Chapter XVII: Preface (1)

I am not unaware, my dear friend Lucilius, of the greatness of the 1 edifice whose foundations I am laying in my old age, when I resolve to survey the universe, to unearth its motives and secrets, and to reveal them to the knowledge of others. When shall I ever manage to cover such a field, gather together such widely-spread material, behold with clear vision such profound secrets? Old age presses hard on the rear, upbraiding me with the years bestowed on vain pursuits. We must ply our task all the more vigorously, and toil must now make good the loss of a lifetime withdrawn from its true purpose. Night must be added to day, engagements cut short, care abandoned of property that lies far away 2 from its owner. The mind must be wholly set free from other thoughts, and at least at the moment of its flight from earth must bestow itself in self-contemplation. It shall do so, and shall urge itself on, and each day it shall measure the brief span of time left. What has been lost shall be repaired by diligent use of the remainder of life. The surest pledge of virtue is repentance and amendment. I may exclaim in 3 the words of an illustrious poet:

High is the courage that inspires me, great the work, but short
The time in which to plan.

I should say the same were I planning it in boyhood or in youth. No period could be anything but narrow in face of such an undertaking. As it is, when the midday of life is past, I have entered upon a task that is serious, difficult, limitless. Let me act as people generally do 4 in a journey--those that are late in starting make up for the delay by their speed. I must hurry on, and without further excuse on the score of age proceed to tackle my problem--undoubtedly a vast, possibly an insuperable, one. My mind swells with pride when I survey the magnitude of my undertaking and reflect how much is unaccomplished of my plan, though not of my life.

Some writers have wasted their efforts in narrating the doings of 5 foreign kings, and in telling, as the case may be, the sufferings or the cruelties of nations. Surely it is wiser to try to end one’s own ills than to record for a coming generation the ills of others. How much better to make one’s theme the works of the gods than the robberies of Philip, or Alexander, or the other conquerors who earned their fame by the destruction of mankind! Such men were as truly scourges of humanity as a flood by which a whole plain has been inundated, or a conflagration by which the greater part of its living creatures has been burnt up. The historians tell us how Hannibal 6 crossed the Alps, how he suddenly transferred into Italy a war rendered more formidable by Roman disasters in Spain; how, when his fortunes were shattered, more determined still, even though the fate of Carthage was sealed, he wandered through all kingdoms, offering to be leader against Rome, and begging for an army; how he never ceased even in his old age to seek to rouse up war in every corner of the world. He could, it was plain, endure to be without a country, but not without a foe.

How much better is it to inquire what ought to be done than what 7 has been done, and to teach those who have entrusted their state to fortune that nothing she gives is stable, but that all her gifts are more fickle than the very air! For she cannot rest, her delight is to match sadness with joy, and to mingle smiles with tears. Therefore in the day of prosperity let no man exult, in the day of adversity let no man faint: the successions of fortune alternate. Why should you boast yourself? The wave meantime bears you aloft on its crest; but where 8 it may strand you, you cannot tell. Its end will be of its own choice, not of yours. Or why, again, do you despond? You have been carried down to the nadir; now is the chance of rising again. Adversity alters for the better, success for the worse. Changes of the kind must be anticipated, not merely in private families, which are affected by a slight cause, but also in sovereign houses. Dynasties rising from the gutter have ere now established themselves above the ruling powers, while ancient empires have fallen when in the very heyday of their 9 power. The number cannot be reckoned of the kingdoms that have been overthrown by other kingdoms. God now makes it His special aim to exalt some and to overthrow others; nor does He let them gently down, but dashes them from their pinnacle, so that no remnant of them is left. A great sight it is; we think it so only because we are ourselves small. There are many departments in which the standard is not derived from 10 the actual size of the objects, but from our own littleness.

What, I ask, then, is the principal thing in human life? Not to have filled the seas with fleets, nor to have planted the standard of the nation on the shores of the Red Sea, nor, when land has been exhausted, to have wandered for the injury of others over the Ocean in quest of the unknown. Rather it is to have grasped in mind the whole universe, and to have gained what is the greatest of all victories, the mastery over besetting sins. There are hosts of conquerors who have had cities and nations under their power, but a very few who have subdued self. What is the principal thing? I say again. To raise the soul above the threats and promises of fortune; to consider nothing as worth hoping for. For what does fortune possess worth setting your heart upon? 11 Why, as often as you lapse from converse with what is divine back to what is human, your eyes will be blinded just like the eyes of those who have returned from bright sunlight into gross darkness. What is the principal thing? To be able to endure adversity with joyful heart; to bear whatever betide just as if it were the very thing you desired to happen. For you would have felt it your duty to desire it, had you known that all things happen by God’s decree. Tears, complaints, lamentation, are rebellion. What is the principal thing? A heart 12 in face of calamity resolute and invincible; an adversary, yea, a sworn foe, to luxury; neither anxious to meet nor anxious to shun peril; a heart that knows how to fashion fortune to its will without waiting for her; which can go forth to face ill or good dauntless and unembarrassed, paralysed neither by the tumult of the one nor the glamour of the other. What is the principal thing? Not to admit evil 13 counsel into the heart, and to lift up clean hands to heaven; to seek for no advantage which some one must give and some one lose in order that it may reach you; to pray--a prayer that no one will envy--for purity of heart; as for other blessings which are highly esteemed by the world, even should some chance bring them to your home, to regard them as sure to depart by the same door by which they entered. What is the principal thing? To lift one’s courage high above all that 14 depends upon chance; to remember what man is, so that whether you be fortunate, you may know that this will not be for long; or whether you be unfortunate, you may be sure you are not so if you do not think yourself so.

