Natural History — Book II

Pliny the Younger & Pliny the Elder · a new plain-English translation from the Latin

1| The world, and this thing which men have been pleased to call by another name, the heavens, beneath whose encircling vault all things live out their existence, it is right to believe to be a deity, eternal, immeasurable, neither begotten nor ever to perish. What lies outside it is no concern of men to search out, nor can the conjecture of the human mind grasp it.

2| It is sacred, eternal, immeasurable, wholly within the whole, or rather itself the whole; infinite and yet like something finite; certain in all things and yet like something uncertain; embracing within itself all things outside and inside; at once the work of nature and nature itself.

3| It is madness that some have pondered its measurement in their minds and dared to publish it; and that others again, taking or given an occasion from this, have taught that there are countless worlds, so that we should have to believe in as many natures of things, or, if a single nature brooded over them all, nevertheless in as many suns and as many moons and all the other heavenly bodies, immeasurable and countless, even in one world; as if the same questions would not always confront our thinking at the limit, out of a longing for some end; or, if this infinity could be ascribed to nature, the maker of all things, as if that same thing would not be easier to understand in a single world, especially so great a work.

4| It is madness, truly madness, to go out of it and to search what lies outside, as though everything within it were already plainly known; as if, indeed, anyone could take the measure of anything who does not know his own measure, or the mind of man could behold what the world itself cannot hold.

5| That its form is rounded into the shape of a perfect sphere is shown first of all by its name and by the agreement of mortals, who call it 'the orb'; but the evidence of the facts teaches it too: not only because such a figure everywhere inclines into itself in all its parts, must sustain itself, and encloses and holds itself together, needing no joints and perceiving neither end nor beginning in any of its parts; nor only because such a shape is the best suited to the motion with which, as will soon appear, it continually revolves; but also by the testimony of our eyes, because from whatever point it is viewed it appears convex and central, which could not happen with any other figure.

6| That this form, then, is carried round in an eternal and restless circuit with indescribable speed in the space of twenty-four hours, the rising and setting of the sun have left beyond doubt. Whether the sound of so vast a mass whirling in ceaseless rotation is immense and therefore beyond the perception of our ears, I for my part could not easily say, by Hercules, any more than whether the ringing of the stars carried round with it and rolling their own orbits is some sweet harmony of incredible charm. To us who live within it, the world glides on in silence alike by day and by night.

7| That countless images of animals and of all things are impressed upon it, and that its body is not perfectly smooth all over, as we observe in birds' eggs, as the most distinguished authorities have said, is indicated by evidence from things on earth, since from the seeds of all things falling from there countless images are born, especially in the sea, and for the most part monstrous ones, because the seeds are mixed together; and further by the testimony of sight, in one place the figure of a bear, in another of a bull, in another of a letter, with a whiter circle running across the middle over the top.

8| For my part, I am also moved by the agreement of nations; for the Greeks called it by a word meaning ornament, and we called it mundus from its perfect and complete elegance. Caelum, the heavens, we certainly named on the ground that it is engraved, as Marcus Varro interprets it.

9| The order of things supports this, with the circle called the zodiac marked out into the figures of twelve animals, and the course of the sun through them keeping to the same rule for so many ages.

10| Nor do I see any doubt about the elements, that there are four of them: highest that of fire, from which come all those eyes of so many shining stars; next that of air, which the Greeks and we call by the same word, aër, this life-giving element that passes through all things and is interwoven with the whole; by its force the earth, held suspended together with the fourth element, that of water, is poised at the middle point of space.

11| Thus by a mutual embrace of opposites a bond is formed: light things are held back by heavy ones from flying away, and heavy things, on the other hand, are held up from falling by the light ones striving upward. So with equal effort in opposite directions each stays in its own place, bound together by the restless circuit of the world itself; and as this always runs back into itself, the earth is lowest and in the middle of the whole, and stands hanging at the pivot of the universe, balancing the things by which it hangs; so that it alone is motionless, while the universe revolves around it; it is connected with all things, and all things rest upon it.

12| Between it and the heavens, suspended in the same air and separated by fixed intervals, are the seven stars which from their motion we call wandering, though none wander less than they. In their midst the sun is carried along, of the greatest size and power, the governor not only of the seasons and the lands but also of the very stars and of the heavens.

13| It is fitting to believe, when we consider his works, that he is the soul, or more plainly the mind, of the whole world, the chief governing principle and the divinity of nature. He supplies light to things and takes away darkness; he hides and he illuminates the other stars; he regulates the alternation of the seasons and the year, always reborn, according to nature's use; he dispels the gloom of the sky and even clears the clouds of the human mind; he lends his light to the other stars as well; glorious, pre-eminent, seeing all things and also hearing all things, as I see Homer, the prince of literature, held of him alone.

14| For this reason I think that to seek the likeness and form of god is a mark of human weakness. Whatever god is, if indeed there is any other, and in whatever region, he is wholly sense, wholly sight, wholly hearing, wholly life, wholly mind, wholly himself. To believe in gods without number, and even drawn from the vices of men, such as Modesty, Concord, Intelligence, Hope, Honour, Clemency, Faith, or, as pleased Democritus, in two only, Punishment and Benefit, is a greater step toward folly.

15| Frail and toiling mortality, mindful of its own weakness, has divided the divinity into parts, so that each person might worship in portions the one whose help he most needs. And so we find different names among different peoples, and within the same peoples deities without number; even the powers below are sorted into kinds, and diseases and many plagues too, while in anxious fear we long to have them appeased.

16| For this reason a shrine to Fever has been dedicated at public expense on the Palatine, an altar to Orbona beside the temple of the Lares, and one to Bad Fortune on the Esquiline. From this one may understand that the population of the heavenly beings is even greater than that of men, since individuals also make just as many gods out of themselves by adopting Junos and Genii for themselves; and certain peoples hold animals, and some even obscene things, as gods, and many things more shameful to mention, swearing by foul foods, and other things like them.

17| To believe that there are marriages among the gods, and that in so long an age no child is born from any of them, and that some are always aged and white-haired, others young and boys, dark in colour, winged, lame, hatched from an egg, living and dying on alternate days, is nearly the raving of children; but it surpasses all shamelessness to invent adulteries among them, then quarrels and hatreds, and even to make divinities of thefts and crimes.

18| For a mortal to help a mortal is god, and this is the road to eternal glory. By this road the leading men of Rome have gone, and by this road now, with heavenly stride, together with his sons, goes the greatest ruler of every age, Vespasian Augustus, coming to the aid of a weary world.

19| This is the oldest custom of giving thanks to those who deserve well, that they ascribe such men to the divinities. Indeed the names of other gods, and of the stars I have mentioned above, were born from the merits of men. That Jupiter or Mercury, or others, are called by different names among themselves and are a heavenly nomenclature - who would not admit, from an interpretation of nature, that this is laughable? That the supreme power, whatever it is, attends to the affairs of mankind, and is not defiled even by so grim and manifold a service - are we to believe it, or to doubt? It is hardly useful to judge which is more advantageous to the human race, since some have no regard at all for the gods, and others a shameful one.

21| They serve foreign rites and carry gods on their fingers; they worship monsters too, they condemn and devise foods, and impose dire commands on themselves, not leaving even their sleep untroubled. They choose neither marriages, nor children, nor in short anything else, except as the rites assist them. Others deceive on the Capitol and forswear themselves by Jupiter as he thunders. And these men crimes help, while those their own rites drive on with punishments.

22| Yet between these two opinions mortality has found for itself a middle divinity, so that even the guesswork about god might be made less plain. For in the whole world, in all places and at all hours, by the voices of all, Fortune alone is invoked and named, she alone is accused, she alone is put on trial, she alone is thought of, she alone is praised, she alone is blamed and worshipped with abuse, fickle [….], and by most thought blind as well, wandering, inconstant, uncertain, changeable, and the patroness of the undeserving. To her all expenses are charged, to her all receipts are credited, and in the whole account of mortals she alone fills both pages; and so subject are we to chance that chance itself stands in place of god, by which god is shown to be uncertain.

23| Another party rejects even her, and assigns events to a man's own star and to the laws of birth, holding that once for all, for all who will ever be, there was a decree from god, and that for the rest of time he has been given leisure. This opinion has begun to settle, and learned and unlearned alike run together toward it. Look: the warnings of lightning, the foreknowledge of oracles, the predictions of soothsayers, and even things small to mention, in the auguries - sneezes and stumblings of the foot. The deified Augustus reported that on the day he was nearly struck down by a mutiny of the soldiers he had put his left shoe on the wrong way round.

25| Each of these things entangles mortality, which has no foresight; so that amid them this alone is certain, that nothing is certain, and nothing is more wretched than man, or more proud. For the other living creatures have care only for their food, and in that nature's kindness supplies them of her own accord; and in one respect their lot is even to be preferred to every good: they do not think about glory, money or ambition, and above all not about death.

26| But it is useful for the conduct of life to believe, in these matters, that the gods attend to human affairs, and that punishments for wrongdoing, though sometimes late, since god is occupied in so great a mass of things, are yet never in vain; and that man was not born next to him so as to be near the beasts in worthlessness.

27| The chief consolations for the imperfect nature of man are these: that not even god can do everything - for he cannot kill himself, if he should wish, which he has given to man as the best thing amid so many penalties of life; nor can he grant mortals eternity or call back the dead, nor make it that one who has lived has not lived, or that one who has held honours has not held them; and he has no power over the past except that of oblivion; and (so that this partnership with god may be tied together with witty arguments as well) he cannot make twice ten not be twenty, or do many similar things. By these things the power of nature is plainly shown, and that this is what we call god. It has not been out of place to turn aside to these matters, because of the common and constant questioning about god.

28| From here let us return to the remaining parts of nature. The stars, which we have said are fixed to the heavens, are not, as the common people think, assigned to individuals among us, bright for the rich, smaller for the poor, dim for the failing, and shining according to each person's lot, counted out for mortals, as though each were born with its own man and died with him; nor do falling stars signify that anyone is being extinguished.

29| The heavens have no such fellowship with us that the brightness of the stars there should be mortal along with our fate. Glutted with too much nourishment from the moisture they have drawn up, they give back the surplus by fiery force when they are believed to fall, just as we notice happening with us too when lamps are lit with liquid oil.

30| Moreover, the nature of the heavenly bodies is eternal, since they are woven into the world and bound together in the weaving; but the power of those of them that could be identified, amid so great a subtlety, through their effects, brightness and magnitude reaches greatly to the earth, as we shall show in its place. The theory of the celestial circles, too, will be better stated in the mention of the earth, since the whole of it bears upon the earth, the discoverers of the zodiac alone not being put off. To have grasped its obliquity, that is, to have opened the doors of things,

31| is reported of Anaximander of Miletus, first, in the fifty-eighth Olympiad; then Cleostratus is said to have marked the signs in it, first those of the Ram and the Archer; the sphere itself much earlier Atlas. Now, leaving the body of the universe itself, let the rest be treated between heaven and earth.

32| It is certain that what they call the star of Saturn is the highest, and therefore appears smallest, and goes round in the greatest circle, and in the thirtieth year returns to the shortest beginnings of its seat; and that the courses of all the wandering stars, and among them those of the sun and moon, run contrary to the universe, that is, to the left, while that always rushes on to the right.

33| And although they are lifted up by it, with its ceaseless revolution of immense speed, and swept to their setting, yet each goes by an opposing motion through its own steps. This is so, that the air, rolled round in the same direction by the eternal whirl of the universe, may not grow sluggish in an idle ball, but may be spread out, divided and distributed by the opposing lash of the stars.

34| The star of Saturn, they say, is of a cold and stiff nature, and the circle of Jupiter is much lower than it, and therefore is carried round by a quicker motion, every twelve years. The third is that of Mars, which some call Hercules', burning with fire from the nearness of the sun, and turning about every two years or so; and so Jupiter, set between the two, is tempered by the excessive heat of this one and the rigidity of Saturn, and made wholesome.

35| Then the course of the sun is of three hundred and sixty parts, but in order that the observation of its shadows may return to its marks, five days are added to the years, and above that a fourth part of a day. For this reason in the fifth year one intercalary day is added, so that the reckoning of the seasons may agree with the sun's journey.

36| Below the sun goes a great star called the star of Venus, wandering in alternating course, and rivalling the sun and moon even in its names. For going ahead of the sun and rising before the morning, it has received the name of the Light-bringer, as if a second sun hastening the day; on the other hand, shining back from the west, it is called Vesper, as if prolonging the light and taking the place of the moon.

37| This nature of it Pythagoras of Samos was the first to discover, about the forty-second Olympiad, which was the 142nd year of the city of Rome. It is already beyond all the other stars in size, and of such brightness that shadows are cast by the rays of this one star alone. And so it has a wide range of names. For some have called it Juno's, some Isis', some the Mother of the Gods'.

38| By its nature all things on earth are generated. For at either rising, sprinkling the earth with a generative dew, it not only fills the conceptions of the earth, but stirs up those of all living creatures too. It runs through the zodiac's circuit in three hundred and forty-eight days, never moving away from the sun farther than forty-six parts, as Timaeus holds.

