Facing the traditional assessment of earthquakes as the highest expression of divine wrath against human beings, an image especially used since the Middle Ages, the detailed analysis of a series of testimonies collected by Greek and Latin authors let us verify that in Antiquity earthquakes were regarded as an expressing of arrival of a divine power, usually from the inner part of the earth. It was a manifestation of the gods faced with human beings from which could derive both positive and negative consequences, but it was always afraid possibility that a divinity gave up its stayamong human beings and, therefore, failed to protect them. Keywords: earthquakes, antiquity, gods, wrath, epiphany.