Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/163

142 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. as if he had been an eye-witness of that stupendous drama. The culminating point of the dome-like mass of the island rested upon a subterraneous cleft, into which it suddenly sank, leaving in its place a vacuum comparable in extent to the circuit-wall of Paris. To-day Thera, Therasia, and Aspronisi represent the outer rim of the old island. When the central mass fell in, it carried along with it a great piece of the northern coast ; through the yawning chasm the sea now rushed in with inde- scribable force, and tore away what still remained of the thin rampart on the west side. After this terrible eruption, the inward fire entered one of those periodical rests common to all volcanoes, and the shrunk island was peopled afresh. Herodotus, who often speaks of Thera, knows of no disaster concerning it. The eruption of 193 b.c, which threw up an island, the first of the small archipelago of Kaimenis, " burnt islands," between Thera and Therasia, is the first intimation we have of such an occurrence among ancient writers. Another upheaval occurred in 726 A.D., during which volcanic substances are said to have been transported by the wind to the coasts of Asia Minor and Macedonia. From 1570 a.d. no century went by without a fiery outburst, but which nobody seemed to heed, and which did little or no damage, until the memorable eruption of 1866, which raged on with unabated violence for more than a twelve month, and was the first to be observed and described by thoroughly competent witnesses, amongst whom M. Fouque easily comes first. The explosions may be said to have extended to 1870; the sea around was heated almost to boiling-point; even now the whitening smoke of fumaroles on the sides of the largest Kaimeni, whose cone rose to nearly 120 metres, testifies that life is not spent below. Had any such phenomenon taken place centuries before Herodotus, in the days of the Doric emigration in the Archipelago, some faint echo would have reached us at least, in the mythical form of a Chimaera or an Enceladus buried under another Etna. Curiously enough however, historians, poets, and geographers are equally silent respecting Thera and its local traditions.^ According to the authority of Herodotus, when the Spartan colony led by Theras reached the island, towards the twelfth century before our era, they found implanted there a Phoenician ^ Pindar, Pythics ; Strabo ; Pausanias.