We are so much accustomed to depend on the four great literary languages for the whole body of our information and amusement, that it occurs to few to consider that ignorance of other European dialects involves any inconvenience at all, except to those who have occasion to visit the countries in which they are spoken. Yet there is much of really valuable matter which sees the light only in the minor tongues, especially those of the industrious North, and with which the world has never been made familiar through translation. Joachim Frederic Schouw, the Danish botanist, is one of the writers of our day who has suffered most prejudicially both to his own fame and to the public from having employed only his native language. For his writings are not only valuable in a scientific point of view, but belong to the most popular order of scientific writing, and would assuredly have been general favourites, had not the bulk of them remained untranslated. His ‘Tableau du Climat de l’Italie’ has, however, appeared in French, and is a standard work. A little collection of very brief and popular essays, entitled ‘The Earth, Plants, and Man,’ has been translated both into German and English. One of these, styled ‘The Plants of Pompeii,’ is founded on a rather novel idea. The paintings on the walls of the disinterred houses of that city contain (among other things) many landscape compositions. Sometimes these are accessory to historical representations. But they often merely portray the scenery of ordinary out-door life. The old decorators of the Pompeian chambers had indeed an evident taste for those trivial tricks of theatrical deception, which are still very popular in Italy. Their verdure, sky, and so forth, seem often as if meant to impose on the spectator for a moment as realities; and are, therefore, executed in a “realistic” though sketchy style. “Consequently,” says Schouw, “the observation of the plants which are represented in these paintings will give, as far as they go, the measure of those which were familiar to the ancient eye, and will help to show the identities and the differences between the vegetation of the Campanian plains a hundred years after Christ, and that which adorns them now.”
We propose to follow the Professor through this confined but elegant little chapter of his investigations. But by restraining ourselves to this alone, we should be dealing with only part of a subject. In most regions, two thousand years have made considerable changes in the appearance of the vegetable covering of the earth; but in that land of volcanic influences in which Pompeii stood, great revolutions have taken place, during that time, in the structure of the ground itself. Sea and land have changed places; mountains have risen and sunk; the very outlines and main landmarks of the scene are other than what they were. Let us for a moment imagine ourselves gazing with Emperor Tiberius from his “specular height” on precipitous Capri, at that unequalled panorama of sea and land formed by the Gulf of Naples, as thence descried, and note in what respects the visible face of things has changed since he beheld it.
The central object in his view, as in that of the modern observer, was Vesuvius, standing out a huge insulated mountain mass, unconformable with the other outlines of the landscape, and covered then, as now, with its broad mantle of dusky green. Then, as now, its volcanic soil was devoted to the cultivation of the vine. But in other respects its appearance was widely different. No slender, menacing column of smoke rose perpetually from its summit. Nor was it lurid, at night, with that red gleam of the slow river of fire,
It was an extinct volcano, and had been so for unknown ages. Nor did it exhibit its present characteristic cone, nor probably its double top; Vesuvius and Somma were most likely one; and the deep half-moon-shaped ravine of the Atrio del Cavallo, which now divides them, is thought to be a relic of the ancient crater. That crater was a huge amphitheatrical depression, several miles in circuit, filled with pasture-lands and tangled woods. Spartacus and his servile army had used it not long before as a natural fortress. But this feature was scarcely visible to the spectator at Capri, opposite the mountain, to whom the summit must have appeared as a broad flat-topped ridge, in shape and height very similar to the Table Mountain at the Cape of Good Hope.
