribitorium, the theatre of Balbus, the stage-building of Pompey’s theatre, the Octavian buildings together with their books, and the temple of Capitoline Jupiter with its surrounding temples.  Hence the disaster seemed to be not of human but of divine contrivance.  Any one can estimate from the list of buildings that