39| In a similar manner, but by no means in size or force, the star of Mercury, called by some Apollo's, next to it, is carried in a lower circle with a course nine days quicker, shining now before sunrise, now after sunset, never more than 22 parts distant from the sun, as Cidenas and Sosigenes teach. And so the reckoning of these stars is peculiar to them and not shared with those mentioned above.

40| For those are seen to be a fourth part of the heavens away from the sun, and a third, and often opposite to the sun, and all of them have larger circuits of complete revolution, to be set out in the reckoning of the great year.

41| But the last star surpasses the wonder of all, the one most familiar to the earth and found by nature as a remedy for darkness: the moon. This manifold and doubtful body has tormented the wits

42| of those who contemplate it, men most indignant at being ignorant of the nearest star: always waxing or waning, now with its face bent into horns, now divided in an equal portion, now curved into a circle, spotted and yet suddenly bright, immense when the orb is full and suddenly nothing, at one time all night, at another late, and in part of the day helping the light of the sun, failing and yet visible even in its failing - and hidden at the end of the month,

43| and then not believed to be in distress - and again low and high, and not even that in one way, but now brought close to the sky, now next to the mountains, now lifted to the north, now cast down to the south. All these things in it the first of men to detect was Endymion; hence the story is handed down of his love for her. We are surely not grateful toward those who, by labour and care, have opened up the light to us in this very light; and, by a strange plague of the human mind, it is a pleasure to bury blood and slaughter in annals, so that the crimes of men may become known to people who know nothing of the world itself.

44| Being therefore nearest the pole, and so with the smallest circuit, it completes in twenty-seven days and a third of a day the same spaces that the highest star, that of Saturn, completes in 30 years, as has been said. Then, lingering in conjunction with the sun for two days, at the slowest, from the thirtieth day it goes out again to the same turns, and is perhaps, of all the things that could be thoroughly learned in the heavens, the teacher that the year ought to be divided into the spaces of twelve months, since it overtakes the returning sun so many times at its starting-points;

45| that it is governed by the brightness of the sun, like the rest of the stars, since it shines wholly with a light it has borrowed from him, like the one we see flitting about in the reflection from water; that therefore with a gentler and imperfect force it only dissolves moisture and even increases it, which the sun's rays consume; that it is seen with unequal light because, full only when directly opposite, on the remaining days it shows to the earth only as much from itself as it receives from the sun;

46| that in conjunction it is not seen because, turned away, it throws back to him all the light it has drawn in, whence it received it. The stars, indeed, are doubtless fed by earthly moisture, because at half orb the moon is never seen spotted, clearly because it does not yet have the strength to draw up beyond its due measure; for the spots are nothing other than filth snatched up from the earth with the moisture. Its own eclipses, and the sun's - a thing most marvellous in the whole contemplation of nature and like a portent - prove to be indications of magnitudes and of shadow.

47| For it is clear that the sun is hidden when the moon comes between, and the moon by the earth's obstruction, and that they take turns, the moon by interposing itself taking those same rays of the sun away from the earth, and the earth taking them from the moon. When the moon passes under, sudden darkness is drawn over the earth, and in turn the star is dulled by the earth's shadow. Night is nothing other than the shadow of the earth, and the shape of the shadow is like a cone and a spinning top turned upside down, since it comes on only with its point and does not rise above the height of the moon, because no other star is darkened in the same way and a figure of this kind always fails at the point.

48| That shadows are used up in space is shown by the very high flights of birds. Therefore the boundary where they meet is the end of the air and the beginning of the aether. Above the moon all is pure and full of daylight. But by us the stars are seen through the night, as other lights are from darkness, and for these reasons the moon fails at night-time. Neither eclipse, however, is regular and monthly, owing to the zodiac's obliquity and to the many-wandering turns of the moon, as has been said, the motion of the stars not always agreeing to the scruples of the parts.

49| This reasoning draws mortal minds up into the heavens and, as if from there, reveals to those who contemplate it the size of the three greatest parts of nature. For the whole sun could not be taken from the earth by the intervening moon, if the earth were larger than the moon. A third vastness, that of the sun, will be disclosed from both, so that there is no need to search its size by the evidence of the eyes and by guesswork of the mind:

50| it is immense, because it casts the shadows of trees set out along boundary lines, for as many thousands of paces as you please, at equal intervals, as though it stood in the middle of the whole space; and because at the equinox it is directly overhead for all dwellers in the southern region at once; likewise because around the solstitial circle shadows of the inhabitants fall at midday to the north, but at sunrise toward the west; which could in no way happen unless it were much larger than the earth; and further, because at its rising it exceeds Mount Ida in breadth, embracing it widely on right and left, especially being separated by so great an interval.

51| The eclipse of the moon declares its size by no doubtful reasoning, just as it declares the smallness of the earth, in failing. For since there are three shapes of shadows, and it is agreed that, if the body that casts it is equal to the light, the shadow is cast in the likeness of a column and has no end; but if the body is greater than the light, that of an upright cone, so that its base is the narrowest and the length likewise unlimited; if the body is smaller than the light, the figure of a cone ending in a point at its tip results, and such a shadow is seen when the moon fails:

52| it is made plain, so that no further doubt remains, that the size of the earth is surpassed. And this by the silent indications of nature herself: for why, in the divided turns of the year, does the sun withdraw in winter, or restore the lands by the dark of the nights? Doubtless it would burn them up, and even so it burns up one part. So great is its size.

53| The reasoning behind both eclipses was first brought to the public among the Romans by Sulpicius Gallus, who was consul with Marcus Marcellus, but who was then a military tribune; having freed the army from anxiety, on the day before King Perses was defeated by Paulus he was brought forward to the assembly by the commander to predict an eclipse, and soon afterwards composed a volume as well. Among the Greeks the first of all to investigate it was Thales of Miletus, who predicted an eclipse of the sun in the 48th Olympiad, in its fourth year; this happened while Alyattes was king, in the 170th year after the founding of the city. After them Hipparchus foretold the course of both stars for 600 years, embracing the months of the nations, the days and hours, the positions of places and the appearances of peoples, with the age as witness, not otherwise than as a partner in the counsels of nature.

54| Mighty men, above mortal estate, who, having grasped the law of such great divinities and now freed the wretched human mind from fear of crimes or some death of the stars in eclipses - in which fear the lofty-voiced poets Stesichorus and Pindar were plainly caught at an eclipse of the sun - or, when mortality accuses sorcery in the moon and therefore helps her with discordant clatter - in which terror Nicias, the Athenian commander, ignorant of the cause, afraid to lead the fleet out of harbour, crushed their resources: blessings on your genius, interpreters of heaven, who have grasped the nature of things,

55| discoverers of proof, by which you have conquered gods and men! For who, seeing these things, and the fixed labours of the stars (since that is how it pleased men to call them), would not forgive mortals for being born subject to their own necessity? Now I shall touch briefly and by heads on matters admitted about them, with the reasoning given only in the places where it is quite necessary and in outline, for the argument of that kind does not belong to the work undertaken, and it is no less surprising that the causes of all things cannot be given than that anything is agreed.

56| It is certain that eclipses return to their own cycles in 223 months; that eclipses of the sun occur only at the last or the first moon, which they call conjunction, those of the moon only when full, and always short of where they were nearest; and that every year eclipses of both stars occur on fixed days and hours beneath the earth, and yet, though they occur above, are not seen everywhere, sometimes because of clouds, more often because the globe of the earth stands in the way, by the convexities of the world.

57| Within two hundred years it was discovered by the sagacity of Hipparchus that an eclipse of the moon sometimes occurs in the fifth month after the previous one, and of the sun in the seventh; that the same is hidden twice in 30 days above the earth, but is seen by others; and, what is most marvellous of all in this marvel, since it is agreed that the moon is dulled by the shadow of the earth, that this happens to her now from the side of the setting, now from that of the rising; by what reasoning, when at sunrise that dulling shadow ought to be under the earth, did it once happen that the moon failed at her setting, with both stars visible above the earth? For that both stars should be sought in 15 days also happened in our own age, in the consulship of the Vespasians, the father for the third time and the son.

58| It is not doubtful that the moon always has her horns turned away from the sun, looking to the rising if she is waxing, to the setting if she is waning; that she shines three-quarters and half a twelfth of an hour longer each day, adding from the second day until the full orb, and subtracting in the waning; and that she is always hidden within 14 parts of the sun. From this argument it is gathered that the size of the wandering stars is greater than that of the moon, since they emerge sometimes even from seven parts. But height forces them to seem smaller, just as the stars fixed in the heavens are not seen by day because of the sun's glare, though they shine just as at night, and this is made plain by an eclipse of the sun and by very deep wells.

59| Of the wandering stars, the three that we have said are placed above the sun are hidden as they travel with it, and rise in the morning when they depart from it, by never more than eleven parts. Afterwards they are governed by the contact of his rays, and in the trine, from 120 parts, make their morning stations, which are also called the first; then in opposition, from 180 parts, their evening risings; and again, approaching from the other side at 120, their evening stations, which they also call the second, until he catches up and hides them at twelve parts, which are called evening settings.

60| The star of Mars, being nearer, feels the rays even from the quartile, from 90 parts, whence the first and second motions have also received the name "ninetieth", so called from either rising. The same, when stationary, lingers in the signs for six months, whereas otherwise it stays two months, while the others do not fill four months in each station.

61| The two lower ones are hidden at evening conjunction in a similar manner, and, left behind by the sun, make their morning risings at as many parts, up to which, at the farthest bounds of their separation, they pursue the sun, and, having overtaken it, are hidden at the morning setting and pass by. Soon after, at the same interval, they rise in the evening, up to the limits we have mentioned. From these they retrograde toward the sun and lie hidden at evening setting. The star of Venus makes two stations, morning and evening, from either rising, from the farthest limits of its distance; those of Mercury are of too brief a moment to be detected.

62| This is the reckoning of the lights and their hidings, more perplexing in motion and wrapped in many marvels, since they change their sizes and colours, and the same ones approach the north and depart to the south, and are suddenly seen nearer to the earth or to the heavens. In these matters, I confess, I am going to report many things differently from my predecessors, and that these too belong to the service of those who first showed the ways of inquiry, provided only that no one despairs that the ages always make progress.

63| All this happens from several causes: the first is that of the circles which the Greeks call hapsides in the stars; for we shall have to use Greek words. Each of the stars has its own, different from those of the universe, since the earth is the centre of the heavens, as well as of the zodiac, which is set obliquely between the two vertices that they have named the poles. All this holds by the reckoning of the compasses, which is always beyond doubt. So from a different centre for each one its apsides rise up, and therefore they have different orbits and unlike motions, since the inner apsides must be shorter.

64| Thus, measured from the earth's centre, the highest apsides are these: Saturn's lies in Scorpio, Jupiter's in Virgo, Mars's in Leo, the sun's in Gemini, Venus's in Sagittarius, Mercury's in Capricorn, and the moon's in Taurus, at the middle of all their parts; and conversely their lowest points, the closest to the earth's centre, lie opposite. So it happens that they appear to travel more slowly when borne along their highest orbit, not because their natural motions speed up or slow down, which are fixed and single for each, but because lines drawn down from the topmost apsis must contract toward the centre, as the spokes do in wheels, and the same motion is felt at one time greater, at another less, by nearness to the centre.

65| The second cause of the heights is that they have their highest apsides, measured from their own centre, in other signs: Saturn at the twentieth part of Libra; for Jupiter it is the fifteenth of Cancer; Mars has Capricorn's 28th; the sun, Aries's 19th; Venus, Pisces's 27th; Mercury, Virgo's 15th; and the moon, Taurus's 3rd. The third reckoning of heights is understood as a measure of the heavens, not of a circle: that the stars rise or descend through the depth of the air, as the eyes judge.

66| Joined to this is the cause of the latitudes and the obliquity of the zodiac. Through this the stars we have mentioned are carried, and nothing is inhabited on earth except what lies beneath it; the rest, toward the poles, is parched. Only the star of Venus goes beyond it, by two parts, which cause is understood to bring it about that certain animals are born even in the deserts of the world. The moon also wanders through its whole breadth, but does not go beyond it at all. After these the star of Mercury ranges most widely, yet so that of the twelve parts - for that is the number of its latitude - it traverses no more than eight, and not these evenly, but two in the middle of it and four above, two below.

67| Then the sun is carried in the middle between two parts, uneven in its winding, serpentine course; the star of Mars through the four middle ones; that of Jupiter through the middle and two above it; that of Saturn through two, like the sun. This will be the reckoning of the latitudes of those descending to the south or climbing to the north. Most people have supposed, wrongly, that the third reckoning, that of those climbing up from the earth into the heavens, also consists in this, and that they rise equally. To refute them, an immense subtlety, embracing all those causes, must be unfolded.

68| It is agreed that the stars at their evening setting are nearest the earth both in height and in latitude, that the morning risings occur at the beginning of each, and the stations at the middle joints of the latitudes, which they call ecliptic. Likewise it is admitted that motion increases while they are near the earth, and decreases when they withdraw into the height. This reasoning is best confirmed by the heights of the moon. Equally there is no doubt that at the morning risings the motion is still increasing, and that from the first stations the three upper stars diminish it until the second stations.

