Herculaneum

(hur-kū-la'ne-um,) a famous city of anc. Italy, in the Campagna, 8 m. S.E. of Naples, buried under an eruption of lava from Mt. Vesuvius, A. D. 79. Its ruins were accidentally discovered in 1713, by the Prince d'Elbeuf, a French nobleman, since which period a systematic course of excavation has restored to the world many of the most pricele relics of antique art, buried for sixteen centuries in the bowels of the earth. [s. 451]