Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 28 -- Et In Arcadia Ego
Ovid's Metamorphoses by Ovid's relates how the river god Alpheus pursued the beautiful nymph
Arethusa who bathed in his waters. Appealing to her patron Diana, goddess of nature, to escape,
Arethusa was transformed into water.
I cried out "Help me. I will be taken. Diana, help the one who bore your weapons for you,
whom you often gave your bow to carry, and your quiver with all its arrows!" The goddess was
moved, and raising an impenetrable cloud, threw it over me.
The river-god circled the concealing fog, and in ignorance searched about the hollow mist.
Twice, without understanding, he rounded the place, where the goddess had concealed me,
and twice called out ‘Arethusa, O Arethusa!’
Cold sweat poured down my
imprisoned limbs, and dark drops
trickled from my whole body.
Wherever I moved my foot, a pool
gathered, and moisture dripped
from my hair, and faster than I
can now tell the tale I turned to
liquid. And indeed the river-god
saw his love in the water, and
putting off the shape of a man he
had assumed, he changed back
to his own watery form, and
mingled with mine.
To the right, "Arethusa Pursued by
Alpheus and Turned into a
Fountain," 1731 by Bernard Picart.
To assist Arethusa's escape, the goddess split the earth between Greece and Sicily, providing a
subterranean path to re-emerge as the Arethusa Fountain.
The Delian goddess split the earth, and plunging down into secret caverns, I was brought here
to Ortygia, dear to me, because it has the same name as my goddess, the ancient name, for
Delos, where she was born, and this was the first place to receive me, into the clear air.’
But Alpheus pursued her under the sea, intermingling his waters with hers, but not the ocean.
Unlike many stories clearly passed from Greek tradition, Ovid's sources for the tale are uncertain,
but the story is one that well illustrates the Roman claim to the deep and powerful purity of the
Greek cultural connection.
In another version, Arethusa was always located in Syracuse and it was the River Alpheus who
made his underground way to Syracuse to be united with her.
According Pliny's Natural History,
But some rivers so hate the sea, that they actually flow underneath the bottom of it, for instance
the spring Arethusa at Syracuse, in which things emerge that have been thrown into the
Alpheus which flows through Olympia and reaches the coast in the Peloponnese.
Pausanias included the following in his Description of Greece, clearly not first-hand knowledge.
Coming up at the place called by the Arcadians Pegse, and flowing past the land of Pisa and
past Olympia, it falls into the sea above Cyllene, the port of Elis. Not even the Adriatic could
check its flowing onwards, but passing through it, so large and stormy a sea, it shows in
Ortygia, before Syracuse, that it is the Alpheus, and unites its water with Arethusa.
DRAFT 1122//66//22001122
Uppddaatteess aatt hhttttpp::////www. .uunnm. .eedduu//~rrhheeggggeenn//UnnddeerrggrroouunnddRi ivveerrss. .hhttml l
363