69| Since this is so, it will be plain that from the morning rising the latitudes are climbed, since in that condition motion first begins to be added to more sparingly, while at the first stations the height also is ascended, since then for the first time the numbers begin to be subtracted and the stars to go backward. The reason of this matter must be given separately. Struck in the part we have mentioned, and in the triangle, by the ray of the sun, they are checked from running a straight course and are lifted by fiery force into the height.

70| This cannot be understood at once by our sight, and therefore they are thought to stand still, whence the name station has been taken. Then the violence of the same ray advances and forces those struck by its heat to go backward. This happens much more at their evening rising, when the whole sun is opposite and they are driven out to the highest apsides and are seen smallest, because they are most distant in height, and are carried with the smallest motion, smaller still when this happens in the signs of the highest apsides.

71| From the evening rising the latitude is descended, the motion now diminishing more sparingly, yet not increasing before the second stations, when the height too is descended, a ray coming over from the other side and with the same force pressing them back toward the earth that had lifted them into the heavens from the earlier triangle. There is so great a difference whether the rays come up from beneath or come over from above, and the same things happen much more at the evening setting. This is the reckoning of the upper stars; that of the rest is more difficult, and has been given by no one before us.

72| First, then, let it be said why the star of Venus never moves away from the sun farther than 46 parts, and Mercury's 20, and often swing back toward the sun short of these. Both have their apsides turned the other way, being placed below the sun, and as much of their circles lies beneath as lies above in those mentioned before, and therefore they cannot be farther away, since the curve of the apsides there has no greater length. So both, by a like reasoning, fix the measure by the margins of their apsides, and balance the spaces of length by the ranging of the latitudes. But

73| why do they not always reach forty-six parts and twenty? In fact they do, but the calculation deceives the canon-makers. For it appears that their apsides also move, since they never pass beyond the sun. And so when the margins fall on the very part of him, on either side, then the stars too are understood to reach their longest intervals. When the margins have been short of it, the stars themselves are forced to return more quickly by as many parts, since that is always the highest extremity for each of the two.

74| From this the reckoning of the motions, too, is understood to be reversed. For the upper stars are carried fastest at the evening setting, these slowest; the former are farthest from the earth in height when they move slowest, these when they move fastest, because as nearness to the centre speeds up the former, so in these the extremity of the circle does. The former begin to lessen their speed from the morning rising, these on the contrary to increase it; the former run backward from the morning station to the evening one, Venus from the evening to the morning.

75| It begins from the morning rising to climb in latitude, but to follow the sun in height from the morning station, swiftest at the morning setting and highest, while it falls off in latitude and lessens its motion from the evening rising, goes backward and at the same time descends in height from the evening station; the star of Mercury again climbs in both ways from the morning rising, and descends in latitude from the evening one, and when it has overtaken the sun it halts at an interval of fifteen parts, nearly motionless for four days.

76| Soon it descends from its height and goes backward from the evening setting to the morning rising, and only this star and the moon descend in as many days as they have ascended. Venus ascends in fifteen times more, while again Saturn and Jupiter descend in double, and Mars even in quadruple. So great is the variety of nature, but the reckoning is evident. For those that strive into the heat of the sun descend also with difficulty.

77| Many further secrets of nature, and laws which she herself obeys, can be set out regarding these matters; for example, in the star of Mars, whose course is the most unobservable, that it never makes a station in the trine with the star of Jupiter, and only very rarely when separated from it by 60 parts, which number produces the hexagonal figures of the universe; and that they do not make risings together except in two signs only, Cancer and Leo; that the star of Mercury makes evening risings rarely in Pisces and most often in Virgo, morning ones in Libra, likewise morning ones in Aquarius, most rarely in Leo; that its retrograde motion does not occur in Taurus or in Gemini, and in Cancer not before the twenty-fifth part;

78| that the moon makes two conjunctions with the sun in no other sign than Gemini, and sometimes does not conjoin in Sagittarius alone; that the last moon and the first are seen on one and the same day or night in no sign other than Aries - this too has fallen to few mortals, and from this comes the fame of Lynceus's seeing; that the star of Saturn and that of Mars fail to appear in the heavens, at most, for 170 days, that of Jupiter for 36 or, at least, with ten days taken off, that of Venus for 69 or, at least, 52, that of Mercury for 13 or, at most, 17.

79| The reckoning of the heights tempers the colours, since they take on the likeness of those into whose air they have come by ascending, and the circle of a strange course dyes them as they approach, the colder one toward pallor, the more burning toward redness, the windy one toward a bristling roughness, the sun and the joinings of the apsides and the extreme orbits toward black obscurity. Each has its own colour: Saturn's white, Jupiter's bright, Mars's fiery, the Light-bringer's glowing, Vesper's gleaming, Mercury's radiant, the moon's gentle, the sun's, when he rises, burning, afterwards radiant; by these causes the vision both of these and of those held in the heavens is linked together.

80| For at one time a crowded multitude is present around the half orbs of the moon, when the calm night lightly illuminates them, at another a thinness, so that we marvel they have fled, when the full moon hides them or when the rays of the sun, or else of those mentioned above have dazzled our sight. And the moon herself plainly feels the differences of the rays of the sun falling upon her, the rest being dulled by the curve of the universe, which bends them, except where the blows of the rays meet at right angles. And so at the quartile of the sun she is divided in half, at the trine she is enclosed in a half-empty orb, and she is filled at the opposition, and again waning she shows the same shapes at equal intervals, by a like reasoning to that by which the three stars above the sun do.

81| The sun himself has four differences, twice when the night is equalled to the day, in spring and autumn, falling into the centre of the earth at the eighth parts of Aries and Libra, and twice with the spaces exchanged, at the winter solstice for the increase of the day, in the eighth part of Capricorn, and at the solstice for the increase of the night, in as many parts of Cancer. The inequality arises from the obliquity of the zodiac, since an equal part of the universe is above and below the earth at all moments. But the signs which rise straight at their rising hold the light over a longer stretch; those that are oblique pass over in a swifter space.

82| It is hidden from most people, though discovered by the leading men of learning through great attendance on the heavens, that the fires that fall to earth and bear the name of thunderbolts belong to the three upper stars, but above all to Jupiter, which is set in the middle, perhaps because in this way it has driven out the contagion of excess moisture from the circle above and of heat from the one below; and so it has been said that Jupiter hurls thunderbolts. Therefore as a coal with a crackle from a burning log, so heavenly fire is spat out from the star, bringing foreknowledge with it, the star not idle in divine works even when a part of itself is cast off. And this happens chiefly when the air is disturbed, either because gathered moisture spurs the abundance on, or because the star is disturbed by a kind of labour, as of a star with child.

83| The intervals of the stars from the earth also many have tried to find out; and they have reported that the sun stands off from the moon nineteen times as far as the moon itself does from the earth. Pythagoras, however, a man of sagacious mind, gathered that from the earth to the moon is a distance of 126,000 stadia, from her to the sun twice that, and from there to the twelve signs three times that, in which opinion our Gallus Sulpicius also was.

84| But Pythagoras sometimes also uses a musical reckoning, and calls the distance of the moon from the earth a tone, from her to Mercury half that space, and from him to Venus likewise, from her to the sun one and a half times that, from the sun to Mars a tone [that is, the same as the moon stands from the earth], from Mars to Jupiter a half, and from Jupiter to that of Saturn, and thence one and a half times that to the zodiac; so that it is made up by seven tones, the harmony they call dia pason, that is, the totality of concord; in it Saturn moves on the Dorian note, Jupiter on the Phrygian, and likewise in the rest, a subtlety more pleasing than necessary.

85| A stadium makes 25 of our paces, that is, 625 feet. Posidonius says that the height from the earth to which clouds and winds and cloud-banks reach is not less than 40 stadia, and from there the air is pure and clear and of undisturbed light; but from the turbid air to the moon, twenty times a hundred thousand stadia, from there to the sun five thousand times a hundred thousand; and that by this space it happens that so immense a size of the sun does not burn up the lands. Many, however, have reported that clouds rise to a height of 900. These things are unascertained and inextricable, but must be handed on, because they have been handed on; among them, however, one method, that of geometrical inference, which never deceives, need not be rejected, if someone cares to pursue these things more deeply, and not as a measure - for to want that is almost the idleness of a madman - but only that an estimate may stand for a mind conjecturing.

86| For since it is apparent that the circle through which the orbit of the sun travels extends, along its circuit, over 360 and almost six parts, and the diameter always embraces a third of the circumference and a little less than a seventh of the third, it is apparent that, when half of it is taken away, since the central earth intervenes, about a sixth part of this immense space, which is grasped in the mind as the space of the circle around the earth, belongs to the space of height, and of the moon a twelfth, since she runs in an orbit so much shorter than the sun's.

87| Thus she comes to be in the middle between the sun and the earth. I wonder how far the shamelessness of the human heart advances, invited by some small success, as in the matters mentioned above reasoning gives the occasion of impudence. And having dared to divine the spaces of the sun to the earth, they apply the same to the heavens, since the sun is in the middle, so that straightway the measure of the universe itself comes within their fingers. For as many sevenths as the diameter has, so many twenty-seconds, they say, has the circle, as though the measure of the heavens stood plainly by the plumb-line.

88| The Egyptian reckoning, which Petosiris and Nechepso set out, gathers that single parts in the circle of the moon, as has been said, extend a little over 33 stadia at the least, in the widest circle, that of Saturn, double, and in that of the sun, which we have said is the middle, half of each measure. This computation has a great deal to be ashamed of, since, if the interval of the zodiac itself is added to the circle of Saturn, a multiplication that cannot even be numbered results.

89| A few things remain about the universe. For in the heavens themselves stars suddenly are born. There are many kinds of them. The Greeks call them cometae, ours crinitae, bristling with blood-red hair and shaggy like locks at the top. The same are called pogoniae when a mane spreads out from the lower part in the likeness of a long beard. The acontiae are brandished like a javelin, with the swiftest of signs. This was the one about which Titus Imperator Caesar, in his fifth consulship, wrote in a splendid poem, the most recent seen to this day. The same, when shorter and tapering to a point, they have called xiphiae; these are the palest of all, with a certain shine like a sword's and without any rays; a disceus, like its name, but amber in colour, sends out a few rays from its edge.

90| The pitheus is seen in the shape of casks, in a hollow of smoky light. The ceratias has the appearance of a horn, such as it was when Greece fought at Salamis. The lampadias imitates burning torches, the hippeus the manes of horses, of very swift motion and travelling in a circle around themselves. There is also a white comet, the dios cometes, shining with so silvery a hair that one can scarcely look at it, and showing in itself the image of a god in human form. There are also goats, in the appearance of fleeces and surrounded by some cloud. Once so far the image of a mane has been changed into a spear, in the 108th Olympiad, the 408th year of Rome. The briefest span in which they have been seen is recorded as 7 days, the longest 180.

91| Some move after the manner of the wandering stars, others stick fast, motionless; almost all are under the north itself, in some part of it that is not fixed, but above all in the white part that has received the name of the milky circle. Aristotle reports that several are seen at once, a thing found by no one else, so far as I know, and that by them severe winds or heats are foretold. They occur also in the winter months and at the southern pole, but there without any radiance. A dire one was observed by the peoples of Ethiopia and Egypt, to which Typhon, the king of that age, gave his name, of fiery appearance and twisted like a coil, grim also to look upon, and not so much a star as a kind of fiery knot.

92| Hair is sometimes scattered also upon the wandering stars and the others. But a comet is never in the part of the sky that sets; it is, for the most part, a terrifying star and not lightly atoned for, as in the civil upheaval in the consulship of Octavius, and again in the war between Pompey and Caesar, and in our own age at the poisoning by which Claudius Caesar left the empire to Domitius Nero, and then in his principate, almost continual and cruel. They hold that it matters into which regions it hurls itself, or from which star it takes its powers, and what likenesses it takes on, and in what places it flashes out:

93| that in the shape of flutes it portends for the art of music, for obscene morals in the shameful parts of the constellations, for talents and learning if it puts out a triangular figure or a square one with equal angles toward certain positions of the perennial stars; that they pour out poisons in the head of the northern or the southern serpent. A comet is worshipped in one place only in the whole world, in a temple at Rome, judged exceedingly auspicious by the deified Augustus himself, to whom it appeared at the start of his career at the games which he was holding for Venus Genetrix, shortly after the death of his father Caesar, in the college founded by him.

94| For in these words he declares his joy in [….]: "In the very days of my games a hairy star was seen for seven days in the region of the sky under the north. It arose around the eleventh hour of the day, and was bright and visible from all lands. By that star the common people believed it was signified that the soul of Caesar had been received among the divinities of the immortal gods, and on that account this sign was added to the statue of his head, which we soon after consecrated in the forum." This he said publicly; in his inner joy he interpreted that it was born for him, and that he was being born in it. And, if we admit the truth, it was salutary for the world. There are some who believe that these stars too are everlasting and go in their own orbit, but are seen only when left behind by the sun; others, that they are born from chance moisture and fiery force, and are therefore dissolved.

