We can assume that Berosus knew that the catastrophe was caused by a planet in contact with the earth. Seneca, in his work, Naturales quaestiones, describe the cataclysms of water and fire that visited this world and brought it to the brink of destruction. He also presented the opinion of Berosus, which is remarkable in that it reflects ancient knowledge similar to that at which we arrived after a long series of deductions and conclusions. Seneca wrote: "Berosus, the translator of Bel, attributed to the planets the cause of these perturbations." And he added: "His certainty in this matter was so great as to fix the dates of the universal conflagration and deluge. Everything terrestrial, he says, will be burned, when the stars which now follow different orbits will reunite in the sign of Cancer, and will place themselves in one line, so that a straight line would pass through the centres of all these globes. The deluge will come when the same planets will have conjunction in Capricorn."

Velikovsky 1950:260

The Greek term for the collision of planets is synodos, which, in the words of a modern interpreter, requires a meeting in space and also a collision of planets.

Velikovsky 1950:261

Pliny wrote: "Most men are not acquainted with a truth oknown to the founder of the science from their arduous study of the heavens," namely, that thunderbolts "are the fires of the three upper planets." He differentiated them from lightning caused by the dashing together of two clouds. Seneca, his contemporary, also distinguished lightnings that "seek houses" or "lesser bolts" and the bolts of Jupiter "by which the threefold mass of mountains fell."

A vivid picture of an interplanetary discharge is given by Pliny: "Heavenly fire is spit forth by the planet as crackling charcoal flies from a burning log." If such a discharge falls on the earth, "it is accompanied by a very great disturbance of the air," produced "by the birth-pangs, so to speak of the planet in travail."

Pliny says also that a bolt from Mars fell on Bolsena, "the richest town in Tuscany," and that the city was entirely burned up by this bolt. He refers to Tuscan writings as the source of his information. By Tuscan writings are meant Etruscan books.

Bolsena, or the ancient Volsinium, was one of the chief cities of the Etruscans, the people whose civilization preeded that of the Latin Romans on the Apennine Peninsula. The Etruscan states occupied the area of what was later known as Tuscany, between the Tiber and the Arno.

Near Bolsena, or Volsinium, is a lake of the same name. This lake fills a basin nine miles long, seven miles wide, and 285 feet deep. For a long time this basin was regarded as the water-filled

crater of a volcano. However, its area of 117 square kilometres exceeds by far that of the largest known craters on earth--those in the Andes in South America and those in the Hawaiian (Sandwich) Islands in the Pacific. Hence, the idea that the lake is the crater of an extinct volcano has recently been questioned. Morevover, although the bottom of the lake is of lava, and the ground around the lake abounds with ashes and lava and columns of basalt, the talus of a volcano is lacking.

Taking what Pliny said of an interplanetary discharge together with what has actually been found at Volsinium, one may wonder whether the cinders and the lava and the columns of basalt could possibly be the remains of the contact Pliny mentions. Again, if the discharge was caused by Mars, it would probably have occurred in the eighth pre-Christian centruy. The catastrophes of that century brought the great Etruscan civilization in sudden decline and launched the migration of newcomers to Italy leading to the founding of Rome. The Etruscans, as cited by Censornus and quoted in the Section of "The World AGes," thought that celestial prodigies augured the end of each age. "The Etruscans were versed in the science of the stars, and after having observed the prodigies with attention, they recorded these observations in their books."