The principal thing is to have life on the very lips, ready to issue when summoned. This makes a man free, not by right of Roman citizenship, but by right of nature. He is the true freeman who has escaped from bondage to self. That slavery is constant, from it there is no deliverance; it presses us day and night alike, without pause, without respite. To be a slave to self is the most grievous kind 15 of slavery; yet its fetters may easily be struck off, if you will but cease to make large demands upon yourself, if you will cease to seek a personal reward for your services, and if you will set clearly before you your nature and your time of life, even though it be the bloom of youth; if you will say to yourself, Why do I rave, and pant, and sweat? Why do I ply the earth? why do I haunt the forum? Man needs but little, nor needs that little long.

To this end it will be profitable for us to examine the nature of the universe. In the first place we shall rise above what is base; in the second, we shall set the spirit free from the body, imparting to it that courage and elevation of which it stands in need. Besides, subtlety of thought practised on the hidden mysteries of nature wil 16 prove no less efficacious in problems that lie more on the surface. And nothing is more on the surface than these salutary lessons we are taught as safeguards against the prevailing vice and madness--faults we all condemn, but do not abandon.

I

Let us enter then on an investigation of forms of water, and let us 1 trace the causes that produce them; whether, as Ovid says:

There was a fountain silvery clear with gleaming wavelets;

or, as Virgil says:

Whence through nine mouths with mighty roar of the mountain
The sea issues in broken waves, overspreading the fields with its
resounding flood;

or, as I find it in your own poem, my dear Lucilius:

The stream of Elis wells up from Sicilian fountains.

Let us inquire by what method the waters are supplied; how it is that day and night unceasingly so many huge rivers roll down their course; 2 why some are swollen by the rain of winter, some increase in summer when all the other streams fail. Meantime let us separate the Nile from the common crowd; it is a river of peculiar and unique character. We shall give it its turn by and by. At present we will confine our treatment to the common waters, cold as well as hot. In regard to the latter we must inquire whether the heat is due to natural or artificial causes. We shall discuss other waters too which are rendered remarkable by taste or some special virtue. Some, for example, I may explain, alleviate affections of the eyes, some, those of the sinews, 3 some effect complete cure of chronic maladies given up by doctors as hopeless. Some again heal sores, some by being drunk ease internal pain and relieve complaints of the lungs and bowels. Some staunch the flow of blood; in fact their individual uses are as varied as their taste.

II

All waters are classed as either standing or running; they are either gathered in one or occupy different channels underground. Some of them are sweet, others have pungent flavours of different kinds, among them salt, bitter, medicinal. Belonging to the last class one may name sulphur, iron, alum waters. The taste shows the quality. Waters of different kinds have many other differences. First there is touch, hot and cold; then weight, light and heavy; then colour, pure, muddy, dark blue, yellowish; then wholesomeness, wholesome and useful, or deadly or capable of petrifaction. Some waters are thin, some thick; some give nourishment, others pass through the system without benefiting it at all; the use of some removes barrenness.

III

The lie of the ground makes water either stand or run; on a slope it flows down, a plain keeps it in, causing it to stagnate. Sometimes under pressure of air it is forced uphill; it is then driven, it does not flow. Surface water comes from rain; spring water from a natural fountain. There is, however, nothing to prevent surface and spring water in the same spot. This we see in Lake Fucinus, into which the streams drain all the rainfall of the surrounding mountains, while there are also large springs concealed under the surface of the lake itself. So, even when the torrents discharge into it in winter, it preserves its appearance unaltered.

IV

Let us inquire therefore, in the first place, how the earth can contain sufficient water to maintain the unbroken flow of the rivers, and where such a vast quantity of water comes from. We are surprised that the ocean is not sensible of the additional water derived from rivers. It is no less surprising that the earth is not sensible of the loss of all the water that issues from it. What is it that has so filled it up that it can from its hidden recesses furnish such quantities and continually make good the loss as it does? Whatever explanation we give regarding a river must apply also to streams and springs.