95| The same Hipparchus, never praised enough, than whom no one has more strongly confirmed the kinship of the stars with man and that our souls are part of the heavens, detected a new star, another one, born in his own age, and by its motion, from where it shone, was led to doubt whether this happened rather often and whether even those we think fixed also move; and so he dared, a thing improper even for a god, to count the stars for posterity and to register the constellations by name with instruments devised, through which he marked the places and magnitudes of each, so that it could easily be discerned from this not only whether they set and were born, but whether some wholly passed on and moved, likewise whether they grew and diminished, the heavens being left to all as an inheritance, if anyone were found to take up that bequest.

96| Torches also flash out, seen only when they fall, such as, when Germanicus Caesar was giving a spectacle of gladiators, ran across before the face of the people at midday. There are two kinds of them. Those that are plainly torches they call lampades, the other bolides, such as was seen at the evils of the Mutinenses. They differ in that torches make long trails with the front part burning, while a bolis burning throughout draws a longer track. Beams too flash out in a similar way, which they call dokoi, as when the Lacedaemonians, beaten in a naval battle, lost the empire of Greece. There is also a gaping of the sky itself, which they call chasma,

97| and a bloody appearance, and - than which nothing is more terrible to mortal fear - a fire falling toward the earth from it, as in the 107th Olympiad's third year, when King Philip was shaking Greece. And I judge that these come about at fixed times by the force of nature, like the rest, not, as most hold, from varied causes which the sharpness of wits devises, since they have indeed been forerunners of great evils; but I judge that those things happened not because these were done, but that these were done because those were going to befall, and that the reason for them is hidden by their rarity, and so is not known, as are the risings and eclipses mentioned above and many other things.

98| Stars are also seen with the sun for whole days, and often around the orb of the sun like garlands of corn-ears and many-coloured circles, as when Augustus Caesar, in his early youth, was entering the city after his father's death to take up a mighty name. The same garlands appear around the moon and around noble stars fixed in the heavens. Around the sun a bow appeared in the consulship of Lucius Opimius and Quintus Fabius, an orb in that of Gaius Porcius and Manius Acilius, a circle of red colour in that of Lucius Julius and Publius Rutilius. Portentous and longer eclipses of the sun also occur, such as when Caesar the dictator was killed and in the Antonian war, with a pallor continuing for almost a whole year.

99| And again several suns are seen at once, neither above the sun itself nor below, but to the side, never near the earth nor opposite it, nor at night, but at sunrise or sunset. Once they are reported to have been seen even at midday in the Bosporus, lasting from the morning time until sunset. Three suns even the ancients saw rather often, as in the consulships of Spurius Postumius and Quintus Mucius, of Quintus Marcius and Marcus Porcius, of Marcus Antonius and Publius Dolabella, and of Marcus Lepidus and Lucius Plancus; and our own age saw them under the deified Claudius as emperor, in his consulship, with Cornelius Orfitus as colleague. More than three at once are not reported ever to have been seen down to this age. Three moons also appeared, as in the consulship of Gnaeus Domitius and Gaius Fannius.

100| What many have called night suns, a light from the sky seen at night, occurred in the consulship of Gaius Caecilius and Gnaeus Papirius and often at other times, so that the look of day shone in the night. A blazing shield, sparkling, ran across from the west to the east at sunset in the consulship of Lucius Valerius and Gaius Marius. A spark seen to fall from a star and to grow as it approached the earth, and, after it had become the size of the moon, to have shed light as on a cloudy day, then, when it withdrew into the sky, to have become a lamp, is reported to have happened once only, in the consulship of Gnaeus Octavius and Gaius Scribonius. The proconsul Silanus saw it with his retinue. Shootings of stars are also seen, and never without fierce winds arising from that quarter.

101| Stars exist also on the sea and on land. I have seen, in the night watches of soldiers, a gleam of that shape cling to the javelins in front of the rampart; and they settle upon the yards of sailors and other parts of ships as with a kind of vocal sound, like birds changing their perch from place to place, heavy when they come single, sinking the vessels and, if they fall into the bottom of the keel, burning them; but when double they are salutary and heralds of a prosperous voyage, and by their coming they say that dire and threatening one called Helena is put to flight; and for this reason they assign this divinity to Pollux and Castor and invoke them at sea. The heads of men also gleam about at evening, with great foreboding. All is of uncertain reasoning and hidden in the majesty of nature.

102| So far on the universe itself and the stars: now the remaining notable things of the sky. For our ancestors also called this the sky, which by another name is the air, everything that, being like emptiness, pours out this vital breath. This region is beneath the moon and much lower, as I observe is almost agreed, mixing the infinite part of the air from the higher nature with the infinite part of the exhalation of the earth, and is confused with both lots. From here come clouds, thunder and the other thunderbolts, from here hail, frosts, rains, storms, whirlwinds, from here very many of the ills of mortals and nature's battle with herself.

103| The force of the stars presses down earthly things that tend toward the sky and draws to itself the same things that would not rise of their own accord. Rains fall, mists rise, rivers are dried up, hailstones rush down. The rays scorch and drive the earth toward the middle from every side; the same, broken, spring back and carry off with them what they could. Vapour descends from above and goes back up again. Empty winds rush in and return with their plunder. The drawing in of breath by so many living creatures pulls the spirit from the height, but it strains the other way, and the earth pours out breath as though into an empty sky.

104| Thus with nature going to and fro, discord is kindled, as by some engine, at the speed of the universe. Nor is there leave for the battle to stand still, but it is ceaselessly snatched along and rolled about, and around the earth shows the causes of things in an immense globe, from time to time weaving one sky after another over itself through the clouds. This is the kingdom of the winds. And so their chief nature is there and nearly embraces the rest of these causes, since most assign the casting of thunder and thunderbolts to their violence; indeed, that it sometimes rains stones is because they have been snatched up by the wind, and many things similarly. For this reason several matters must be spoken of together.

105| That some causes of storms and rains are fixed, but some fortuitous or as yet of unascertained reasoning, is clear. For who would doubt that summers and winters, and what in the seasons is understood to come round each year, happen by the motion of the stars? Therefore as the nature of the sun is understood in the tempering of the year, so too the remaining stars each have their own power and are fertile according to the nature of each. Some are productive of moisture dissolved into liquid, some of it congealed into frosts or drawn together into snow or frozen into hail, others of breath, others of mildness or of heat, others of dew, others of cold. Nor, indeed, should these be thought as great as they appear, since the reckoning of so immense a height shows that none of them is smaller than the moon.

106| Therefore each exercises its own nature in its own motion, which is plain: the passages of Saturn above all make rains. Nor is this the power only of the travelling stars, but of many also of those attached to the heavens, whenever they are impelled by the approach of the wandering stars or goaded by the casting of rays, as we perceive happens in the Suculae, which the Greeks on that account call by a name meaning rain. Indeed some do so of their own accord and at fixed times, like the rising of the Kids. The star of Arcturus hardly ever emerges without a stormy hail.

107| For who does not know that at the rising of the Dog-star the heat of the sun is kindled? The effects of this star are felt very widely on earth: the seas boil when it rises, wines surge in their cellars, pools are stirred. Egypt calls an animal the oryx, which it says stands facing the star at its rising and gazes at it, and as it were worships it, after it has sneezed. That dogs, indeed, throughout that whole period are driven above all into madness is not in doubt.

108| Indeed even parts of certain signs have their own power, as at the autumnal equinox and at the winter solstice, when we understand the star to be completed with storms, and not in rains and storms only, but in many experiences of bodies and of the countryside. Some are breathed upon by the star, others are stirred at fixed times in the bowels, the sinews, the head, the mind. The olive and the white poplar and willows turn their leaves round at the solstice. On the winter solstice day itself the herb puleium, hung up indoors and drying, flowers.

109| Membranes stretched with air are burst. Let him wonder at this who does not observe by daily experiment that one herb, which is called heliotropium, always looks at the departing sun and turns with it at all hours, even when a cloud overshadows. Further, that by the power of the moon the bodies of oysters and shellfish and all conchs grow and again diminish; and the more careful investigators have found that even the fibres of shrews correspond to the number of the moon; and that the smallest animal, the ant, feels the powers of the star, always idle at the moon's dark.

110| It is all the more shameful for a man to be ignorant, admitting especially that the eye diseases of certain beasts of burden grow and diminish with the moon. The vastness of the subject is a defence, it being divided in immense height into seventy-two signs, that is, images of things or living creatures, into which the experts have distributed the sky. In these they have noted 1,600 stars, those evidently remarkable in effect or in appearance, for example in the tail of Taurus seven, which they have called Vergiliae, in the forehead the Suculae, and Bootes, which follows the Seven Triones.

111| Apart from these causes I would not deny that rains and winds arise, since it is certain that a damp mist is breathed out from the earth, and at other times, because of heat, a smoky one, and that clouds are generated when moisture escapes upward, or from air condensed into liquid. Their density and body are inferred by no doubtful proof, since they overshadow the sun, which is at other times clearly visible even to divers at any depth of water.

112| Therefore I do not deny that into these also fires fall from above, from the stars, such as we often see in clear weather, by the stroke of which it is true that the air is shaken, since even hurled javelins whistle; but when they reach a cloud a discordant vapour is generated, as when glowing iron is dipped into water, and a smoky whirl is rolled. From this storms are born, and if breath or vapour struggles in the cloud, thunder is produced; if it bursts out burning, thunderbolts; if it strains along a longer stretch, lightning-flashes. By these the cloud is split, by those broken through, and thunders are the blows of fires driven in, and so at once the fiery cracks of the clouds flash.

113| It is possible also that a breath which has travelled up from the earth, pressed down by the repulse of the stars and held in by a cloud, makes thunder, nature choking the sound while it struggles, the crash being uttered when it bursts out, as in a membrane stretched with breath. It is possible also that that breath, whatever it is, is kindled by friction, while it is borne headlong. It is possible also that it is struck out by the clash of clouds, as with two stones, the lightnings sparkling. But all these things are fortuitous. Hence the brute and idle thunderbolts, such as have no reasoning of nature. By these mountains are struck, by these seas, and all other futile strokes. But those that foretell the future come from on high, at fixed times and from their own stars.

114| In like fashion I should not deny that winds, or rather blasts, can be generated by the dry and parched exhalation of the earth, and can also be produced by waters breathing out air that neither thickens into mist nor grows dense into clouds, and can also be driven by the impulse of the sun, since wind may be understood as nothing other than a wave of air, and in more ways as well. For we see them rise from rivers and snows and from the sea, and even in calm weather, and others, which they call altani, from the land. These, when they come back from the sea, are called tropaei, but if they go on, apogei.

115| The bends of mountains, however, and their frequent peaks, and ridges bent at the elbow or broken at the shoulders, the hollow folds of valleys, cutting the air which therefore rebounds by the unevenness - the cause that also makes voices echo in many places - generate winds without end. Even caves do, such as one in Dalmatia, vast in mouth and steep in its chasm, into which, if a light weight is thrown, a squall like a whirlwind flashes out even on a calm day; the place has the name Senta. And in the province of Cyrenaica a certain rock is reported as holy to the south wind; it is sacrilege to touch it with a human hand, the south wind at once rolling up the sands. In many houses too, moistened chambers shut in the shade have their own breezes. So little is a cause wanting.

116| But it matters a great deal whether it is a blast or a wind. Those that are fixed and blow through, which are felt not by some single tract but by whole lands, which are neither breeze nor squall but, as the very name implies, males, are winds, whether they are born from the unceasing motion of the universe and the contrary meeting of the stars, or whether this is that generative breath of the nature of things, wandering hither and thither as though in some womb, or air lashed by the unequal striking of the wandering stars and the many-shaped casting of rays, or whether they issue from stars of their own, the nearer ones, or fall from those fixed in the sky: it is plain that these too have a law of nature, not unknown, though not yet fully understood.

117| More than twenty Greek authors of old handed down observations on them. All the more I wonder, when the world was discordant and divided into kingdoms, that is, into limbs, that so many men took care for things so hard to discover, in the midst of wars especially and faithless hospitality, with pirates, enemies of all mortals, terrifying by report those about to pass; so that today each man in his own region comes to know some things more truly from their commentaries, though they never went there, than by the knowledge of the natives; whereas now, in a peace so festive, with the emperor so delighting in the progress of affairs and arts, nothing at all is learned by new inquiry, nay, not even the discoveries of the ancients are thoroughly learned.

118| The rewards were not greater, being scattered among many by the greatness of fortune, and those men dug these things out with no other reward than that of helping posterity. For it is the morals of men that have grown old, not the fruits; and an immense multitude sails the sea, which is open, whatever it is, and with a welcoming landing on every shore, but for the sake of gain, not knowledge. Nor does the blind mind, intent only on avarice, reckon that this very thing can be done more safely by knowledge. Therefore I shall treat the winds more scrupulously than the plan of the work perhaps requires, seeing so many thousands of sailors.

119| The ancients kept to four only, for as many parts of the world - and so Homer names no more - by a dull reckoning, as was soon judged; the next age added eight, with a reckoning too fine and cut up. The most recent preferred a mean between the two, adding four to the short list from the numerous one. Hence each of the four quarters of the sky has two: from the equinoctial east, the subsolanus; from the winter east, the vulturnus. The former the Greeks call apeliotes, the latter eurus. From the south the auster, and from the winter west the Africus; they call them notus and Libs. From the equinoctial west the favonius, from the solstitial west the corus; they call them zephyrus and argestes. From the north the septentrio, and between it and the solstitial east the aquilo, called aparctias and boreas.