At the time in question, scarcely a few vague traditions remained to record the fact that the mountain had once “burnt.” The fiery legends of Magna Græcia related to the country west of Naples, where volcanic action had been more recent: the Phlegræan fields, the Market-place of Vulcan (Solfatara), the cone of Gnarime (Ischia), through which the imprisoned Typhœus breathed flame, from whence he has been since transferred to Vesuvius, as a Genoese monk informed us when we and he first looked on that volcano together. Vesuvius awoke from his sleep of unknown length, as every one knows, in A.D. 79, when he celebrated his resumption of authority by that grand “extra night” of the 24th August, which has had no rival since, in the way of pyrotechnical entertainment, except on the distant shores of Iceland, the West Indies, and the Moluccas. His period of activity lasted nearly a thousand years. Then he relapsed into lethargy for six hundred. In 1631, he had resumed (as old prints show), something nearly resembling the form which we have attributed to him in classical times. His top, of great height, swollen up by the slow accumulation of burning matter, without a vent, was a level plateau, with a pit-like crater, filled with a forest of secular oaks and ilexes: only a few “fumaroles,” or smoke-holes, remained here and there to attest his real character. Even the legends of his conflagrations had become out of date. The old “Orearch” or mountain-spirit, Vesevus, is portrayed by the local poet Pontanus in the fifteenth century, as a rustic figure, with a bald head, hump back, and cincture of brushwood—all fiery attributes omitted. Even his terrible name was only known to the learned: the people called him the “Monte di Somma.” The suburban features of a great luxurious city, convents, gardens, vineyards, hunting-grounds, and parks of the nobility, had crept again up the sides of the mountain, until they almost mingled with the trees on the summit. The approaching hour was not without its premonitory signs, many and strange. The phenomena which Bulwer makes his witch of Vesuvius recount, by way of warning, to Arbaces, are very closely borrowed from contemporary narratives of the eruption of 1631. Nor were the omens of superstition wanting, accommodated to the altered feelings of the times. At the Plinian eruption, the people imagined that the old giants buried in the Phlegræan fields had risen again, and renewed their battle with the gods: “for many phantoms of them,” says Dio Cassius, “were seen in the smoke, and a blast, as of trumpets, was heard.” In 1631, carriages full of devils were seen to drive, and battalions of diabolical soldiers to gather in marching array along the precipitous flanks of the mountain. The footsteps of unearthly animals were tracked on the roads. “A peasant of the name of Giovanni Camillo” (so we are informed by the Jesuit Giulio Cesare Recupito, a contemporary), “had passed Easter Eve at a farm-house of his own on the mountain. There, without having taken a mouthful of anything, he was overtaken by a profound slumber, from which awakening suddenly, he saw no longer before his eyes the likeness of the place where he had fallen asleep, but a new heaven, a new soil, a new landscape: instead of a hill-side covered with wood, there appeared a wall crossing the road, and extending on each side for a great distance, with a very lofty gate. Astonished at this new scene, he went to the gate to inquire where he was. There he found a porter of the order of St Francis, a young man in appearance. Many conjecture that this was St Antony of Padua. The porter at first seemed to repulse him, but afterwards admitted him into the courtyard, and guided him about. After a long circuit they arrived at a great range of buildings breathing fire from every window.” In short, the poor peasant was conducted, after the fashion of such visions, through the mansions of hell and purgatory, where he saw, of course, many of his acquaintance variously tormented. “At last, on the following day, he was restored to himself, and to Vesuvius: and was ordered to inform his countrymen that a great ruin was impending over them from that mountain: wherefore they should address their vows and prayers to God. On Easter Day, at noon, he came home, and was observed of many with his dress sprinkled with ashes, his face burnt black, as if escaped from a fire.” This was two years before the eruption, and during the interval Camillo always told the same story; wherefore, after passing a long time for either mad or drunk, he was finally raised to the dignity of a prophet. At last, on the night of the 15th December, the ancient volcano signalised his awakening by a feat of unrivalled grandeur. In forty-eight hours of terrific struggles, he blew away the whole cap of the mountain; so that, on the morning of the 18th, when the smoke at last subsided, the Neapolitans beheld their familiar summit a thousand feet lower than it had been before; while its southern face was seamed by seven distinct rivers of fire, slowly rolling at several points into the sea.
Since 1631, the frequency, if not the violence, of the eruptions seems to have gradually increased, and Vesuvius is probably more “active” now, in local language, than at any former time in his annals, having made the fortunes of an infinity of guides and miscellaneous waiters on Providence within the last twelve years, besides burning a forest or two, and expelling the peasantry of some villages. But his performances on a grand scale seem for the present suspended. Frequent eruptions prevent that accumulation of matter which produces great ones. Indeed, the late Mr Laing, whose ‘Notes of a Traveller’ show him to have been that identical “sturdy Scotch Presbyterian whig” who visited Oxford in company with Lockhart’s Reginald Dalton, “reviling all things, despising all things, and puffing himself up with all things,” deliberately pronounced the volcano a humbug, and believed the depth of its subterranean magazines to be extremely trifling. Still, the curious traveller, like that fabulous Englishman who visited the lion-tamer every night for the chance of seeing him devoured, cannot help looking with a certain eagerness for the occurrence of those two interesting catastrophes, of which the day and hour are written down in the book of the Fates—that combination of high tide, west wind, and land-flood, which is to drown St Petersburg; that combination of south-east wind and first-class eruption which is to bury Naples in ashes. This finale seemed nearer in that recent eruption of December 1860, which spent its fury on Torre del Greco, than perhaps on any former occasion; but once more the danger passed away.