V

Some are of opinion that the earth receives back all the water it has lost. The sea, therefore, does not get larger, because it does not assimilate the water that runs into it, but forthwith restores it to the earth. For the sea water returns by a secret path, and is filtered in its passage back.[50] Being dashed about as it passes through the endless, winding channels in the ground, it loses its salinity, and, purged of its bitterness in such a variety of ground as it passes through, it eventually changes into pure, fresh water.

[50] The ordinary text, as Koeller saw, is evidently wrong. It runs:
“For by a secret path the sea water enters the ground and becomes
visible, and returns stealthily, and is filtered, etc.” No author can
be supposed to have written such a sentence. The restoration must be
conjectural. I have adopted what seems simplest and most in keeping
with the context.

VI

Some suppose that all the water that the earth drinks in from rain is sent out again into the rivers. They set down by way of proof the fact that there are fewest rivers in the localities where there is least frequent rain. On that account, they say, the deserts of Ethiopia are destitute of streams, and few springs are found in the interior of Africa, because there is always a blazing sky and almost perpetual summer. Therefore there are ugly stretches of sandy waste, without tree and without inhabitant, sprinkled at rare intervals by showers that they immediately swallow up. On the other hand, it is well known that there are abundant streams and rivers in Germany and Gaul and next to them in Italy, because they enjoy a moist climate, and even the summer is not without rainfall.

VII

A great deal can obviously be urged in reply to this. First of all, 1 as a diligent digger among my vines, I can affirm from observation that no rain is ever so heavy as to wet the ground to a depth of more than 10 feet. All the moisture is absorbed in the upper layer of earth without getting down to the lower ones. How, then, can rain, which merely damps the surface, store up a supply sufficient for rivers? The greater part of it is carried off at once into the sea by river-channels. But a small portion is absorbed by the ground, and even that is not retained. For the ground is either dry and so uses up at 2 once the water poured into it; or else it is saturated and throws off what of the rainfall it does not require. This is the reason why rivers do not rise with the first rainfall; the thirsty ground absorbs it all.

And then, again, how are we to explain the fact that some rivers burst out from rocks and mountains? What contribution can be made to them by rains that are carried down over the bare crags and have no earth into which to sink? Besides, wells sunk in the very driest localities 3 to a depth of 200 or 300 feet reveal rich springs of water at a depth to which rain water does not penetrate. One may be sure there is no rain water there nor any gathering of moisture, but living (= spring) water as it is usually called. The opinion in question is disproved by this other argument, too; some springs well up in the very summit of a mountain. It is plain, therefore, that the water in them is forced up or forms on the spot, since all the rain water runs off.

VIII

Some writers think there is an exact parallelism between the external and the internal distribution of water in the earth. On the outer surface are huge marshes, great navigable lakes, and seas covering immense tracts of earth and pouring over its hollows. So in the interior of the earth there is abundant store of fresh water, which overflows great spaces no less than the Ocean and its gulfs above ground; in fact, still more extensively, as the depth of the earth extends farther down than that of the sea. From that supply in the deeps, therefore, those rivers of which we have spoken issue. And why should one be surprised that the earth is not sensible of their withdrawal since the sea is not sensible of their addition?

IX

Some approve the following explanation: The earth contains, they 1 assert, many hollow recesses and a great quantity of air. This air, under pressure of the gross darkness, of necessity freezes. Then remaining sluggish and unmoved it ceases to circulate and turns into water. Just as on earth a change in the density of the atmosphere produces rain, so beneath the earth the change of density starts a river or a stream. In the former case the air above our heads cannot long remain sluggish and heavy; for sometimes it is rarefied by the sun’s heat, sometimes expanded by the wind’s force. There are, therefore, long intervals between falls of rain. But underground 2 the forces, whatever they are, that turn air into water, are constant--perpetual darkness, everlasting cold, inert density; they can, therefore, supply without a break the sources of fountain or flood. We Stoics are satisfied that the earth is interchangeable in its elements. So all this air that she has exhaled in her interior, since it is not taken up by the free atmosphere, condenses and is forthwith converted into moisture.

X

There you have the first cause of the origin of underground water. 1 You may add the more general principle that all elements arise from all: air comes from water, water from air; fire from air, air from fire. So why should not earth be formed from water, and conversely water from earth? If the earth is capable of transmutation into other elements, water must be one of them, in fact, the most suitable of them. The two things are cognate; both are heavy, condensed, both driven by nature down to the very confines of the universe. Earth is formed from water; why not water from earth in like manner?

