Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 3 -- Roman Encyclopedists
Natural historian Gaius Plinius Secundus (23-79), better
known as Pliny the Elder, extracted 20,000 facts from 2,000
volumes to write Naturalis Historia, surely the most ambitious
literature review of all time. His “facts” were largely travelers’
tales (e.g., an account of the Monocoli monopodal race),
reports of marvels (e.g., a boy commuting to and from school
on a dolphin), and ancient belief (e.g., the correlation between
celestial bodies and metals, the Sun being gold; Mars, iron;
Saturn, lead; and the Moon, silver).
To the right is a hand-illuminated page from the 1472 printing
of Naturalis Historia. By any measure, the Romans garnered a
long-lasting readership.
Pliny adhered to the Oceanus theory, citing Aristotle's authority.
The intention of the Artificer of nature must have been to unite the earth and water in a mutual
embrace, earth opening her bosom and water penetrating her entire frame by means of a
network of veins radiating within and without, above and below, the water bursting out even at
the tops of mountain ridges, to which it is driven and squeezed out by the weight of the earth,
and spurts out like a jet of water from a pipe. This theory shows clearly why the seas do not
increase in bulk with the daily accession of so many rivers. The consequence is that the earth
at every point of its globe is encircled and engirdled by sea flowing round it.
Pliny accepted Aristotle’s reversed hydrologic cycle, the proof stemming from water’s preferred
shape.
But what the vulgar most strenuously contend against is, to be compelled to believe that the
water is forced into a rounded figure; yet there is nothing more obvious to the sight among the
phenomena of nature. For we see everywhere, that drops, when they hand down, assume the
form or small globes.
Pliny refers to a network of veins where,
[Water] pushed by blasts of air and compressed by the weight of the earth... gushes forth in the
manner of a pump [siphon] to the highest levels.
Pliny endorses Aristotle as to "why the sea is salt" and gives qualitative description of salinity
distribution with depth:
Hence it is that the widely-diffused sea is impregnated with the flavor of salt, in consequence of
what is sweet and mild being evaporated from it, which the force of fire easily accomplishes;
while all the more acrid and thick matter is left behind; on which account the water of the sea is
less salt at some depth than at the surface.
Naturalis Historia provided a compendium of subterranean streams.
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.
We will see more of this Syracuse conection in Chapter 28, Et In Arcadia Ego.
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