fas51, did you see stone steps in this cavern?

No steps, a walk-in on level ground.

Larry,

I mis-spoke before regarding the West face. It should be the East to North face of the mount. The West face would be on the sea side and it was not in that location.

Does anyone know who pseudo-Justin is? What he wrote about Cuma? And what year he wrote about Cuma?

Well, pseuedo-Justin wasn't a "who" actually. Justin Martyr, also known as St. Justin was an early Christian apologist, a convert from paganism. He is generally regarded as among the foremost interpreters of the early Gospels in the 2nd century.

And in that same time period, pagan philosophers began to attack Christianity in a systematic statement of their beliefs. These Montanistic prophets have been referred to as pseudo-prophets.

Justin died in 165; "pseudo-Justin" is referred to by those studying the pseudepigraphical writings (pseudepigraphy covers the false ascription of names of authors to works, even to perfectly authentic works that make no such claim within their text) who note that these writings are generally uncertain and the question of genuineness often undecided.

So you can see where there is a scholastically sticky problem with being completely sure, in certain gray areas, who wrote what when. There was a pseudo-Ignatius and many others "pseudo's" to whom literary notes or works have been attributed with greatly varying degrees of acceptance as being valid or truthful.

A large number of works have circulated from early times under Justin’s name, all of them spurious.

The famous "Antro di Sibilia" at Cuma was discovered, as you probably know, in 1932 by Amedeo Maiuri and his identification of the site was based upon a description by Virgil in the Aenid, 6th book, as well as by an anonymous author known as pseudo-Justin.

This is the best I can do for you as my research or scholastic reach does not go much beyond this.

Larry

Yeah, but that's still pretty good, Larry.

Yours,

Pseudo-Jeff