To return, however, from this digression, which has nothing to excuse it except the interest which clings even to often-repeated stories respecting the popular old volcano. Other features in that wonderful panorama, seen from Capri, have undergone scarcely inferior changes since the time of Tiberius. Yonder rich tract of level land at the mouth of the Sarno, between Torre dell’ Annunziata and Castellamare, did not exist. The sea has retreated from it. Tiberius saw, instead of it, a deep bay washing the walls of the compact little provincial city of Pompeii. But the neighbouring port of Stabiæ is gone: not a vestige of its site remains. Above it to the right, Monte Sant’Angelo, and the limestone sierra of which it forms a part, remain, no doubt, unchanged by time. Only that marvellous range of Roman villas and gardens which lined its foot for leagues, almost rivalling the structures of the opposite Bay of Baiæ for magnificence, has disappeared, no one knows how or when. The diver off the coast of Sorento can touch with his hand the long ranges of foundation-work, brick and marble, which now lie many feet beneath the deep clear water. It was a strange fit of short-lived magnificence, that which induced the grandest of millionnaires, the chiefs of the Augustan age, to raise their palaces, all round the Gulf of Naples, on vaulted ranges of piles laid within the sea, so that its luxurious ripple should be heard under the rooms in which they lived. Niebuhr, who, with all his curious insight into the ways of antiquity, was not superior to the temptation of finding a new reason for everything, asserts that they did so in order to escape the malaria. But that mysterious evil influence extended some way beyond the shore. The country craft will, to this day, keep as far as they can, in the summer nights, off the coast of the Campagna, while the quiet land-breeze is wafting death from the interior. The real causes were, doubtless, what the writers of the time disclose. The land close to the shore was dear and scanty, and ill-accommodated for building, from its steepness. The first new-comer who set the fashion of turning sea into land, was imitated by others in the mere wantonness of wealth, until the whole shore became lined with palatial edifices, like the Grand Canal of Venice; but not so durably. These classical structures, frequently delineated with more or less detail in the Pompeian frescoes, were as beautiful and as transitory as those of our dreams; or like the vision which Claude Lorraine transferred to canvass in the most poetical of landscapes, his ‘Enchanted Palace.’ Judging from the singular phenomena exhibited by the ‘Temple of Serapis,’ and by other topographical records, geologists have concluded that land and sea, in this volcanic region, wax and wane in long successions of ages. Thus the sea rose (or rather the land sank) on the coast of the Bay of Naples for about eleven centuries previous to A.D. 1000; then the reverse movement took place until about A.D. 1500: and the land is now sinking again. If so, these marine palaces must have gradually subsided into the sea, and their owners may have been driven out by the invasion of cuttle-fish and sea-hedgehogs, and other monsters of the Mediterranean shallows, in their best bedrooms, even before Norman or Saracen incursions had reduced them to desolation. But whatever the cause of their disappearance, they had vanished before modern history began: nor has modern luxury, in its most profuse mood, ever sought to reproduce them. Their submarine ruins remain as memorials of ages when men were at all events more daring and earnest in their extravagance, and the “lust of the eye and the pride of life” were deified on a grander scale, than at any other epoch of the world’s history.
Naples herself, the “idle” and the “learned” (for the ancients called her somewhat inconsistently by both epithets, nor had she as yet acquired her more recent soubriquet of the “beautiful”), formed a far less conspicuous object in the view than now; it was a place of some twenty or thirty thousand souls, according to Niebuhr’s conjectural estimate; confined between the modern Mole on the one hand, and the Gate del Carmine on the other; and nestling close in the neighbourhood of the sister city Herculaneum. The lofty line of the houses on the Chiaia—of which you may now almost count the windows in the top storeys from the sea-level at Capri, through that pellucid atmosphere, while the lower storeys are hidden by the earth’s curvature—did not then exist. But instead of it there extended the endless terraces and colonnades, the cypress avenues and plane groves, of that range of fortress-palaces erected by Pollio and Lucullus, enlacing island, and beach, and ridge, even to the point of Posilippo, with tracery of dazzling marble. Here, however, the mere natural changes have been small, except that an island or two (like that of the Castel dell’ Uovo) has since been joined to the continent. But farther west, round the Bay of Baiæ, fire and water have dealt most fantastically with the scenery. Scarcely a prominent feature on which the Roman eye rested remains unchanged. Quiet little Nisida was a smoking semi-volcano. Yonder level dun-coloured shore, from Pozzuoli to the Lucrine, was under water, and the waves dashed against a line of cliff now some miles inland. That crater-shaped Lake of Agnano, now the common resort of Neapolitan holiday-makers, did not exist; it must have been formed by some unrecorded convulsion of the dark ages. Yonder neatly truncated cone, rising five hundred feet above the plain, seems as permanent a feature in the landscape as any other of the “everlasting hills;” but it was the creation of a few days of violent eruption, only three centuries ago—as its name of Monte Nuovo still indicates—whether by “upheaval” or by “ejection,” philosophers dispute. But the beautiful Lucrine Lake, the station of Roman fleets and the very central point of Roman luxury, disappeared in the same elemental commotion; leaving a narrow stagnant pool behind. Only yon slight dyke or barrier of beach, between this shrunken mere and the sea, deserves respect; for that has remained, strange to say, almost unaltered throughout. It is one of the very oldest legendary spots of earth; doubtless the very road along which Hercules dragged the oxen of Geryon; the very “narrow shore” on which Ulysses landed, in order to call up the melancholy shades of the dead. Farther inland, again, Avernus remains unchanged, in shape at least; but many and strange are the revolutions which it has undergone in other respects. We first hear of it as a dark pool, surrounded by forests; the bed, doubtless, of an ancient crater filled with water, and retaining much of volcanic action; but not (as commonly supposed) fatal to the birds that flew over it. That notion is not classical; or rather, it is founded on a misconception of classical authorities. The pool is not called by the best writers “lacus Avernus” but “lacus Averni,” the lake of the Avernus. What is an Avernus? Lucretius tells us that it is a spot where noxious gases escape from the earth, so that the birds which fly over it fall dead on the earth or into the lake if there happens to be a lake below them.