But, you say, the rivers are too large to be accounted for in this way. Well, after you have considered the size of the rivers, just look at the size of the reservoir whence they issue. Are you surprised that a 2 fresh supply of water is always forthcoming for them, since they flow on for ever, some even rushing down their channel with impetuous haste? Surely you might as well be surprised, when the winds drive hither and thither the whole atmosphere, that the supply of air does not fail, but flows on day and night unceasingly. And the wind, remember, is not confined to a definite channel, as rivers are, but goes with wide sweep over the broad expanse of heaven. You might well, too, be surprised that after so many breakers have spent their force, any succeeding wave is left. The truth is, nothing is ever exhausted that returns upon itself (_i.e._ is self-supported). All the four elements 3 return alternately upon one another; what is lost in one is conserved by passing into another. Nature, too, weighs her parts as if with nice adjustment in the balance, lest their just proportion should be disturbed and the world topple over into ruin (= lose its equilibrium). All elements are in all. Air not only passes into fire, but it is never without fire. Deprive it of its heat and it will grow stiff, stagnant, hard. Air passes into moisture, but nevertheless contains moisture. Earth yields both air and water, and is never at any time devoid 4 of water any more than it is of air. The mutual transition is the easier, because there is already an admixture of the element to which the transition is to be made. So (1)[51], then, the earth contains moisture, which it forces out. (2)[51] It contains air, which the darkness of its wintry cold condenses so as to form moisture. (3)[51] By nature, too, it has itself the power of changing into moisture: this power it habitually exerts.

[51] The numerals here have no counterpart in the original.

XI

You have still a difficulty, you say. If the causes giving rise to 1 rivers and fountains are constant, why are their waters sometimes dried up? and why do they sometimes appear in places where they did not exist before? Their routes, I should reply, are often disturbed by earthquakes; the channel is cut off by a fall of rock or earth, and the water being held back seeks a fresh exit, which it forces with a certain measure of violence; or merely by the earth’s vibration the course is shifted from one place to another. On the surface of the earth one may observe that rivers that have lost their channels are first of all dammed back, but afterwards, in lieu of the course they have lost, force a new one. Theophrastus affirms that an incident of 2 the kind took place in the Corycian Mount,[52] where, after a slight shock of earthquake, a fountain burst out from a fresh source.

[52] In Cilicia.

But some writers are of opinion that other causes too are at work to call up water in other ways, or to drive or turn it from its course. Mount Haemus was once destitute of water; but after a tribe of the Gauls, being hard pressed by Cassander, took refuge there, and felled the woods, an immense supply of water appeared. No doubt the woods had attracted it for their nourishment previously. When they were uprooted, the moisture, ceasing to be used up by their roots, overflowed. Theophrastus affirms that the same thing happened near Magnesia. 3

But with all respect to Theophrastus, this is not a very likely story. Everything that is most shady tends most to gather water. But that would not be the case if trees drained off water. Roots draw their nourishment from their immediate vicinity; but the volume of river water flows from recesses far down, and is derived from a source deeper than roots can penetrate. Besides, when trees are cut down, more moisture than before is required; the stumps suck up a supply, not merely for life, but for new growth.

Theophrastus tells us, too, that round Arcadia, which was a city in 4 the island of Crete, the wells and lakes disappeared, because the land ceased to be tilled after the destruction of the city; but after it had got back its tillers, it recovered its waters also. He sets down as the cause of the dryness, that the earth had got hidebound and quite hard, and not being stirred could not transmit to the underground reservoirs the rain that fell. But if this is true, how comes it that we see springs in great plenty in the most desert ground? In fact, one finds 5 a great deal more ground that began to be tilled on account of the abundance of water than that began to have an abundant supply of water because it was tilled. You may be quite sure that it is not mere rain water that is carried down in our greatest rivers, navigable by large vessels from their very source,[53] as is proved by the fact that the flow from the fountain-head is uniform winter and summer. Rainfall may cause a torrent, but it cannot maintain the steady, constant flow of a full river. Rains cannot produce, they can only enlarge and quicken, a river.

[53] The text seems to be at fault, but the argument is quite clear.

XII

Let us, if you please, go into the matter a little more deeply, and 1 you will soon see that you have no cause to put further questions, once you reach the true origin of rivers. A river is, of course, formed by a supply of water that is always constant. If you ask me, therefore, how water is produced, I will ask in my turn how air or earth is produced. If there are four elements in nature, you are not entitled to ask where water, one of them, comes from; it _is_ the fourth part of nature. Why, therefore, are you surprised that so great a portion 2 of nature can furnish a perpetual supply of liquid from itself? Just as the atmosphere, which is likewise a fourth part of the universe, is the source of winds and breezes, so is water, of streams and rivers. If wind is atmosphere in motion, so is a river water in motion. I have given it strength enough in saying that it is one of the four elements. You must be aware that what has an element as its source can never run short.

