Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 3 -- Roman Encyclopedists
Pausanias (110-180) left us his Descrittione della
Grecia di Pausania, the original travel guide. A 1593
edition is shown to the right.
Pausanias traveled to Arcadia, famous for its closed
depressions and perennial springs, where he noted the
river Styx.
Pausanias repeated with more topographical detail
Strabo's information on the Stymphalus, the combined
origin of the Alpheius and the Eurotas, and the further
course of the Alpheius to Syracuse.
He recorded an occasion when drifted timber blocked
the sink at Stymphalus and the plain became a lake for
a width of 75 kilometers. A huntsman following a deer
into the marsh was said to have caused the blockage
to break apart and be drawn into the sink.
We’ll return to Arcadia’s depiction in poetry in Chapter
28.
Pausanias wrote that the Helicon River, after a course of 13 kilometers disappears into the earth
at the foot of Mt. Olympus and after another 4 kilometers, rises again as the Baphyra, navigable
to the sea. Legend told that the women who killed Orpheus wished to cleanse the bloodstains
and the river sank underground to avoid being an accomplice.
We’re unsure to which modern stream this refers, but modern classicists never stop searching.
Pausanias recorded an Arcadian cave in which was lost to history until 1964, but more
fundamental than geographical modernity is this segment from Pausanias' sojourn in Epirus,
Near Cichyrus is a lake called Acherusia, and a river called Acheron. There is also Cocytus, a
most unlovely stream. I believe it was because Homer had seen these places that he made
bold to describe in his poems the regions of Hades, and gave to the rivers there the names of
those in Thesprotia.
It's Pausanias' hat-tip to Homer.
The geographer Eratosthenes supposed that the Egyptian marshes of Rhinosoloura between
the Mediterranean and the Red Sea were formed by the Tigris and Euphrates, 1,000 kilometers
away.
Following are other Mediterranean-basin rivers said to disappear and re-emerge at locations
locatable on modern maps.
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