And Virgil’s description, accurately construed, gives exactly the same meaning.
It was the exhalations from the mysterious cavern that were deadly, not those from the lake. Such an “Avernus” is the “Gueva Upas” or Valley of Death, in Java, to which condemned criminals were formerly sent to perish; whence the romance about the Upas Tree. And such an Avernus, on a small scale, still exists on the shore of the peaceful little Lake of Laach in Germany, also an extinct crater: there are spots on its beach where bird-corpses are to be found in numbers, killed by mephitic exhalations. But—to return to our lake—it must at that time have lain at or (like some other extinct craters) below the level of the sea; for Augustus’s great engineering operation consisted in letting the sea into the lake.
Fifteen hundred years afterwards, and just before the Monte Nuovo eruption, the place was visited by that painful old topographer, Leandro Alberti, the Leland of Italy. The channel made by Augustus was then gone; but the lake was still on a level with the sea, for he asserts that in storms the sea broke into it: and the water, as he expressly affirms, was salt. Now, its level is several feet above that of the sea, and the water is fresh. The upheaval must have been gradual and peaceful, for the outline of the lonely mere is as perfectly rounded now as the poet Lycophron described it;—but a portion only of that bewildering succession of changes of which this coast has been the theatre: the latest vibration of that vast commotion figured in the legendary war of the Giants. Nor is it quite so wild a conjecture as some have deemed it, that the tradition which peopled this bright coast with Cimmerians—then dwellers in the everlasting mist, on the border-land between the dead and the living—had its origin in the tales of primeval navigators, who had visited the neighbourhood during some mighty and prolonged eruption, covering sea and shore with a permanent darkness which “might be felt:” like the coast of Iceland in 1783, when for a whole summer continual eruptions arose from the sea as well as the land: when “the noxious vapours that for many months infected the air, enveloped the whole island in a dense fog which obscured the sun, and was perceptible even in England and Holland.”
Still farther westward in our panoramic view, the confusion between past and present becomes even more undecipherable. Baiæ has disappeared; a stately city of pleasure, which, to judge by its remaining foundations, rose on a hillside in terraces, something like its British counterpart Bath, but with its foot washed by the Mediterranean instead of the Avon: so has Misenum, with its naval station: and not only are these towns gone, but the land on which they stood seems so to have changed its shape, through earthquakes, marine encroachments, and the labour of men, that its very outlines are altered, until the eye rests at last on the peak of Ischia, which ends the semicircle.
Thus much by way of introduction to the more immediate point of our inquiry: the changes in the general aspect and character of the earth’s vegetable covering which have taken place in the same period of two thousand years, and in the same locality.