XIII

Water is, according to Thales, the most powerful of the elements. 1 He thinks it was the first of them, and that all the others sprang from it. We Stoics, too, are also of the same opinion; or perhaps I should rather say that we think it is the last.[54] For we say that it is fire that lays hold upon the world and changes all things into its own nature. We suppose that fire eventually fades and sinks, and that, when the fire is quenched, nothing is left in nature save moisture, in which lies the hope of the world that is to come. So fire is the end, moisture the beginning, of the world. Can you wonder that rivers may always issue from this, which was before all things, and from which all things have been formed? In the separation of the elements [at the 2 beginning] the moisture was reduced to a fourth part, and was placed in such a situation that it could furnish a sufficient supply for rivers, streams, and fountains. The next opinion expressed by Thales is a silly one. The whole earth, he says, is upborne by water, and floats just like a boat; when it is spoken of as trembling, it is rolling by the movement of the water. It is no wonder, then, that there should be abundance of water to pour forth in rivers, since the world is itself wholly set in water. You should put out of court such an antiquated, unscientific idea. There is no ground for believing that the water comes in through the chinks in the earth’s sides, and forms bilge-water in her centre.

[54] _I.e._ that to which all others may be reduced: the text seems
corrupt, and the meaning is more or less conjectural. Gercke’s text
reads, “are also of the same or an analogous opinion.”

XIV

The Egyptians have recognised four elements also; and they then form each into two, male and female. The atmosphere they consider male where it is windy, female where it is cloudy and sluggish. They call the sea manly water, every other kind of water they call womanly. Fire they call masculine where a flame is burning, and feminine where there is a glow that is harmless to touch. The firmer kinds of earth, such as boulders and crags, they call male, reserving the term female for the parts that are amenable to cultivation.

XV

There is but one sea, which has so existed no doubt from the 1 beginning of things. It has sources of its own, from which its impulses and tides are derived. As with the raging sea, so with this gentler kind of water, there is a vast supply[55] in secret, which no river course can drain dry. The exact explanation of its reserve strength has not yet been discovered. It is only the superfluous portion of it that is released. Now, there are some of these beliefs to which 2 we may safely subscribe; but I hold this further opinion. My firm conviction is that the earth is organised by nature much after the plan of our bodies, in which there are both veins and arteries, the former blood-vessels, the latter air-vessels. In the earth likewise 3 there are some routes by which water passes, and some by which air. So exactly alike is the resemblance to our bodies in nature’s formation of the earth, that our ancestors have spoken of veins (= springs) of water. Again, in our bodies there is not merely blood, but many other kinds of moisture, some essential to life, others tainted and somewhat thick--brain in the head, marrow in the bones, mucus, saliva, tears, and a kind of lubricating substance that suffuses the joints, and enables them to turn more quickly (= synovial fluid).

[55] All the texts give _via_ = way. The obvious correction is _vis_
= amount, supply. Gercke confirms this correction.

So, too, in the earth there are several different kinds of moisture. There are some kinds that grow hard when fully formed. Hence arises 4 all the metalliferous soil, from which our avarice seeks gold and silver. Then there is the kind which turns from liquid into stone. In some localities the earth and its moisture combine to form a liquid like bitumen and other substances of the same kind. There, then, we find the cause of waters produced according to the law and will of nature. But as in our bodies, so in the earth, humours often contract 5 taints of various kinds. A blow, or some shock, or exhaustion of the ground, or cold or heat injures the natural vigour. A vein of sulphur, too, may solidify the moisture, lasting for a longer or shorter time. Therefore, as in our bodies, when a vein is cut, the flow of blood lasts till the blood is exhausted or the incision in the vein has closed up and stopped it, or until some other cause has staunched the blood; in like manner in the ground, when the seams have been loosened and laid bare, a stream or river rushes forth. The way in which the 6 water is used up depends on the extent of the opening in the seam. At one point its flow is checked by some obstacle; at another it heals up, so to speak, into a scar and chokes the path it had made; at another the power of transmutation, which we have said the earth possesses, reaches its limit and cannot longer supply material that may be liquefied: sometimes the exhausted source is replenished, now by energy self-recruited, now by a supply drawn from external sources. For I ought to say that often dry objects placed opposite to wet attract the moisture to them. Earth itself, which easily assumes another form, 7 often wastes away, and is dissolved in moisture. The same phenomenon occurs under the earth as above it in the clouds; becoming too dense and heavy to retain longer its own character, solid begets liquid. There is often a gathering of thin, scattered moisture like dew, which from many points flows into one spot. The dowsers call it sweat, because a kind of drop is either squeezed out by the pressure of the ground or raised by the heat. This slender trickle scarce suffices to form a spring. But if the sources are great and the gatherings great, rivers issue. Sometimes they flow gently if the water merely descends by its own weight, sometimes with violence and loud roar if air be intermingled and eject the water.

XVI

Another peculiarity requires explanation: some wells are full for 1 six hours and dry for six alternately: why is this so? It is hardly necessary to name the rivers individually which are at certain months broad, at certain narrow, and to give separate causes of this, seeing I can give a common explanation that applies to all. An ague returns at the same hour, gout always keeps its appointment, the custom of women, unless interrupted, observes its stated period, birth is ready at the proper month. In like manner waters have their intervals of recurrence, at which to withdraw and at which to return. Now, some intervals are shorter, and the more striking on that account; some are longer, 2 but no less certain. And what is strange in that, when you see that the succession of events, and all nature, by decree preserve their appointed order? Winter has never mistaken its time. Summer has always blazed forth in its season. The changes of spring and autumn have occurred according to their wont. Solstice and equinox alike have kept their appointed days.