120| A more numerous reckoning had inserted four others: thrascias, midway between the north and the solstitial west; likewise caecias, midway between the aquilo and the equinoctial east, from the solstitial east; Phoenices, midway between the winter east and the south; likewise, between Libs and notus, a compound of the two, midway between the south and the winter west, Libonotus. Nor is that the end. Some have even added one by the name of mesen between boreas and caecias, and between eurus and notus, euronotus. Particular peoples also have winds peculiar to themselves, not proceeding beyond a certain tract, such as sciron for the Athenians, turned a little from argestes, unknown to the rest of Greece. Elsewhere the same blast is called Olympias.

121| Common usage understands argestes under all these names. Caecias some call Hellespontias, and others call the same ones otherwise. Likewise in the province of Narbonensis the most famous of the winds is the circius, inferior in violence to none of them, which most often carries one to Ostia, cutting across the Ligurian sea. The same is not only unknown in the other parts of the sky, but does not even reach Vienna, a city of the same province: a few miles before, by the meeting with a modest ridge, that great wind is held in check! And Fabianus denies that the austri penetrate into Egypt. From which a plain law of nature appears, even the winds having a time and an end assigned.

122| Spring, therefore, opens the seas to sailors; at its beginning the favonii soften the winter sky, the sun holding the 25th part of Aquarius. That day is the sixth before the Ides of February. This agrees roughly with all those which I shall set down next, since with each intercalation they come a day earlier and in the following five-year period keep the order again. The favonius some call chelidonias from the sight of the swallow, on the eighth day before the Kalends of March; some indeed call it ornithias, blowing, from the coming of the birds, on the seventy-first day after midwinter, for nine days. The opposite of the favonius is the one we have called subsolanus.

123| Summer is given by the rising of the Vergiliae, in an equal number of parts of Taurus, six days ahead of the Ides of May, a season which is austral, with this wind opposed by the septentrio. In the hottest time of summer the Dog-star rises, with the sun entering the first part of Leo, which day is the fifteenth before the Kalends of August. About eight days before its rising the aquilones precede it, which they call prodromi.

124| Two days after the rising, the same aquilones blow more steadily for forty days. These they call etesiae. The heat of the sun, doubled by the burning of the star, is believed to soften them, and none of the winds are more fixed. After them the austri blow frequently again, as far as the star Arcturus, which rises eleven days ahead of the autumn equinox. With this the corus begins. The corus brings autumn; its opposite is the vulturnus.

125| After that equinox, in about 44 days, the setting of the Vergiliae begins winter, a time that is accustomed to fall on the third day ahead of the Ides of November; this belongs to the winter aquilo and is very unlike that summer one, opposite which is the Africus. Seven days before the winter solstice and as many after it the sea is laid calm for the brooding of the halcyons, whence those days have taken their name. The rest of the time is winter. Yet the savagery of storms does not close the sea. Pirates first forced men, at the risk of death, to rush into death and try the winter seas; now avarice compels the same.

126| Of the winds, the coldest are those we said blow from the north, and the corus near them. These both restrain the others and drive off clouds. Damp are the Africus and above all the auster of Italy. They say that in the Pontus too the caecias draws clouds toward itself. Dry are the corus and vulturnus, except when they are dying away. Snowy are the aquilo and septentrio. Hail is brought by the septentrio and the corus. The auster is sultry; the vulturnus and favonius are mild. These are drier than the subsolanus, and in general all winds from the north and the west are drier than those from the south and the east.

127| The most healthy of all is the aquilo; harmful is the auster, and more so when dry, perhaps because when damp it is colder. Living creatures are believed to be less hungry when it blows. The etesiae mostly cease at night and rise from the third hour of daylight. In Spain and Asia their blast is from the east, in the Pontus from the aquilo, in the other regions from the south. They blow also from the winter solstice, when they are called ornithiae, but milder and for few days. Two also change nature with their position: the auster of Africa is clear, the aquilo cloudy.

128| All the winds blow in their turns, and for the most part so that the contrary begins as the one ending. When the nearest rise as others fall, they go round from the left side to the right, as the sun does. For their monthly reckoning the fourth day of the moon decides most. By the same winds one sails in opposite directions with the sheets let out, so that at night the opposed sails mostly meet. Greater waves are raised by the auster than by the aquilo, since the former blows from below, from the bottom of the sea, the latter from the top. And therefore after the austri earthquakes are especially harmful.

129| By night the auster, by day the aquilo, is stronger, and those blowing from the east last longer than those blowing from the west. The septentriones for the most part cease on an odd number, an observation that holds in many other parts of nature too; so odd numbers are considered male. The sun both increases and checks the blasts: rising and setting it increases them, at midday in the summer seasons it checks them. And so in the middle of the day or the night they are mostly lulled, because they are loosened either by excessive cold or by heat. Winds are also lulled by rains. They are expected chiefly from where the scattered clouds have opened the sky.

130| Eudoxus thinks that, if one cares to observe the smallest cycles, the same turns return of all of them when four years are completed, not of the winds only, but of the other weather for the most part. And the beginning of that five-year period is always in the intercalary year at the rising of the Dog-star. So much for the general winds.

131| Now for the sudden blasts, which, arising when the earth exhales, as has been said, and cast down again, at times, with a skin of clouds drawn over, appear in many shapes. For wandering and rushing in the manner of torrents, as we have shown pleases some, they produce thunder and lightning. But borne in with greater weight and onrush, if they have burst a wide dry cloud, they generate a squall, called by the Greeks ecnephias; but if, wheeling more tightly in a pressed-down fold, they have broken out, without fire, that is, without a thunderbolt, they make a whirlwind, which is called typhon, that is, a brandished ecnephias.

132| This carries with it something torn from a freezing cloud, rolling and turning it and making its own ruin heavier by that weight, and changing from place to place in a rapid spin, the chief scourge of sailors, shattering not only yards but the very vessels, twisted; there is a slender remedy in vinegar poured out against it as it comes, whose nature is the coldest. The same, thrown back by the very impact, carries up into the sky what it has caught up with it and swallows it into the height.

133| But if it breaks out of a deeper cavity of a pressed-down cloud, though less wide than a squall and not without a crash, they call it a turbo, throwing down everything nearest. The same, more fiery and kindled while it rages, is called prester, scorching and trampling alike whatever it touches. There is no typhon from the aquilo, nor an ecnephias when the ground is snowy or snow is lying. But if it has at once broken the cloud and burst into flame and had fire, and did not conceive it afterwards, it is a thunderbolt.

134| It differs from the prester as flame from fire. This spreads widely by its blast, that is rolled together by its onset. A vortex, by returning on itself, differs from a turbo as a shriek from a crash; a squall differs from both in breadth, with the cloud rather scattered than broken. A fog like a beast also forms in the cloud, dire for sailors. There is also what is called a column, when thickened moisture, rigid, sustains itself; of the same kind also the aulon, when a cloud draws up water as through a pipe.

135| In winter and in summer thunderbolts are rare, from opposite causes: in winter the air, condensed, is packed by the thicker hide of the clouds, and every exhalation of the earth, stiff and cold, extinguishes whatever fiery vapour it receives. This reasoning keeps Scythia, and the frozen regions about, free from the fall of thunderbolts; on the other hand excessive heat does so for Egypt, since the hot and dry breaths of the earth, very rare and thin, condense into weak clouds.

136| In spring and autumn thunderbolts are more frequent, the causes of summer and winter being mixed up in each season; by this reasoning they are frequent in Italy, because the air, more changeable with a milder winter and a cloudy summer, is always in some way in spring or in autumn. And in those parts of Italy that slope down from the north toward warmth, such as the district of the city and of Campania, lightning flashes alike in winter and in summer, a thing that does not happen in any other situation.

137| Of the thunderbolts themselves several kinds are reported. Those that come dry do not burn but scatter; those that come damp do not burn but darken. The third is what they call the bright one, of a most marvellous nature, by which casks are emptied with their coverings untouched and no other trace left, and gold and bronze and silver are melted inside, the little purses themselves in no way scorched, and not even the seal of wax disfigured. Marcia, [….], chief of the Romans, when pregnant was struck, the offspring killed, and she herself lived without any other harm. In the prodigies of Catiline's time, at the municipality of Pompeii, Marcus Herennius, a decurion, was struck by lightning on a clear day.

138| The writings of the Tuscans hold that nine gods send thunderbolts, and that they are of eleven kinds; for Jupiter hurls three. The Romans have kept only two of these, assigning the daytime ones to Jupiter, the nocturnal to Summanus, those being rarer, certainly, for the same reason of a colder sky. Etruria thinks that they also burst out of the earth, those which it calls infernal, which occur in the winter season and are especially savage and accursed, though all those they consider earthly are not of the general sort nor coming from the stars, but from the nearer and more turbid nature. The proof is evident, that all those above, falling from the sky, have oblique strokes, but these, which they call earthly, straight ones.

139| And those which fall from nearer matter are believed to come out of the earth because from the rebound they leave no traces, whereas that reasoning is of a stroke not from below but from the front. Those who pursue these matters more subtly think that these proceed from the star of Saturn, as the burning ones do from Mars, as when Volsinii, the wealthiest town of the Tuscans, was burned up entire by a thunderbolt. They also call family ones, prophetic for a whole life, those that happen first when a man has obtained his household. They hold, however, that they portend private matters for no more than ten years, except those made at a man's first inheritance or on his birthday, and public matters for no more than thirty years, except at the founding of a town.

140| There is a record in the annals that by certain rites and prayers thunderbolts are either compelled or obtained. It is an old report of Etruria that one was obtained at Volsinii, when the city's fields had been laid waste and a monster was approaching which they called Olta, summoned by their king Porsina. And before him Numa had done this rather often, as Lucius Piso, a weighty authority, relates in the first of his annals, and Tullus Hostilius, who imitated it not quite rightly, was struck by lightning. We have groves and altars and rites, and among the Statores, the Tonantes and the Feretrii we have also received an Elicius Jupiter.

141| There is a varying opinion about this in life, according to each man's mind. To believe that rites command nature is the part of the bold, and no less of the dull to take away power from benefits, since in the interpretation of lightning too knowledge has advanced so far that it foretells some to come on a fixed day, and whether they will destroy, or whether others have first been made that lie hidden, with innumerable public and private trials in both. Let these things therefore be as it has pleased nature, some certain, some doubtful, some proved, some to be condemned: for the rest we shall not omit what is memorable in them.

142| That lightning is seen before thunder is heard, though they occur together, is certain, and no wonder, since light is faster than sound; the stroke and the sound coincide, nature so measuring it, but the sound is of the thunderbolt having set out, not of its being brought in; and the breath is still quicker than the thunderbolt, so everything is shaken and blown upon before being struck, and no one is touched who has first seen the lightning or heard the thunder. Lightning on the left is thought favourable, because the left is the side of the world on which the rising is. And not so much the coming is watched as the return, whether the fire rebounds from the stroke, or whether, the work done or the fire used up, the breath returns.

143| The Tuscans divided the sky into sixteen parts for this observation. The first runs from the north to the equinoctial east; the second goes on to the south; the third reaches the equinoctial west; the fourth takes what remains from the west to the north. These they again divided into four parts each, of which eight from the east they called left, and as many on the opposite side right. Of these the most dire are those that touch the north from the west. And so it matters a great deal where thunderbolts have come from and where they have withdrawn. It is best for them to return to the parts of the rising.

144| Therefore when they have come from the first part of the sky and withdrawn into the same, the highest good fortune is portended, such as we have heard was the portent given to Sulla the dictator. The rest are less favourable or dire in proportion to the part of the heavens themselves. Some lightning, they think, it is not right to announce or to hear, unless it is reported to a guest or a parent. The great vanity of this observation was caught out when the temple of Juno at Rome was struck in the consulship of Scaurus, who soon after was the first man.

145| At night rather than by day it lightens without thunder. One animal, man, it does not always kill; the rest it kills at once, nature evidently granting him that honour, though so many beasts excel in strength. All lie on the opposite side. A man, unless he is turned toward the parts struck, does not breathe again. Those struck from above sink down. One struck while awake is found with eyes shut, while asleep with eyes open. A man killed in this way it is not lawful to burn; religion has handed down that he be buried in the earth. No animal is set alight unless killed by the thunderbolt. The wounds of those struck by lightning are colder than the remainder of the body.

146| Of those things that are born from the earth, it does not strike the shrub of laurel, and it never descends into the earth deeper than five feet. And so the fearful think deep caves the safest, or tents of the skins of the beasts they call calves, since this is the only animal of the sea that is not struck, as among birds the eagle is not, which for this reason is pictured as the armour-bearer of this weapon. In Italy, between Tarracina and the temple of Feronia, towers stopped being built in the time of the Civil War, there being none of them that was not demolished by lightning.