One of the greatest features of interest to the scientific botanist, and even to the less instructed lover of nature, which Italy presents, consists in the circumstance that the northern and southern types of vegetation—to speak more closely, the northern-temperate and the sub-tropical—meet together, especially in its warmer regions, in stronger contrast than probably anywhere else. The same remark is true, no doubt, of the Mediterranean shores in general: but those of France and of Turkey approach more to the general northern aspect; those of Barbary to the tropical: in favoured Italy the two types seem sometimes to blend and sometimes to contrast in ever-changing and ever-striking variety. The same was doubtless, to some extent, the case in ancient times. But the northern character was probably far more prevalent than now. The early Greek settlers landed on a forest region, where the common deciduous trees of the north, now driven back to the scantily clothed gorges of the central Apennines, flourished in great abundance. Such a nature as this may still be observed in the few forest patches left in the higher Abruzzi, the Sila of Calabria, and so forth. “The beech-forest,” says Schouw, “is called the symbol of the Danish character. But I have wandered in Calabria through large and beautiful beech-woods, on the higher plateaux of the Apennines, where the vegetation as well as the bracing air constantly reminded me of my home.” Probably the wild shores of Corsica, or those of Dalmatia, with their shaggy growth of northern forest and their undergrowth of mixed northern and Mediterranean shrubs, present an aspect more resembling what the followers of Ulysses and Æneas beheld when they landed, than may elsewhere be found. We may notice historical traces of the continued existence of this ruder and fresher nature, not only in the agricultural writers of the Romans, who speak far more of deciduous trees than of the evergreen, now deemed so characteristic of Italy, but in the well-known pages of Virgil. There is not in general much of “local colour” in the ‘Eclogues’ and ‘Georgics:’ that is a poetical artifice of later day. But what there is, represents the physiognomy, not of the Lombard plains where he was born, but of the neighbourhood of Naples in which he lived. His sea-sand is “black,” not brown or yellow, like that of all other bards,—the volcanic sand of the bays of Baiæ and Naples—very coal-dust in appearance. When he recommends the farmer to place his hives near a tree, for the bees to swarm on, it is a “palm-tree, or huge oleaster”—advice which he might as well have tendered to a Scythian as to a colonus of his native Mantua. Now, the general idea which the verses of Virgil convey of the region with which he is concerned, is that of a sylvan country—not, emphatically, the “land of the cypress and myrtle,” but of the oak, ash, linden, wych-elm, beech, citizens of the great Transalpine forests. Some of the trees of which he celebrates the grandeur are now not only become scarce in his country, but it is difficult to ascertain with accuracy their real character. The mighty æsculus, for example, the noblest denizen of Latian forests, which formed of itself great woods, “lata æsculeta,” is a mere puzzle for antiquarian botanists: no one knows what it was, and there may be some question whether it has not disappeared from the face of earth, or whether it survives only in some nearly extinct variety of oak.[5]
Man has doubtless done much towards the effecting of this change, the more valuable plants of the south having been gradually introduced, and the indigenous woods cleared for their reception; but Nature has done much of herself. In the remaining woodland districts of maritime Italy—such as the Maremme of Tuscany and the Latian Campagna—the evergreen species seem to be gradually supplanting the deciduous, the foreign the indigenous. We talk familiarly of the hardy vegetation of the North; but, where the two meet on conditions of climate endurable by both, the children of the tropical sun seem to show the greater hardihood, and to come out survivors in the great battle for existence. Their every aspect, their rough bark and leathery leaves, seem indicative of a stronger vitality than that which animates the more majestic but more delicate structure of the leafy giants of the northern temperate zone. A similar law—if the analogy does not appear too fanciful—seems to govern the migrations of trees and shrubs, and of the human family itself. The North produces the races of more commanding aspect: it sends them forth conquering and to conquer; they establish empires, they subjugate the so-called feebler races of the South; but, in the midst of their conquests, they sicken and perish, and become extinct. The children of the South gradually penetrate northwards, and by their own more prolific multiplication, as well as by crossing or intermixture, in which their more essentially vigorous nature attains predominance, they efface the type of the Northern race, and cause it ultimately to disappear. What has become of the descendants of those hordes which swarmed from the populous North, in the decline of the Roman Empire, over all the regions adjacent to the Mediterranean? They have vanished, or are scarcely recognised by antiquaries in a few problematical instances, where small insulated communities, thought to be of Teutonic or Gothic origin, maintain a precarious existence among the descendants of their former subjects. Where are the historical Gauls, with their tall figures, their fleshy frames, their golden hair, and eyes of truculent blue? A few of them, possibly, to be found in Flanders; but anything less like the Gaul of antiquity than the sinewy, nervous, agile, undersized, brown-skinned, and black-haired biped, who now inhabits some eighty out of the eighty-five departments of France, can hardly be imagined. What is become even of the purer Northern breed of Germany itself? Scarcely to be found, except on the shores of the Baltic: elsewhere the ordinary European type prevails, olive skin and cheveux châtains. “I sought for the fair population of classical Germany in vain,” says Niebuhr, “until I found it in Scandinavia.” On the other hand, the Greek in Provence, the Moor in Spain, Southrons, transplanted into those countries in no very great numbers, have impressed their type on the general population, and, as it were, changed the very breed. When dark and fair intermix, the odds seem to be greatly in favour of the dark complexion prevailing in the offspring. We heard lately of a society formed in France for the conservation of the “Xanthous,” or yellow-haired variety of the human race, which they regard as the true aristocracy of nature, and rightly conceive to be threatened with extinction: their object to be attained by portioning from time to time blonde maidens who might take to themselves husbands of the same complexion. Even so—to return to our trees—the meridional vegetation gradually drives back that of the North in the battlefield of species. If we figure to ourselves the appearance of the plains of England two thousand years ago, with their indigenous vegetable covering only—without the common elm, the linden, plane, sycamore, poplar, acacia, chestnut, fruit-trees of every kind, and cultivated plants in general—without, probably, a single species of pine or fir, or indeed any evergreen but box, yew, and holly—and remember that every foreign plant has displaced a native, we may gather some idea of the conquests which the South has effected even here, not indeed without the aid of human industry, but in part by sheer physical superiority. But on the Mediterranean coast these conquests have been much more marked. Take the following description of the change which two thousand years have made in the common flora of Greece, from the work of a German botanist (Fraas, Klima und Pflanzenwelt):—
“The following species from the flora known to Theophrastus have either entirely disappeared from Greece, or have emigrated from the habitations which he assigns to them, and withdrawn into the moister climate of more northerly regions; the varieties commonly known to the ancients of the Linden; the Yew, that child of damp and shady hillsides, of which rare and dwarfed specimens only are now to be found on the highest mountains; the Hornbeam, the Beech, and Alder of Homer; and, with scanty exceptions, the ‘spear-furnishing’ Cornel and the tall Ash. Instead of these, another class of plants has conquered for itself greater space in the vegetable realm—thick-leaved, hard-leaved, down-covered, thorny and prickly bushes, evergreen for the most part, and adding, by their rich flowers, great beauty to the spring. This vegetation, analogous to that of the American savannas and Asiatic steppes, has now replaced the ancient flowery meadows, resembling those of middle Europe, with wastes of heath and pines, carob-trees and grey oleasters. Together with these we have the various kinds of arbutus, myrtle, oleander, philyreæ, pistachios, kermes-oaks, rosemary, thyme, and the flora of dry mountain regions in general.”