Beneath the earth likewise there are laws of nature, less familiar to us, but no less fixed. Be assured that there exists below everything that you see above. There, too, there are antres vast, immense recesses, and vacant spaces, with mountains overhanging on either hand. There are yawning gulfs stretching down into the abyss, which 3 have often swallowed up cities that have fallen into them, and have buried in their depths their mighty ruins. These retreats are filled with air, for nowhere is there a vacuum in nature; through their ample spaces stretch marshes over which darkness ever broods. Animals also are produced in them, but they are slow-paced and shapeless; the air that conceived them is dark and clammy, the waters are torpid through inaction. Most of these creatures are blind, such as moles and underground rats, which have no sense of sight, since it is unnecessary for them. From these depths fish are, according to Theophrastus, dug up in certain localities.

XVII

At this point many pleasantries will occur to you to apply to my 1 incredible narrative, which you will politely call a good story. A man will no longer go to fish with net and hook, but with his mattock! The next thing will be for some one to go out hunting at sea. Now what reason is there, I ask, why fish should not cross the land if we can cross the sea and change our abodes? You are surprised at this happening. How much more incredible are the achievements of luxury as often as it either counterfeits or vanquishes nature? Fish are to be found swimming in the dining couch; one is caught right under the table, to be transferred immediately to the table. A mullet is not thought fresh enough unless it expires in the hand of the banqueter. 2 These fish are handed round enclosed in glass jars, and their colours are observed while they expire; death paints many hues on them as they draw their last struggling breath. Others are pickled alive and killed in the sauce. These are the people who think one is romancing who asserts that a fish can live underground and instead of being caught can be dug up! How inconceivable it would sound to them to hear that a fish swam in sauce and was killed during dinner, but not to be served at dinner; that first it was long admired, and that the eyes were feasted on it before the gullet was!

XVIII

Suffer me here to lay aside my subject, and to apply the scourge to 1 luxury! Commend me for a beautiful sight, says one, to an expiring mullet. In the death-struggle, as its life ebbs away, first a ruddy glow, then a pallor suffuses it. How symmetrical are the variations as it changes from tint to tint between life and death! Our somnolent, jaded luxury gets a long respite by means of this.[56] It was late in waking up to find how cruelly it had been circumscribed in being cheated of such a pleasure! Hitherto only fishermen have been able to enjoy this grand and beauteous sight. But why should we at the 2 banquet be satisfied with a cooked, a lifeless fish? Let him expire on the very tray. We used to be surprised at the fastidiousness of our epicures in refusing to touch fish unless it had been caught on the same day, when, as the saying goes, it smacked of the briny. It used for that reason to be delivered post haste--way had to be made for the breathless porters as they hurried along shouting. To what 3 lengths have refinements now been pushed? A fish killed to-day has come to be considered as already stinking. “He was taken out of the water this day, I assure you.” “I cannot trust you in a matter of such moment. I must have the evidence of my own senses; let the creature be brought here and breathe out his life before my eyes.” Such a pitch of fastidiousness has the gourmands’ palate reached that they will not taste a fish unless they have seen it swimming and throbbing in the very banqueting room.

[56] The passage is almost hopelessly corrupt. The meaning of this
sentence seems to be that luxury gets some respite from the fatigues
of the table by watching the mullet’s death-struggle. Ruhkopf
suggests an emendation which would give the sense: Our somnolent,
jaded luxury has taken a long time to discover this new enjoyment.
That would certainly be well in keeping with the following sentence.

The more skill our jaded luxury has had placed at its disposal, 4 the more refined and elegant the devices that in its frenzy it day by day invents; it spurns everything that is common. We used to hear the remark, “Nothing can surpass a mullet caught on the rocks”; but now it runs, “Nothing equals the beauty of an expiring mullet. Let me hold in my own hands the glass vase, to see him jump and quiver.” After long and fulsome praise has been lavished on him, he is taken 5 out of his transparent pond. Then each guest shows off his experience of such scenes by pointing out the hues to his fellows. “Look how the red bursts forth, deeper than any carmine; look at the veins he has along his sides: see, you would think his belly was covered with blood; what a gleam of dark blue shot forth just under the brow! Now he is stretching himself out, and sinking to a uniform pallid hue!” Not one of these selfish fellows would sit by a dying friend’s bedside, none of them can endure the sight of a father’s death--a sight they have dearly longed for. How few will attend the funeral of a relative! The 6 last hour of brothers and friends is shunned by them; they are all in a hurry to be in at the death of a mullet! For he has a delicate beauty, don’t you know, that nothing can surpass. My impatience makes me sometimes exceed the bounds of decency and use words at random. These drivellers are not satisfied to bring teeth, and palate, and stomach to the revel; they make their very eyes partners in the gluttony.

