Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 1 -- Greek Mythology
The Styx (one of several, as we'll see in Chapter 55, A Superfluity of Surficial Stygian Streams),
Asopus, Inachus and Ladon (tributary to the westerly Alpheus) encircle Lake Pheneus. Only from
a topographic map can we have confidence in a river's direction, or alternatively, given a
particular reach of water, can we be sure of to which basin it belongs. Only in recent mapping
was it determined that the Ladon drains the region through the underlying limestone.
Nearby this Styx lies the Monastery Mega
Spiel, founded in 362 upon a grotto, and Limn
Kastrion Cave, 3 kilometers of underground
lakes linked by waterfalls.
The photo shows one of many nearby caverns.
If there was an entrance to the underworld, this
Arcadian region looks to qualify.
Basins such as these keep modern hydro-cartographers employed and -- as we will see in
Chapters 19-25 -- likewise the writers of pulp fiction.
To confuse an early geographer reliant on oral accounts, there are no less than three Asopus
rivers:
The Asopus above,
The Asopus of Boeotia, northwest of Athens, emptying into the Euboean Gulf, and
The Asopus on the Anatolian uplands of Sakarya, modern Turkey.
Sophocles said that the Inachos of Akarnania in Epirus joined the Inachos of the Argolid.
Strabo (Chapter 3, Roman Geographers) saw the problem of colonists transferring familiar names
to make the new land seem more like the old.
Hecataeus ... says that the Inachus of the Amphilochi, which flows from Mount Lacmus, from
whence also the Aeas descends, was distinct from the river of like name in Argolis, and was so
named after Amphilochus, from whom likewise the city of Argos was denominated
Amphilochian.
To geographers working from orally-derived accounts, however, like-names may have been
thought to be re-emerged reaches of a single watercourse.
Here's the summary of a tale older than geography itself, however.
Asopus, god of the Peloponnean River and son of Oceanus, was married to Metope, daughter of
river-god Ladon. Asopus' siblings included Acheron, Alpheus, Inachus, Styx and Maender -- the
latter etymologically recognizable today as a riverine pathway. Asopus and Metope had twenty
daughters, several of which were carried off by other gods.
The daughters of river deity -- and not insignificantly, nieces to gods of underground waters -- are
kidnapped to distant lands. Any reasonable Greek would of course expect to come upon them in
his travels.
We thus have
Underground rivers inexorably woven into ancient, but flexible, myth,
Contorted fluvial geomorphology and altered names, and
Rivers observed to disappear into or rise from the ground.
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