Mount Aetna
place · 3 works · 3 mentions · 7 anchored passages
Aetna · Aetna's Mount · Aetna's fire-streaming rock · Aetna's fires · mount Aetna · the mountain · the rock of Aetna
in the texts
Cyclops
The volcano in Sicily that serves as the setting of the play, location of the Cyclops's cave
O Hephaestus, lord of Aetna, rid thyself for once and all of a troublesome neighbour by burning his bright eye out.
This is mount Aetna, the highest point in Sicily.
— Mount Aetna in Sicily, before the cave of the Cyclops.
De Rerum Natura
The volcano in Sicily whose eruptions Lucretius explains through natural causation.
Go tearing on, and Aetna's fires o'erflow,
Whereby athrough the throat of Aetna 's Mount
Such vast tornado-fires out-breathe at times,
Letters to Lucilius
The volcano in Sicily, discussed both as a natural phenomenon and as a traditional poetic subject.
Whether your Aetna can fall away and tumble in upon itself, whether the unceasing force of its fires will drag down that lofty peak, conspicuous over the wide reaches of the sea, I do not know;
What shall I give you not to describe Aetna in your poem, not to touch this set theme handled by every poet?
Yet neither claim is incredible, neither that the mountain, which is daily devoured, is shrinking and does not remain the same, since the fire does not eat away the mountain itself, but blazes up out of some hollow basin in its depths and feeds elsewhere, so that the fire has not the mountain as its fuel, but as its passage.