XIX

But to return to my subject. Here is a proof I have to give you 1 that in the underground recesses are concealed great quantities of water which abound in filthy fish. Any time that the water bursts out, it brings in its train a huge crowd of creatures foul to sight, disgusting and noxious to taste. At any rate, once, near the city of Hydissus in Caria, a flood of underground water threw up to the light of day a number of strange fishes, and all who ate them died. And no wonder. Their bodies were full of oil from their long inactivity; 2 they had been fattened in the darkness without exercise, and deprived of that light whence health is derived. A further proof that fish may be produced in those depths of earth is afforded by the breeding of eels in shady places; they also are a heavy diet through their want of exercise, especially if a considerable depth of mud has hidden them quite out of sight. So then the earth contains not only veins of water 3 by the union of which rivers may be formed, but also streams of very great size. In some cases their channel is concealed throughout, until they are swallowed up in some cavern; others of them well up in the bottom of some lake. Everybody knows that some marshes have no bottom. What is the point of my argument? It shows plainly that mighty rivers have here unending supplies whose limits are incalculable, just as is the duration of rivers and fountains themselves.

XX

For the variety of taste in water there are four causes. The first is 1 the kind of soil through which it flows. The second also depends on the soil when the water arises from transmutation of it. The third is from air which has been transformed into water. The fourth comes from some taint which water often contracts when injuriously affected by foreign bodies. These causes impart to water, first, variety of taste, then 2 medicinal power, its heavy pestilential smell, its lightness and heaviness, its heat and its excessive astringency. It is affected by its passage through ground full of sulphur, or nitre (= saltpetre), or bitumen. If the water is tainted in this way, the drinking of it endangers life. This is the explanation of a passage in Ovid:

The Ciconians have a river a draught of whose waters turns into stone.
The bowels; which mantles in marble all that it touches.

The river in question has medicinal properties, its mud being of 3 the kind that glues together and hardens the bodies it encounters. Just as the dust at Puteoli becomes stone if it touches water, so, contrariwise, if the water of this river touches a solid body, it adheres and gets firmly affixed to it. This is the reason why objects thrown into the same lake[57] are constantly found to be turned to stone when they are taken out. This occurs at several places in Italy; you may put into the water a twig or bough and a few days after you can take out a stone. The mud surrounds the object and gradually 4 coats it over. This will seem the less surprising if you have remarked that the Albula, and, generally speaking, all water charged with sulphur, deposit a coating of it on the banks of their channels and streams. Some one or other of the foregoing causes accounts for the peculiarities of those lakes, whereof who tastes with the lips, in the words of the same poet,

[57] The allusion is not quite evident.

Goes raving mad or endures a sleep of wondrous depth.

The effect is like that of strong drink, only more violent. Drunken- 5 ness is madness until its effects pass off; with a weight like lead it bears down its victim into sleep. In the like manner the strong infusion of sulphur in this water contains a sort of poison that is more potent owing to the noxious atmosphere, and either goads the mind to madness or weighs it down in deep sleep. The river in Lyncestis likewise possesses this baleful power:

For whoso with intemperate lips has drained a draught,
Staggers as if having drunk deep of wine undiluted.

XXI

There are certain caves a glance down into which has cost people their life. So swift is their destructive power that it kills in flight the birds that cross them. That is the kind of air and the kind of place from which waters of death escape. If the infection of the air and place is less severe, the damage is less fatal too, merely affecting the sinews like men overpowered by intoxication. I am not at all surprised that place and air infect water and render it similar in character to the tract through which and from which it proceeds. Similarly, milk shows the taste of the cow’s fodder, the quality of the wine comes out even in the vinegar it yields. There is, in fact, nothing that does not bear marks of its origin in the same way.

XXII

There is another species of water which we Stoics are satisfied must be coeval with the world. If the latter has existed from all eternity, so must it too. If the world has had some beginning, then the water was assigned its place at the creation. You want to know what kind of water I mean? I mean the Ocean and all its seas that wash the continents of the earth. Some philosophers are convinced that the rivers likewise whose nature is inexplicable, date from the creation of the world; such are the mighty rivers Danube and Nile, too remarkable to be supposed by any possibility to have the same origin as other rivers.

XXIII

Such is the division of various kinds of water, as it presents itself to some minds. After that come waters of the sky, which the clouds pour down from the upper regions. Of terrestrial waters, they say, there are some that overflow, so to speak, and creep along the surface; others are concealed underground. I have already explained all these.