147| Besides these, it has been entered in the records that it rained milk and blood, from the lower sky, in the consulship of Manius Acilius and Gaius Porcius and often at other times, and flesh in the consulship of Publius Volumnius and Servius Sulpicius, and that of it nothing rotted through that the birds had not carried off; likewise iron among the Lucani, in the year before Marcus Crassus was killed by the Parthians and with him all the Lucanian soldiers, a large number of whom were in the army. The form of the iron that rained was like sponges. The soothsayers warned of wounds from above. In the consulship of Lucius Paulus and Gaius Marcellus wool fell as rain around the fort of Carissanum, near which a year later Titus Annius Milo was killed. The acts of that year record that baked bricks rained down while he was pleading his cause.

148| The clash of arms and the blare of trumpets heard from the sky we have received in the Cimbrian wars, and often before and after. In the third consulship of Marius, heavenly arms were seen by the people of Ameria and Tuder, clashing together from the east and the west, those from the west being driven back. That the sky itself burns is no wonder at all, and has often been seen, when clouds are seized by a greater fire.

149| The Greeks celebrate Anaxagoras of Clazomenae as having predicted, by his knowledge of heavenly writings, in the 78th Olympiad, in its second year, on which days a stone would drop from the sun; and this took place by daylight in a region of Thrace, at the river Aegos, a stone which is shown even now, the size of a wagonload, of burnt colour, a comet also blazing on those nights. If anyone believes this prediction, he must at the same time admit that the divine power of Anaxagoras was a greater marvel, and that the understanding of the nature of things is dissolved and all confounded, if either the sun itself is believed to be a stone or a stone ever to have been in it. That stones fall often, however, will not be doubted.

150| In the gymnasium at Abydos for that reason a stone is revered to this day, a modest one indeed, but one which the same Anaxagoras is said to have predicted would come down in the midst of the lands. One is revered also at Cassandria, formerly called Potidaea, which was founded on account of it. I myself saw one in the territory of the Vocontii, brought down shortly before. The bows, as we call them, are frequent, and neither a marvel nor a portent. For they do not even foretell rainy or clear days with any confidence. It is plain that a ray of the sun, sent into a hollow cloud, is, with its edge driven back, refracted toward the sun; and that the variety of colours comes about by a mixture of clouds, fires and air. Certainly they do not occur except with the sun opposite, nor ever except in the form of half a circle, nor at night, although Aristotle reports that one was sometimes seen, which however he himself admits can occur only on the 30th day of the moon.

151| They occur chiefly in winter, from the autumnal equinox when the day is shortening. When it increases again, from the spring equinox, they do not appear, nor around the solstice with the longest days, but at the winter solstice [that is, with the shortest days] frequently; the same are high when the sun is low and low when the sun is high, and smaller at rising or setting, but spread out in width, narrow at midday but of larger circuit. In summer they are not seen around midday; after the autumn equinox, at any hour, and never more than two at once.

152| As for the remaining matters of the same nature, I see they are doubtful to few: that hail is generated by rain turned to ice, and snow by the same moisture more softly compacted, and frost from freezing dew; that in winter snow falls, not hail, and hail itself more often by day than by night, and melts much faster than snow; that mists occur neither in summer nor in the greatest cold, dews neither in frost nor in heats nor in winds, nor except on a clear night; that by freezing the liquid is reduced, and when the ice has melted the same measure is not found; that varieties of colours and shapes are seen in the clouds, according as the fire mixed in prevails or is overcome.

153| Furthermore, that certain places have certain peculiarities: the nights of Africa are dewy in summer; at Locri in Italy and at the Velinus lake rainbows appear every day; at Rhodes and Syracuse clouds are never drawn over so thick that the sun is not seen at some hour; such things will be told more suitably in their own places. Let this be said about the air.

154| Next comes the earth, the only part of nature to which, for her outstanding services, we have given the title of maternal veneration. She is to men what the heaven is to god: she receives us at birth, nourishes us when born, and, once we are brought forth, ever sustains us, and last of all, when we are already cast off by the rest of nature, embraces us in her lap, then above all as a mother covering us, sacred by no merit more than that by which she makes us too sacred, bearing even our monuments and inscriptions, prolonging our name and extending our memory against the brevity of life; whose divinity, in our anger, we invoke as a last curse, praying it lie heavy on those who are already nothing, as though we did not know that she alone never grows angry with man.

155| Waters rise into rains, stiffen into hail, swell into waves, rush down in torrents; the air is thickened into clouds, rages in storms: but she is kindly, gentle, indulgent, and ever the handmaid to the uses of mortals; what she produces under compulsion, what she pours forth of her own accord - what odours and flavours, what juices, what textures, what colours! With what good faith she repays the loan entrusted to her! What she nourishes for our sake! For harmful creatures are the fault of the vital breath: she must receive seeds and sustain what is begotten; but among bad things the blame is with the begetters. She, once a serpent has struck a man, receives it no more, and exacts punishment even in the name of the helpless. She pours forth healing herbs and is ever in labour for man.

156| Indeed it may be believed that out of pity for us she even established poisons, so that, in weariness of life, hunger - a death most alien to the earth's merits - might not consume us with slow wasting, so that crags might not scatter the torn body, so that the punishment of the noose, perverse as it is, might not torment us with the breath shut in, when a way out is sought, so that a death sought in the deep might not turn burial into food, so that the pain of iron might not tear the body. So it is: in pity she bred that by a very easy draught of which, the body unharmed and with all its blood, we may be extinguished without labour, like men who thirst, so that no birds or beasts touch the dead and the earth keeps the man who has perished by his own hand.

157| But let us admit the truth: the earth bred a remedy for our ills, and we make it the poison of life. For do we not use iron likewise, which we cannot do without? And yet we would not complain with justice, even if she had borne it for the sake of wrongdoing. Against one part of nature, indeed, we are ungrateful. What does she not serve man for, whether for luxury or for insult? She is thrown into the seas or, so that we may let in the straits, eaten away. By waters, iron, fire, wood, stone, grain, she is tormented at every hour, and much more to minister to our luxuries than to our nourishment.

158| And yet what she suffers at the top and outermost skin might seem tolerable: we penetrate into her bowels, digging veins of gold and silver and mines of copper and lead; we seek gems too and certain little stones, driving shafts into the depth. We drag out her bowels so that a gem may be worn on the finger, for which it is sought. How many hands are worn down so that one joint may shine! If there were any underworld, the tunnels of avarice and luxury would surely by now have dug it up again. And we wonder if she has produced anything for harm! For wild beasts,

159| I suppose, guard her and keep off sacrilegious hands. Is it not among serpents that we dig, and veins of gold we handle with the roots of poison? Yet the goddess is the more placable on this account, that all these outcomes of wealth tend to crimes and slaughters and wars, and that we water her with our blood and cover her with unburied bones, with which, as though reproached for our frenzy, she at last covers herself over and hides even the crimes of mortals. Among the charges of an ungrateful spirit I would reckon this too, that we do not know her nature.

160| Her shape is the first matter, on which there is agreement. We call it certainly the orb of the earth, and we admit that the globe is enclosed by its poles. For the form of a perfect orb is not found in such lofty mountains and such flat plains, but its embrace, if all the lines were taken together in a circuit, would make the figure of a perfect orb, a thing that the nature of things itself compels, not for the same causes we gave for the heavens. For there a hollow convexity inclines upon itself and presses upon its own pole, that is, the earth, from every side. This rises, solid and packed, like something swelling, and stretches outward. The universe inclines toward the centre, but the earth goes out from the centre, its immense globe forced into the form of an orb by the constant revolution of the universe around it.

161| Here there is a mighty battle of the learned and, on the other side, of the common people, over whether men are spread round the earth on every side and stand with their feet turned toward one another, and all have a similar crown of the head, and in the same way are trodden upon at whatever middle part; the other side asking why those opposite do not fall off, as though a reason were not at hand why they in turn should wonder that we do not fall. There comes in an opinion probable even to the unteachable crowd, that even if the globe is unequal, like the shape of a pine-cone, the earth is nevertheless inhabited on every side.

162| But what does this matter, when another marvel arises: that she hangs and does not fall with us, as though the force of the breath, enclosed especially in the universe, were uncertain, or could fall, nature resisting and denying where it could fall to. For as the seat of fires is nowhere but in fires, of waters nowhere but in waters, of breath nowhere but in breath, so for the earth, with everything keeping her off, there is no place except in herself. That a globe is formed is yet marvellous, amid so great a flatness of sea and plains. To this opinion Dicaearchus is a witness, a man of the first learning, who by the care of kings measured mountains, of which he reported Pelion the highest at 1,250 paces by the reckoning of the plumb-line, concluding that this was no portion of the whole roundness. This conjecture seems to me uncertain, not being unaware that certain peaks of the Alps rise over a long stretch and no less than fifty miles.

163| But it is chiefly among the common people that this dispute lies, if they are compelled to believe that the figure of waters too is drawn up into a summit. Yet nothing in nature is more manifest to the sight. For drops hanging everywhere form into little globes, and when thrown on dust or laid on the down of leaves are seen in perfect roundness, and in filled cups the middle swells most, which on account of the thinness of the liquid and the softness settling into itself is detected more easily by reasoning than by sight. And this is even more marvellous, that in filled cups a very little liquid added makes the excess flow round, whereas the contrary happens when weights are added, often up to twenty denarii each, evidently because the things received within lift the liquid to a peak, whereas liquid poured in slides off from the rising heap.

164| The same is the reason why land is not seen from ships but is visible from the masts of ships, and why, when a vessel recedes far, if something that gleams is tied to the top of the mast, it seems to descend gradually and at last to be hidden. Finally, the ocean, which we admit is the outermost, by what other shape would it cohere and not fall away, with no margin enclosing it beyond? This returns to the same marvel, how, even if it is globed, the outermost sea does not fall away. Against this, that, were the seas flat and of the form in which they appear, this could not happen, the Greeks, the discoverers, teach by geometrical subtlety, to their own great joy and great glory.

165| For since waters are carried from the height to lower places and this is their admitted nature, and no one doubts that on any shore they have come as far as the slope allows, it plainly appears, without doubt, that the lower anything is, the nearer it is to the centre of the earth, and that all lines sent out from the centre to the nearest waters become shorter than those from the first waters to the outermost sea; therefore the waters, wholly and from every part, incline toward the centre and for that reason do not fall away, since they press toward the interior.

166| We ought to believe that the artificer nature formed this so, that, since the dry and arid earth could not hold together by itself without moisture, nor on the other hand could water stand unless the earth supported it, they might be joined in mutual embrace, the earth opening bays, the water passing through all of it, within and without, above and below, the veins running about like bonds, and even bursting out on the topmost ridges, where, driven by the breath and pressed out by the earth's weight, it leaps like jets from siphons and is so far from danger of falling that it springs up to every highest and loftiest place. By this reasoning it is plain why the seas do not grow, though so many rivers flow into them daily. The earth, then, in its whole globe, is girt about the middle by a surrounding sea, and this is not to be investigated by arguments, but is known already by experience.

167| From Gades and the Pillars of Hercules, by the circuit of Spain and the Gauls, the whole west is navigated today. The northern ocean has been navigated for the greater part, under the auspices of the deified Augustus, Germany being sailed round by fleet to the promontory of the Cimbri, and from there an immense sea seen, or known by report, toward the Scythian region and the lands stiff with excess of moisture. For that reason it is least likely that the seas fail there, where the force of moisture prevails. Next, from the east, from the Indian sea under the same star, the whole part sloping toward the Caspian sea has been sailed through by Macedonian arms, under the rule of Seleucus and Antiochus, who wanted it to be named after themselves Seleucis and Antiochis.

168| And around the Caspian many shores of the ocean were explored, and little short of the whole north has been rowed through from one side or the other, so that even so a huge argument, that of the Maeotic marsh, leaves no place for conjecture, whether it is a gulf of that ocean, as I note many have believed, or a backwater of a divided position by a narrow strait. On the other side, from the same west of Gades, a great part of the southern gulf is navigated today around Mauretania. The greater part of it, and of the east, the victories of Alexander the Great also traversed as far as the Arabian gulf, where, in the campaign of Gaius Caesar, son of Augustus, the figureheads of ships from Spanish wrecks are reported to have been recognized.

169| And Hanno, when the power of Carthage flourished, sailing round from Gades to the end of Arabia, gave that voyage in writing, as Himilco was sent at the same time to learn the outer parts of Europe. Besides, Cornelius Nepos is the authority that a certain Eudoxus of his own day, fleeing King Lathyrus, left the Arabian gulf and was borne all the way to Gades, and long before him Caelius Antipater says he had seen a man who had sailed from Spain to Ethiopia for the sake of trade.

170| The same Nepos, on the northern circuit, relates that to Quintus Metellus Celer, colleague of Afranius in the consulship but then proconsul of Gaul, certain Indians were given as a gift by a king of the Suebi, having been swept into Germany by storms while sailing from India for the sake of trade. So the seas, flowing around on every side, divide the globe and take a part of the world from us, with no passable way from there to here or from here to there. This reflection seems suited to exposing the vanity of mortals, and calls on me to show, as though placed before the eyes, how great this whole thing is, whatever it is, in which nothing is enough for individuals.

