For before now mighty earthquakes have rent the earth in diverse places, and violent rains have burst forth and flooded it, and the inroads and withdrawals of waves have often turned the dry land into sea and sea into dry land, and the might of winds and hurricanes has sometimes overthrown whole cities, and fires and flames have consumed the earth, either coming forth from heaven in former times, even as men say that in the days of Phaethon they burnt up the eastern regions of the earth, or else gushing forth and erupting from the earth in the west, as when the craters of Etna burst and flowed like a torrent over the earth.