Nature has taken back the ruins of Cumae so completely to her own bosom, that it is difficult to believe that on this desolate spot once stood one of the most powerful cities of antiquity, which colonised a large part of Southern Italy.  A sad, lonely, fateful place it is, haunted for ever by the gods of old, the dreams of men.  A silence, almost painful in its intensity, broods over its deserted fields; hardly a living thing disturbs the solitude; and the traces of man’s occupancy are few and faint.  The air seems heavy with the breath of the malaria; and no one would care to run the risk of fever by lingering on the spot to watch the sunset gilding the gloom of the Acropolis with a halo of kindred radiance.  Every breeze that stirs the tall grasses and the leaves of the brushwood of the dismantled citadel has a wail in it; the long-drawn murmur of the peaceful sea at the foot of the hill comes up with a melancholy cadence to the ear; and even on the beautiful cyclamens and veronicas that strive to enliven the ruins of the temples of Apollo and Serapis, emblems of the immortal youth and signs of the renewing power of Nature as they are, has fallen the gray shadow of the past.  Each pathetic bit of ruin has about it the consciousness of an almost fabulous antiquity, and by its very vagueness appeals more powerfully to the imagination than any historical associations.  “Time here seems to have folded its wings.”  In the immemorial calm that is in the air a thousand years seem as one day.  Through all the dim ages no feature of its rugged face has changed; and all the potent spell of summer noons can only win from it a languid smile of faintest verdure.  The sight of the scanty walls and scattered bits of Greek sculpture here take you back to the speechless ages that have left no other memorials of their activity.  What is fact and what is fable it were difficult to tell in this far-away borderland where they seem to blend.  And I do not envy the man who is not deeply moved at the thought of the simple, old-world piety that placed a holy presence in this solitary spot, and of the tender awe with which the mysterious divinity of Cumae was worshipped by generations of like passions and sorrows with ourselves—­whose very graves under the shadow of this romantic hill had vanished long ages before our history had begun.

Every schoolboy is familiar with the picturesque Roman legend of the Sibyl.  It is variously told in connection with the elder and the later Tarquin, the two Etruscan kings of Rome; and the scene of it is laid by some in Cumae—­where Tarquinius Superbus spent the last years of his life in exile—­and by others in Rome.  But the majority of writers associate it with the building of the great temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill.  Several prodigies, significant of the future fate of Rome and of the reigning dynasty, occurred when the foundations of this temple were dug and the walls of it built.  A fresh human head, dripping gore, was found deep