171| First of all, it seems to be reckoned at half, as though no portion were taken from it by the ocean itself, which, poured all around the middle, and both discharging and receiving all the other waters, and nourishing whatever goes up into the clouds and the stars themselves, so many and so great, in what space of breadth, then, will it be believed to dwell? The possession of so vast a mass must be shameless and boundless.

172| Add that heaven has taken more from what remained. For since it has five parts, which they call zones, everything lying beneath the two outermost ones, on either side around the poles, this one which is called the seven oxen's and the one opposite which is called southern, is pressed down by hostile stiffness and everlasting frost. There is perpetual gloom in both, and, from the sight of milder stars being foreign, a malign light, whitish with frost alone. But the middle of the lands, where the sun's track runs, is scorched with flames and roasted by the heat at close quarters. Around, only two zones, between the burnt one and the frozen ones, are temperate, and they themselves are not passable to each other because of the fiery stars.

173| So heaven has taken three parts of the earth; the plunder by the ocean is uncertain. But the one portion left to us I do not know whether it is not in an even greater loss, if indeed the same ocean, poured into many gulfs, as we shall tell, barks so close at the inner seas by its approach that the Arabian gulf is 115 miles distant from the Egyptian sea, and the Caspian 375,000 from the Pontic; the same, flowing in between, enters through so many seas, by which it parts Africa, Europe and Asia - how much of the lands does it occupy?

174| Let there be reckoned further the measure of so many rivers and such great marshes; let lakes and pools be added, ridges already raised into the sky and steep even to look at, forests and precipitous valleys and wildernesses, and places deserted for a thousand causes; let these so many portions of the earth be taken away, nay rather, as many have handed down, a point of the universe (for the earth is nothing else in the whole): this is the material of our glory, this is our seat. Here we hold offices, here we exercise commands, here we crave wealth, here we, the human race, make an uproar, here we renew wars, even civil ones, and by mutual slaughter make the earth roomier! And,

175| to pass over the public frenzies of nations, this earth, in which we drive out our neighbours and by theft dig turf from a neighbour into our own soil, so that he who has measured out his fields most widely and has driven his neighbours out beyond report, what part of the earth does he enjoy, or, when he has extended it to the measure of his greed, what portion of it, at last, does he hold when dead?

176| That it is in the middle of the whole universe is established by no doubtful proofs, and most plainly by the equinox, with equal hours. For unless it were in the middle, it could not have equal days and nights, as is found, and the dioptrae confirm it especially, since at the equinoctial season rising and setting are seen from the same line, at the solstice the rising along its own line, and at the winter solstice the setting. Which could in no way happen unless it were placed at the centre.

177| Three circles, interwoven with the zones mentioned above, mark the inequalities of the seasons: the solstitial, from the highest part of the zodiac for us, toward the northern region, and opposite, toward the other pole, the winter one; likewise the equinoctial, proceeding in the middle circuit of the zodiac. The cause of the other things we marvel at lies in the shape of the earth itself, which is understood, by the same proofs, to be like a globe, with the waters along with it. For so it comes about, without doubt, that the stars of the northern region never set for us, and conversely those of the southern never rise, and again these are not seen by those, as the globe of the earth lifts itself against the midst of the sight.

178| The Trogodytice and the adjoining Egypt do not see the septentriones, nor does Italy see Canopus, or what they call Berenice's hair, likewise what under the deified Augustus they named Caesar's throne, notable stars there. And the rising height is so plainly curved that Canopus seems, to those looking from Alexandria, to stand out above the earth by about a fourth part of one sign, from Rhodes to graze the earth as it were itself, and in the Pontus not to be seen at all, where the septentrio is highest. The same is hidden from Rhodes, and more so from Alexandria; in Arabia, in November, hidden in the first watch, it shows itself in the second; at Meroe at the solstice it appears for a little while in the evening, and a few days before Arcturus rises it is seen along with the day.

179| Mariners' voyages discover this above all, in one place with the sea against them, in another sloping down, with stars suddenly visible and as though emerging from the strait, which had lain hidden in the curve of the ball. For the universe does not raise itself by this higher pole - or else these stars would be seen on every side - but these same stars are believed higher to those nearest and sunk to those far off, and as now this peak appears lofty to those placed on the downward slope, so to those who have crossed to that slope of the earth those rise up, while those that were high here sink, which could not happen except in the figure of a ball.

180| For this reason the dwellers in the east do not perceive the evening eclipses of the sun and moon, nor those dwelling in the west the morning ones, while the midday ones they perceive later than we. At Arbela, in the victory of Alexander the Great, the moon is reported to have failed in the second hour of the night, and the same moon rising in Sicily. The eclipse of the sun in the consulship of Vipstanus and Fonteius, who were consuls a few years ago, occurring on the day before the Kalends of May, was perceived in Campania between the seventh and eighth hours of the day, and the commander Corbulo reported it seen in Armenia between the tenth and eleventh hours of the day, the circuit of the globe revealing some things to some and hiding them from others. If the earth were flat, everything would appear at once to everyone and nights would not be unequal; for equal intervals of twelve hours would be seen alike by those placed elsewhere as in the middle, which now do not coincide in every part in the same way.

181| For this reason neither night nor day, though the same, is over the whole orb at once, the opposition of the globe bringing night, its circuit bringing day. This has been learned by many experiments, in Africa and Spain by Hannibal's towers, and in Asia, where, on account of terrors from pirates, a similar guard of watch-towers was raised, in which it has often been found that beacon fires lit in the sixth hour of the day were observed from behind in the third hour of the night by the farthest. The runner of the same Alexander, Philonides, covered from Sicyon to Elis, 1,200 stadia, in nine hours of the day, and from there, though the way was downhill, he several times came back in the third hour of the night. The cause was that when going his road was with the sun, and returning he met it going the other way and passed it in contrary encounter. For this reason those sailing to the west, though the day is shortest, overcome the spaces of a night voyage, as though accompanying the sun itself.

182| And the hour-reckoning vessels are not for use everywhere the same, the shadows of the sun changing themselves at every 300 stadia or, at the farthest, every 500. And so the shadow of the pin, which they call the gnomon, in Egypt at midday on the day of the equinox makes a little more than half the measure of the gnomon, in the city of Rome the shadow lacks a ninth part of the gnomon, in the town of Ancona there is a surplus of a thirty-fifth, and in the part of Italy called Venetia the shadow at the same hours is equal to the gnomon.

183| In a similar way they report that at the town of Syene, which lies 5,000 stadia above Alexandria, on the midday of the solstice no shadow is cast, and a well made for the sake of that experiment is lit up entirely. From which it is plain that the sun is then over the head at that place, which Onesicritus writes happens at the same time in India above the river Hypasis. And it is agreed that in the city of Berenice of the Trogodytae, and from there at 4,820 stadia, in the same nation at the town of Ptolemais, which was founded at the edge of the Red Sea for the first elephant hunts, this same thing happens during forty-five days before the solstice and as many after, and during those 90 days the shadows are cast to the south.

184| Again, at Meroe - this island and capital of the Aethiopian nation is inhabited 5,000 stadia from Syene on the river Nile - shadows vanish twice a year, when the sun is then in the eighteenth part of Taurus and the fourteenth of Leo. In the nation of the Oreti in India there is a mountain named Maleus, near which shadows are cast to the south in summer and to the north in winter. Only for fifteen nights does the septentrio appear there. In the same India, at Patala, a very celebrated port, the sun rises on the right, and shadows fall to the south.

185| While Alexander was staying there it was noted that the septentrio was seen only in the first part of the night. Onesicritus, his officer, wrote that in those places of India where there are no shadows, the septentrio is not seen, that those places are called ascia, and that the hours are not counted there. And Eratosthenes reported that in the whole Trogodytice shadows fall in the opposite direction twice forty-five days in the year.

186| So it comes about that, from the varying increase of light, at Meroe the longest day comprises 12 equinoctial hours and eight parts of one hour, at Alexandria 14 hours, in Italy 15, in Britain 17, where in summer bright nights doubtless show themselves, a thing reasoning compels us to believe, as on the days of the solstice, with the sun approaching nearer the summit of the universe, the lands lying beneath, in a narrow circuit of light, have continuous days for six months, and nights, on the contrary, when it is removed toward the winter solstice.

187| Pytheas of Massilia writes that this happens in the island of Thule, six days' sailing to the north of Britain, and some even affirm it for Mona, which is distant from Camalodunum, a town of Britain, about 200,000. This reckoning of shadows, and what they call gnomonice, was discovered by Anaximenes of Miletus, the pupil of Anaximander, of whom we have spoken, and he was the first to show at Lacedaemon the clock which they call the sciothericon.

188| The day itself different peoples have observed differently: the Babylonians as between two sunrises, the Athenians between two sunsets, the Umbrians from midday to midday, the whole common people from daylight to dark, the Roman priests and those who defined the civil day, likewise the Egyptians, as well as Hipparchus, from midnight to midnight. It is apparent that the intervals of light between sunrises are shorter near the solstices than at the equinoxes, since the zodiac lies more obliquely around its middle, but more upright near the solstice.

189| We must add what is linked to these celestial causes. For it is not doubtful that the Aethiopians, scorched by the heat of the neighbouring star, are born looking as though burnt, with frizzled beard and hair, and that in the opposite region of the world there are peoples with white, icy skin, with flowing yellow hair, fierce from the stiffness of the climate, while those are wise by quickness; and by the very evidence of the legs, in those the juice is called back by the nature of the heat into the upper parts, in these it is driven down into the lower parts by falling moisture; here grave wild beasts, there varied forms of animals are produced, and above all many shapes of birds, made swift by the fire; but the tallness of bodies in both, there by the thrust of the fires, here by the nourishment of moisture;

190| but in the middle of the earth, by a salubrious mixture from both sides, are tracts fertile for everything, with moderate habits of body and a great temperance in colour, gentle customs, clear senses, fertile minds capable of all nature, and these have the empires that never belonged to the outermost peoples, just as those never obeyed these, torn away and solitary, under the divinity of the nature that presses upon them.

191| The doctrines of the Babylonians hold that earth tremors and chasms, like everything else, happen by the force of the stars, but of those three to which they assign thunderbolts, and that they happen when the travelling stars are with the sun or in conjunction, and chiefly about the quadratures of the universe. A certain splendid and immortal divinity in this is, if we believe it, attributed to Anaximander of Miletus, the natural philosopher, who is said to have predicted to the Lacedaemonians that they should guard their city and houses, for an earthquake was impending, when their whole city collapsed and a great part of Mount Taygetus, jutting out in the shape of a ship's stern, broke off and weighed that disaster down with a further ruin. Another conjecture, but that too divine, is also attributed to Pherecydes, the teacher of Pythagoras, that from a draught of water out of a well he foresaw and predicted an earthquake to his fellow citizens.

192| If these things are true, how far at last can such men be seen to be from god, while they live? And these matters indeed are to be left to each person's judgment: I think it is not doubtful that winds are the cause. For the lands never tremble except when the seas are lulled and the sky so calm that the flights of birds do not hang, all the breath that bears them up having been withdrawn, nor ever except after winds, the blast being stored, of course, in the veins and hidden hollows of the earth. A tremor in the earth is nothing other than thunder in a cloud, nor a chasm anything other than when the thunderbolt bursts out, the shut-in breath struggling and striving to go out to freedom.

193| It is therefore shaken in different ways, and marvellous works are produced, in one place walls laid low, in another swallowed by a deep chasm, in another masses thrown up, in another rivers sent forth, sometimes even fires or hot springs, in another the course of rivers turned back. A terrible sound precedes and accompanies it, at one time like a murmur, at another like bellowing or human cries or the crash of clashing arms, according to the quality of the receiving matter and the form either of the caverns or of the tunnel through which it travels, thinner as it creeps along in a narrow place, hoarse in the same when curved back, rebounding in hard ones, seething in damp ones, surging in standing waters, raging against solid rock.

194| And so a sound is often produced even without a tremor. Nor is it ever shaken in a simple way, but trembles and vibrates. A chasm sometimes remains, showing what it has swallowed, sometimes hides it with the mouth closed and the ground drawn over again so that no traces are left, cities mostly devoured and a stretch of fields swallowed. Seaside places are shaken most, nor are mountainous ones free from such an evil. I have ascertained that the Alps and the Apennine have often trembled.

195| In autumn and spring the lands are moved more often, as thunderbolts are. Hence the Gauls and Egypt are shaken least, since here the cause of summer stands in the way, there that of winter. Likewise more often by night than by day. The greatest tremors occur in the morning and evening, but near daybreak they are frequent, and by day around midday. They happen also at an eclipse of the sun and moon, since the storms are then lulled, but especially when heat follows rains or rains follow heat.

196| Sailors also perceive them by no doubtful sign, when the swell suddenly rises without a breath of wind or is shaken by a blow. In ships too the timbers tremble as in buildings and give warning by a creak. Indeed even birds do not sit unafraid. There is also a sign in the sky, which precedes a future tremor either by day or a little after sunset in clear weather: a thin streak, as of a line of cloud, stretched out over a long space.