Let us now see how far the historical indications furnished by the Pompeian relics corroborate what has been already said respecting this “intrusion of the climate of the South,” as Fraas terms it, into the regions north of the Mediterranean.
In order to ascertain the plants known to the citizens of Pompeii, says Schouw, two records remain to us—namely, the pictures discovered in its ruins, and the remnants of plants themselves. But, he adds, the use of the first requires some care:—“Many representations of plants are naturally so little precise that their particular species cannot be ascertained, as would be the case in modern pictures of the same kind. And, if the plant be recognisable, it does not follow as certain that it was known at Pompeii, for the plants of foreign countries are also occasionally represented. Thus the Nile-nature is often delineated—marshy landscapes, with the lotus and the nelumbium, the hippopotamus, ichneumon, flocks of geese, and date-palms at the water’s edge; as, for instance, in the lower rim of the famous mosaic supposed to represent Alexander and Darius. Frequently, also, the representations are fanciful—for instance, a laurel growing out of a date-palm, and even appearing to rise out of it as a shoot from the same root—a physiological impossibility, unless, perhaps, it has reference to that strange practice of the ancients—the planting of different kinds so close to each other that they might appear to the eye connected.”
After making these allowances, we may safely arrive at the following conclusions. Among the trees which gave the Neapolitan landscape its character were then (as now) the stone-pine and the cypress. The former is frequently represented, with its peculiar branchless stems and cloud-like head—the product not only of close planting but of actual pruning in nurseries, as may now be noticed in the neighbourhood of Naples. This tree was cultivated for its edible nuts; and pine cones have been found among the charred objects in the shops of Pompeii. The beautiful cypress often occurs in the Pompeian frescoes, not unfrequently mingled with the pine, and gracefully combining with the outlines of the fanciful villas and temples represented. It is Gilpin, we think, who points out the peculiar adaptation, by contrast, of the spiral cypress and poplar to the long horizontal lines of southern buildings; while the square masses of the lime and elm combine well with the pointed Gothic. The “Pinus halepensis,” adds Schouw (the common maritime pine of Italy), is also found in these pictures. The vine, of course, occurs constantly—so does the olive. They were, no doubt, as universal then as now; and preferred respectively, as they do now, the volcanic and the calcareous hills in the vicinity of Naples. Preserved olives were found in Pompeii, which even retained something of their taste. The myrtle, and the beautiful oleander, or laurel-rose, as the French call it—common shrubs of to-day—also appear in the frescoes. Add to these the laurel and bay tribe, the ilex, fig, pomegranate, the “arundo donax” or gigantic reed—cultivated then as now for its various uses, and covering the marshy grounds with its dense brake, strange to the northern eye, are most of them recognisable also in these pictures. And we are enabled to say that the common vegetable forms on which the eye of the Pompeian citizen rested were, to this extent, similar to those on which his descendant gazes now.
But there were many species, now common, then rare or unknown, some of which are mentioned by Schouw in the little essay before us; others, we are able to add, from different sources. The aloe or agave, and the Indian fig (figue de Barbarie, as the French call it), are now among the familiar plants of maritime Italy. The former vigorously protrudes itself in every stony, solitary spot, from the old ramparts of Genoa to the lava-fields of Aeta; the latter is half-cultivated in a careless sort of way for its luscious bulb; and the two seem, in many places, to have almost extirpated the older vegetation. Both of these lusty children of the South are of quite modern origin in Italy, having come over from America. Some have fancied that the pineapple is represented in one Pompeian fresco. “But this,” says our Professor, “is undoubtedly the edible crown of a young dwarf palm, or chamærops humilis.”
