Herculaneum

And priests with heads so closely shaven that Apuleius says they reflected light.

A fresco preserved in Herculaneum, another city destroyed alongside Pompeii, shows what a public ritual to Isis may have looked like.

A priest stands in the center, presumably holding a golden jar filled with sacred Nile water, bringing it out from the temple.

Priests with shaven heads stand around, with one fanning a fire on an altar.

Uh, let's see.

Other examples, uh, in Pompeii and the Herculaneum, Herculaneum walls.

Uh, ancient Roman sites preserved under volcanic ash featuring political campaign slogans, love notes, and insults scratched in the plaster.

Oh, there's more.

Matthew's Gospel, is no older than the third century.

It is curious, too, that no ancient Greek manuscripts have been found, either in Greece or Italy, excepting some rolls discovered in the ruins of Herculaneum.

one reason for this is no doubt the fact that when roman armies assailed athens and other greek cities they despoiled them not only of their statues and works of art but of their books as well these went to furnish the libraries of rome though it is probable that certain of them found their way back to greece in company with some of rome's own literary produce when constantine set up his capital and founded a library at byzantium another means by which greek manuscripts left the country was afforded by the eagerness of to me the second to extend the great library of alexandria to which end he brought books in all parts of greece and particularly in athens and rhodes the roman libraries did not survive the onslaughts of the barbarians who seem to have carried out a very thorough work of destruction in the eternal city but it is not unlikely that in some cases books among other portable treasures were carried away when their owners sought refuge in less troubled localities such as constantinople or alexandria still the fact remains that the contents of the roman libraries have disappeared and that for the ancient manuscripts now in our possession we are indebted to the tombs the temples the monasteries and the sands of egypt sometimes to show the strange adventures of some of these manuscripts.

The cartonnage cases in which mummies of the later period were enclosed were made of papyrus documents, which apparently had been treated as waste paper and put to all sorts of undignified uses.

Virgil's house stood, probably, on the wooden slope above the town of Naples, deep set in orange groves and lemon plantations, and in full view, to the north, of the snow-pinnacled Apennines, and, southward, of the blue waters of the bay.

Vesuvius, too, rose dark against the morning sun only a few leagues onward, and, at its foot, the doomed cities nestled, Pompeii and Herculaneum, then with still a hundred years of busy life to run.

Beehives in Virgil's day, as we can gather from certain ancient Roman bas-reliefs still in existence, were of a high, peaked dome pattern, and they were made of stitched bark or wattled osiers, as he himself tells us.

Many of the directions he gives as to their situation and surroundings are still golden rules for every beekeeper.

One of the most well-known volcanoes in the world is located here, not far from the Bay of Naples on Italy's west coast.

Mount Vesuvius has erupted numerous times over the centuries, most famously in AD 79, when it destroyed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

It is the only volcano on the European mainland to have erupted during the last hundred years.

The two other active Italian volcanoes, Etna and Stromboli, both in a state of almost continual eruption, are on islands.