XXIV

Several explanations are given of the temperature of water. Some- 1 times it is hot, sometimes it boils so fiercely that it cannot be used until it has given off its steam in the open, or is tempered by mixing cold water with it. Empedocles is of opinion that as there are fires concealed in many places beneath the earth, water is heated when they happen to lie beneath the ground through which it has to flow. Let me use an illustration. We are in the habit of constructing serpentines,[58] and cylinders, and vessels of several other designs in which thin copper pipes are laid in descending spiral coils. The object is to make the water meet the same fire over and over again, and flow through a space sufficient for heating it up; so, entering as cold it comes out hot. Empedocles supposes something of the same kind to take 2 place underground. People who have their baths heated without fire may well believe that he is right. In this case air from the heated furnace is introduced. The air glides along the passages, warming up the walls and vessels of the bathroom just as if fire had been directly applied. In short, all the cold water in these instances is changed into hot by merely passing through a heated medium; and inasmuch as it is conveyed in an enclosure there is no evaporation to impart a flavour to it.[59] Others, again, suppose that the water contracts heat by issuing from or passing through ground charged with sulphur; the heat is imparted by the properties of the material, to which also smell and taste bear witness. All substances, I may say in general terms, tend to reproduce the qualities of the medium by which they have been warmed. If you are surprised at sulphur warming water, you have only to pour water over quicklime; it will at once evolve heat.

[58] The technical name is “worm.”

[59] There is considerable doubt regarding the correct text and
meaning.

XXV

Some waters are fatal, although they give no indication of this 1 either by smell or taste. In Arcadia, near Nonacris, the river called by the people there the Styx lures strangers to ruin, as its appearance and smell rouse no suspicion. This is like the drugs of accomplished poisoners, which cannot be detected save by their fatal effects. The water I mentioned a little above brings destruction with amazing swiftness, and allows no opportunity of applying a remedy. It hardens immediately it is drunk, and, much like chalk under the influence ofcccc 2 water, it sets and binds fast the bowels. There is a poisonous water in Thessaly, near Tempe, shunned by all cattle and wild beasts. It comes out through seams of iron and copper, and contains the power of softening the very hardest material. It does not nourish any trees either, and it kills grass. Certain rivers possess a peculiar and strange power. Some there are whose draught dyes whole flocks of sheep. Within a short time those that were black have white fleeces; in other cases those that came white go away black. This is what two rivers in Boeotia do, one of which from its effect is called Melas (Blackwater). Both the rivers issue from the same lake, to go on their opposite missions. So, too, in Macedonia, Theophrastus asserts there 3 is a river to which shepherds who desire to turn their sheep white bring them. If the sheep drink it for any length of time, their colour changes as if they had been dyed. But if those people want a dark wool, they have a dyer ready at hand who charges nothing; they have merely to drive the same flock to the river Peneus. I have recent authorities for the statement that there is a river in Galatia that has the same power of changing the colour in all animals, while in Cappadocia there is one which if drunk changes the colour of horses but not of any other animal; their skin is dappled with white spots.

It is well known that there are lakes whose waters bear up those 4 who cannot swim. There used to be a pool in Sicily, there still is one in Syria, in which brickbats float, and no objects thrown in, however heavy, will sink. The cause of it is obvious. Weigh any object and compare it with water while they are equal bulk for bulk. If the water is the heavier, it will bear the object that is lighter than itself, and will raise it above its surface to a height proportionate to its lightness; objects heavier than the water will sink in it. But if the weight of water and of the object compared with it in 5 respect of weight be equal, the object will neither go to the bottom nor yet will it stick up; it will just be in equipoise with the water. It will float, it is true, but almost submerged and without any part projecting. The differences in weight give the reason why some logs float almost entirely above water, while some sink to their centre, and some go down until they are in equipoise with the water. For it always holds good that, when the weights of the two are equal, neither yields to the other; but objects heavier than water sink, those lighter are upborne.

Now heavy and light do not refer to our judgment of weight, but are 6 relative to the medium by which an object is to be supported. So when water is heavier than the human body or than a stone, it does not allow the inferior weight to sink. So it comes to pass that in some lakes even stones will not go to the bottom; I mean hard solid stones. There are many light pumice stones, of which in Lydia whole islands that float are composed. Theophrastus is my authority for the statement. I have myself seen a floating island in the lake near Cutiliae. Another is carried about in the Vadimonian Lake, another in the lake by Statonia. The island at Cutiliae contains trees and grows grass, and 7 yet it is borne up by the water, and is wafted now in this direction, now in that, not merely by wind, but even by a mere air. So light the breath that moves it that night and day it never remains stationary in one spot. There are two reasons for it: first, there is the weight of the water, which is medicated and therefore heavy; and then there is the portable material of the island itself, which contains no solid body, although it supports trees. Perhaps in the first instance the 8 thick liquid laid hold upon and made fast light trunks and boughs scattered over the surface of the lake. So also whatever rocks are in the island, you will find porous and hollow. They resemble those formed of moisture that has hardened especially near the banks of medicinal springs; in such cases the scourings of the spring coalesce and the foam is solidified. It is necessarily light, being formed by concretions of windy, empty material.