A still more important want of classical ages was that of the whole tribe of Agrumi, as the Italians call them—the orange, lemon, citron, and so forth. “Italy was not then,” says our Professor, “the land
and was consequently without one of the favourite features with which æsthetic Northerns adorn their notions of Italy. They are of course absent from the frescoes. They were known to Pliny as foreign plants only. The “Median Apple” (citron) was cultivated in Italy no earlier than the third century after Christ; lemons came from the Saracens; oranges, last of all, were brought by the Portuguese from the East.
The white, or silk-worm mulberry, now the commonest of all trees in the richer parts of Italy, was also unknown to the Pompeians. Its cultivation on the peninsula began, according to Schouw, in the sixth century. Silken fabrics were scarce and expensive, and imported by the Romans from the East. Voltaire somewhere makes the great superiority of a femme de chambre of Madame de Pompadour over the Empress Livia consist in the unlimited enjoyment of silk stockings. It may, however, be questioned whether the Empress would have appreciated such a luxury, or whether, as the audacious French traveller, Monsieur Nodier, asserted respecting the Glasgow ladies not many years ago, she would not have got rid of such incumbrances whenever free from the restraints of company. The picturesque Carouba tree (Ceratonia siliqua), which now forms groves along many parts of the Italian coast, is also probably of modern introduction. We may add another more important plant which the Professor has omitted—the chestnut. Not, of course, that this magnificent native of Thessaly was unknown to Roman antiquity. It was, on the contrary, extensively cultivated in ancient Italy for its fruit. Naples was particularly famous for the excellence of its chestnuts—
such as Martial appetisingly describes, and such as that flâneur of a poet had doubtless often purchased, scalding hot, from the tripod of some hag-granddaughter of Canidia or Sagana, in the alleys of the learned city. But it was probably as yet a fruit-tree only. Introduced but two centuries before Christ,[6] it had not had time to form forests; to become, as it now is, the characteristic tree of the lower Apennines, supplanting its ancient but thriftless relative the beech, and driving the latter back to the narrow domain which it still occupies on the top of Monte Sant’ Angelo. The gnarled and twisted chestnut trunks, with their pointed foliage, under which Salvator Rosa studied his art when sojourning among the brigands at the back of Amalfi, have no counterpart in the drawings of Pompeii any more than in the poetry of Virgil.
Of cultivated crops, wheat and barley are represented in the Pompeian frescoes, and grains of them have been discovered in the houses. In one pretty sketch a quail is picking at an ear of barley; in another at a kind of millet. Other less known cereals seem to have been familiar to the ancients. But two of the most important, both in an economic and picturesque point of view, are missing from these sketches,—maize and rice. Both are of modern introduction. The “polenta” of the classical peasant was of barley. Cotton, it need scarcely be added, is of very modern introduction; it now covers extensive fields at the southern foot of Vesuvius.
After this long list of acquisitions, we must turn to some few instances of vegetable forms familiar to the ancient eye, and which the modern misses. The absolute extinction of a species is indeed a rare thing. Decandolle, in his ‘Geographie Botanique,’ likens the changes in vegetation to those which take place in a language: the appearance of a new word, or a new species, attracts observation at once; the disappearance of an old one is very gradual, and seldom total. We have already spoken of the comparative scarcity at present of deciduous trees, and of one—the æsculus—which modern botanists have been unable to define. But one or two ornamental foreigners, introduced in old times, have also disappeared, or nearly so. The most remarkable of these is the oriental Plane. Every Latin scholar is well aware of the modish passion for these trees which prevailed among the wealthy Romans, a preference not wholly æsthetic; it was partly a fashion, borrowed like other fashions from the despotic East, in days when republican millionaires at Rome, like those of Washington, had begun to discover that everything really meritorious came from lands possessing a “strong government.” The Platanus had been from hoary antiquity the object of veneration of Persian monarchs and Grecian heroes. No tree had anything like the same amount of historic and fabulous tradition attached to it. Marsyas was hanged on one, when duly skinned, by Apollo: Agamemnon and Menelaus planted a couple, each of which, a monstrous relic, was shown to Pausanias in his travels. Xerxes had caused his whole host to halt before a noble specimen in Lycia. “He was so enamoured of it,” says old Evelyn, “that for some days neither the concernment of his expedition, nor interest of honour, nor the necessary motion of his portentous army, could persuade him from it. He styled it his mistress, his minion, his goddess: and when he was forced to part from it, he caused a picture of it to be stamped on a model of gold, which he continually wore about him.” As it is now the glory of Ispahan and Shiraz, so it was of the Greek cities of yore. The groves of the Academe and Lyceum were composed of it. “By the Plane Tree” was the favourite oath of Socrates: the more shame to him, said his accuser Melitus, that he should blaspheme so fine a tree. The famous Plane of Buyukdéré on the Bosphorus is popularly said to serve even now as a tent for the Seraskier when he encamps there. The Romans took to it, as we have said, with that extravagant enthusiasm which characterised their follies; “the only tree,” says Pliny, in his sententious stoical way, “which ever was transplanted for the sake of its shade alone.” Julius Cæsar himself planted the first specimen in Spain, at Corduba; it was a noble tree in Martial’s time, and flourished, as he says, by being irrigated with wine.
It became so common in the Roman pleasances, that groves of planes, as well as laurels, are spoken of by the same poet as the ornaments of every citizen’s place of ordinary pretensions.
Undoubtedly, in fashionable Campania, it must have been so common as to form a familiar feature in the landscape. But it perished with the remainder of that luxurious civilisation. In a convent garden at Naples—so a traveller tells us—there remains one enormous specimen, of an antiquity which can only be conjectured: the grandchild, it may be, of some forlorn ornament of a ruined villa, which had seen the Goths march into Italy. We have heard of no others of the genuine race. Of late years, indeed, the plane has begun to resume its popularity as an ornamental tree, and for the same reasons—its delightful shade, namely, and its adaptation to the atmosphere of great cities; being able to throw off the noxious residuum of coal smoke by the peeling of its bark. Planes are now the common trees of the market place in Southern Europe, as they are in our London squares. But, unhappily, the variety almost always seen is of new importation, not of the old stock; not the princely oriental, but its plebeian cousin the occidental, or button-wood of the United States; faster in growth, taller,—stronger perhaps—but incomparably uglier: a melancholy instance of the encroachments of modern democracy.
To the Oriental plane we must add the date-palm: not indeed as strange now to the Italian eye, nor as very abundant in classical times; but as certainly more abundant then than now; an exception to the general law which we have indicated of the increasing prevalence of Southern forms of vegetation. The date-palm in Italy is, after all, but an occasional exotic. Mayer, the painstaking German author of a book on ‘Naples and the Neapolitans,’ says there are scarcely a dozen or two of them in the gardens of that city and its suburbs. There are eight or ten only in Rome, says M. Ampère. It does not ripen its fruit. It dwells uncomfortably, in the uncongenial neighbourhood of the pine; for in America and other unsophisticated regions, the natural limit of the palm ends where that of the pine begins. Picturesque as its solitary form often is, in the villa garden, or behind the convent wall, we cannot look at it without thinking of some poor captive Saracen maiden, shivering at the door of a Northern crusading baron. Even on the coast of the Riviera, where it appears to thrive the most, it affords a melancholy sight when writhing under the icy Mistral, which ever and anon turns the flank of the precarious barrier of the Maritime Alps, and whirls its blasts of snow-dust against the broad leaves. It appears in many of the Pompeian frescoes. Schouw suggests that this does not prove it a native, as the scenes represented may be foreign or symbolical. But the caution is unnecessary. The date-palm was certainly common of yore in maritime Italy, though no doubt in single specimens.[7] “Vulgo in Italiâ, sed steriles,” says Pliny: who accurately distinguishes it from the dwarf-palm or chamærops, then, as now, more characteristic of Sicily. We have already noticed the use for which Virgil recommends it in the ‘Georgics.’ Varro, ‘De Re Rusticâ,’ is still more to the point, when he classes the fibres of the palm along with flax, hemp, and reeds, among materials grown on the farm, which may be turned to account for making cordage.
“Thus we perceive,” concludes our naturalist, “that the vegetable world, and in particular the list of cultivated vegetables, has undergone many changes since the age when Pompeii flourished; and that, while the ancient Pompeians enjoyed a great superiority over the moderns in respect of many enjoyments of life, particularly those arising from the arts, they lacked nevertheless some very valuable plants which increased geographical knowledge and extended commerce have procured for their descendants.”
But however this may be, no one can well contemplate in earnest these relics of a most curious and refined civilisation—in some respects perhaps the most curious and refined which the world has ever seen—and return with satisfaction to the coarse generalisation of the disciples of universal progress in the affairs of humanity, with whose speculations we have been lately surfeited. The feelings which such inquiries excite are assuredly more akin to those with which they inspired the proud and melancholy Leopardi, when he turned from them and from the wealth of conception and nobleness of sentiment with which the ancient world abounded, to that long degradation of subsequent ages, out of which humanity is in truth only now emerging. Very grand, though profoundly sorrowful, are those lines of his, entitled ‘Bruto minore,’ in which he portrays the expiring patriot, not as bewailing his present catastrophe, nor calling on the gods for present revenge, but as brooding, in utter hopelessness of spirit, over “the dark forward and abysm of time”—the Erebus-like blackness of that prospect of coming degeneracy and decay: the trance of ages, into which the human soul was about to fall.