197| There is also in wells a muddier water, not without a disagreeable smell, just as in the same there is a remedy, of the kind that numerous caves provide; for they breathe out the breath that has been taken in. This is noted in whole towns: they are shaken less when hollowed out by frequent tunnels for drainage, and those that hang over such places are far safer, as is understood at Naples in Italy, its solid part being exposed to such mishaps. The safest parts of buildings are the vaults, also the corners of walls and the doorposts, which resist by alternate pushing. And walls built of earthen brick are shaken with less harm.

198| There is also a great difference within the kind of movement itself, for the earth is shaken in several ways. The safest is when it vibrates, making buildings rattle and creak, and when it swells up and rises, then sinks back with an alternating motion. It does no harm, too, when roofs collide and batter one another with opposing blows, since one movement is held back by the other. A billowing tilt, a kind of rolling like the swell of the sea, is dangerous, or when the whole movement drives itself in one direction. Tremors cease when the wind has broken out; but if they have persisted, they are not stilled before 40 days, and generally later, since some have lasted a year or even two.

199| Once there occurred an enormous prodigy of the lands, which I find in the volumes of the Etruscan discipline, in the territory of Mutina, in the consulship of Lucius Marcius and Sextus Julius. Two mountains ran together, charging at each other with a tremendous crash and then drawing back, while flame and smoke rose into the sky between them by day, and a great crowd of Roman knights, with their households and travellers, watched from the Aemilian Way. By that collision all the farmhouses were crushed, and a great many animals that had been inside were killed. This was the year before the Social War, which, I am inclined to think, was more deadly to the land of Italy itself than even the civil wars. Our own age has known an omen no less wonderful, in the final year of Nero the emperor, as we have set out in the account of his reign: meadows and olive groves, with a public road running between them, passed over into each other's places in the territory of the Marrucini, on the estates of Vettius Marcellus, a Roman knight who managed Nero's affairs.

200| Together with an earthquake there also come floods of the sea, evidently poured in by the same breath, or else taken into the hollow of the sinking earth. The greatest earthquake in the memory of mortals occurred in the principate of Tiberius Caesar, when twelve cities of Asia were laid low in a single night. The most frequent was in the Punic War, when in the course of one year news reached Rome of it fifty-seven times; and in that very year, while they were fighting at Lake Trasimene, neither the Carthaginians nor the Romans felt a very great earthquake. Nor is the evil a simple one, nor is the danger only in the quaking itself: the portent is equal to it or greater. The city of Rome has never trembled without that being a forewarning of some future event.

201| The same cause produces new lands, when that same breath, strong enough to lift, has not been able to burst out of the ground. For lands are born not only by the deposit of rivers, as the Echinades islands were piled up by the river Acheloüs, and by the Nile the greater part of Egypt (in which, as we believe Homer, there was a course of a night and a day from the island of Pharos), nor only by the retreat of the sea, as formerly at Circeii. This is recorded to have happened also in the harbour of Ambracia over a distance of ten miles, and of five miles at the Piraeus of the Athenians; and the Ephesian sea once washed the temple of Diana. If we believe Herodotus, there was sea above Memphis as far as the mountains of the Ethiopians, and likewise from the plains of Arabia; sea around Ilium and in all Teuthrania, and wherever the Maeander has brought in its plains.

202| Lands are born also in another way, and suddenly rise out of some sea, as though nature were making things even with herself and giving back in one place what a chasm has swallowed in another. The islands of Delos and Rhodes have long been recorded as famous; and smaller ones were born later: beyond Melos, Anaphe; between Lemnos and the Hellespont, Nea; between Lebedus and Teos, Halone; among the Cyclades, Thera and Therasia; among the same, in the 145th Olympiad, in its fourth year [after 130 years], Hiera, also called Automate, and two stadia from it, after 242 years, in our own age, in the consulship of Junius Silanus and Valerius [Balbus],

203| on the eighth day before the Ides of July, Thia. Before our time, one also emerged near Italy among the Aeolian islands, and likewise near Crete, 2,500 paces in extent, together with hot springs; another in the 163rd Olympiad's third year, in the Tuscan gulf, which burned with a violent blast, and it is recorded that, with a great multitude of fish floating around it, all those who had eaten of them at once died. So also they say the Pithecussae in the Campanian gulf arose, and soon afterwards the mountain Epopos on them, when flame suddenly burst out of it, was levelled to a flat plain. On the same island a town was swallowed into the depths, and by another movement of the earth a pool emerged, and by yet another, mountains having been rolled forward, the island Prochyta came into being.

204| For nature has made islands in this manner too: she tore Sicily from Italy, Cyprus from Syria, Euboea from Boeotia, Atalante and Macria from Euboea, Besbicus from Bithynia, and, from the headland of the Sirens, Leucosia. Again she has taken islands away from the sea and joined them to the land: Antissa to Lesbos, Zephyrium to Halicarnassus, Aethusa to Myndus, Dromiscos and Perne to Miletus, and Narthecusa to the promontory of Parthenius. Hybanda, once an island of Ionia, is now two hundred stadia from the sea; Ephesus has Syrie inland, and neighbouring Magnesia has Derasidae and Sapphonia.

205| Epidaurus and Oricum have ceased to be islands. She has swallowed lands entire: first of all where the Atlantic Sea is, if we believe Plato, over an immense space, and later also the inner sea. We see today Acarnania drowned by the Ambracian gulf, Achaea by the Corinthian one, and Europe together with Asia by the Propontis and the Pontus. Besides this the sea has broken through at Leucas, Antirrhium, the Hellespont, and the two Bosporuses. And, to pass over gulfs and pools, the earth devours herself. She swallowed Cibotus, a very high mountain with a town of Caria; Sipylus in Magnesia, and earlier in the same place a most famous city that was called Tantalis; the territories of the cities Galene and Gamale in Phoenicia, along with the cities themselves; and Phegium, a very lofty ridge of Ethiopia, as if the shores too were not treacherous in their ravages.

206| The Pontus took away Pyrrha and Antissa around Lake Maeotis, and the Corinthian gulf took Helice and Bura, whose traces appear in the deep. More than thirty miles of the island of Ceos were suddenly torn away and carried off, with very many of its people; in Sicily half of the city of Tyndaris was taken, and whatever is missing there from Italy; likewise Eleusis in Boeotia. Let earthquakes be passed over in silence, and whatever there is where at least the graves of cities remain, so that we may speak of the wonders of the earth rather than the crimes of nature. And, by Hercules, the things of the heavens would not be harder to relate.

207| There is the wealth of metals, so various, so rich, so fruitful, springing up again through so many ages, though fires, collapses, shipwrecks, wars and frauds ravage so much of it daily over the whole world, and luxury and so many mortals wear so much away; the painting of the gems, so manifold, the colours of the stones with their spots, and among them the whiteness of some, which shuts out everything but light; the power of medicinal springs; the perpetual blazes, through so many ages, of fires that flash out in so many places; deadly breaths, in some places let out from pits, or deadly from the very situation of the spot; in some places fatal to birds alone, as at Soracte in the district near the city; in others to all living creatures except man,

208| and sometimes to man as well, as in the territory of Sinuessa and of Puteoli. They call them spiracula, others Charonea: pits exhaling a deadly breath. So too in the land of the Hirpini, the place of Ampsanctus by the temple of Mephitis, which kills those who enter it; in the same way at Hierapolis in Asia, which is harmless only to the priest of the Great Mother. Elsewhere there are prophetic caves, from whose exhalation people grow intoxicated and foretell the future, as at Delphi, the most famous oracle. In these matters what other cause can any mortal bring forward than the divinity of nature, diffused through all things, breaking out now in one way and now in another?

209| Some lands, indeed, tremble at being walked on, as in the territory of Gabii, a short way from the city of Rome, for about two hundred iugera, under the gallop of riders; likewise in the territory of Reate. Some islands are always afloat, as in the Caecuban territory and the same Reatine, in that of Mutina, that of Statonia, and the lake of Vadimon, and at the Cutilian waters a shady wood, that is never found in one spot both by day and by night; in Lydia the islands called Calaminae, driven not only by winds but also by poles wherever one wishes, which in the Mithridatic war were the safety of many citizens. There are small ones also in the Nymphaeum, called Saliares, because in a chorus of song they move to the beat of the dancers' feet. In the great Tarquinian lake of Italy two groves float around, now assuming a triangular shape, now a round one, in their circuit, as the winds drive them, but never a square.

210| Paphos has a celebrated shrine of Venus, one court of which receives no rain; likewise at Nea, a town of the Troad, around the statue of Minerva; and in the same place the sacrifices left there do not putrefy.

211| Near Harpasa, a town of Asia, stands a fearful crag, movable with a single finger, yet resisting if it is pushed with the whole body. In the peninsula of the Tauri, in the community of Parasinus, there is an earth by which all wounds are healed. But around Assos in the Troad a stone is produced that consumes every body; it is named sarcophagus. Near the river Indus are two mountains: one by nature holds all iron fast, the other repels it, so that, if there are nails in a shoe, in the one the feet cannot be pulled free, in the other they cannot be made to stay. It is noted that at Locri and Croton there has never been a plague, nor an earthquake at Ilium, but that in Lycia there are always forty clear days after an earthquake. In the territory of Arpi, grain that is sown does not come up; at the Mucian altars in the Veientine territory, and near Tusculum, and in the Ciminian forest, there are places in which things driven into the ground cannot be pulled out. In the Crustuminian, hay that grows there is harmful, while outside it is wholesome.

212| Much has been said also of the nature of waters, but the tides of the sea, which come in and flow back, are the greatest marvel, in several ways indeed, but the cause lies in the sun and moon. Twice between two risings of the moon they flow in, and twice they return, always in twenty-four hours: first, as the heavens rise with her, they swell; soon, as she declines from the meridian height of the sky toward her setting, they subside; and again, as she approaches from the setting beneath the earth to the lowest part of the sky, opposite the meridian, they flood in,

213| and from there, until she rises again, they draw back into themselves; and they never ebb at the same time as the day before, as though gasping, with the greedy star drawing the seas along with her by a draught, and rising continually from a different quarter than the day before; yet returning at equal intervals and always at six-hour spacings, not of any given day or night or place, but equinoctial ones, and therefore unequal against the span of the ordinary hours, according as more or fewer of those measures fall into the day or the night,

214| and equal everywhere only at the equinox. A great proof, full of light and even of daytime utterance, that those are dull who deny that the stars pass beneath the earth and rise again, and that they present a like aspect to the lands there, indeed to the whole of nature, in the same workings of rising and setting, the star's course or other effect being no less manifest beneath the earth than when it moves past before our eyes.

215| The difference due to the moon is still more manifold, and first in periods of seven days. For the tides are moderate from the new moon to the half moon, and swell out more fully from that point and run strongest at the full. From then they grow gentler, equal by the seventh day to those at first, and again on the other side, at the half moon, they increase. At conjunction with the sun they are equal to the full. The same tides are milder when the moon is in the northern signs and withdrawing farther from the earth than when, having turned toward the south, she exerts her force with a nearer thrust. Every eight years the tides return to the beginnings of their motion and to equal increases, in the hundredth circuit of the moon. All these effects are increased by the yearly causes of the sun: the tides are greatest at the two equinoxes, and more at the autumnal than the spring one, while they are lowest at the winter solstice, and still more at the summer one.

216| Yet this is not in the very turning points of the seasons that I have named, but a few days after, just as it is not at the full moon or the last moon but afterwards, nor at once when the sky shows or hides the moon or she declines from the middle region, but generally about two equinoctial hours later, the effect of everything that happens in the heavens always reaching the earth more slowly than the sight of it, as with lightning, thunder and thunderbolts.

217| All the tides on the ocean, however, cover and lay bare larger spaces than in the rest of the sea, whether because the whole body of water acts more vigorously than a part, or because the open expanse feels more effectively the force of the star ranging freely, while the same force is held back by narrow confines. For that reason lakes and rivers are not stirred in a like manner. (Pytheas of Massilia is the authority that the tides above Britain swell by eighty cubits.) The inner seas too are shut in by the lands as in a harbour;

218| yet in some places a wider spaciousness obeys the rule, as in the many instances of voyagers carried from Italy to Utica on the third day over a calm sea and with no pressure on the sails, while the tide was boiling. These movements are detected nearer the shores more than on the deep, since in the body also the extremities feel the pulse of the veins, that is, of the breath, more. In most estuaries, however, owing to the different risings of the stars in each region, different tides arise, differing in time and not in principle, as in the Syrtes.

219| And some places have a nature of their own, as the strait of Tauromenium, which reverses its flow more often, and that in Euboea, which reverses it seven times in a day and a night. The same tide stands still for three days in the month, on the seventh, eighth and ninth day of the moon. At Gades, the spring nearest the shrine of Hercules, enclosed like a well, at some times rises and falls together with the ocean, at others does both at opposite times; in the same place another spring agrees with the movements of the ocean. On the bank of the Baetis there is a town whose wells diminish as the tide rises and increase as it goes out, standing still at the times between. The same nature belongs to a single well in the town of Hispalis, the rest being ordinary. And the Pontus always flows outward into the Propontis, and never flows back inward into the Pontus.

220| All seas are cleansed at the full moon, and some also at a fixed time. Around Messana and Mylae refuse like dung is cast up upon the shore, whence the story that the cattle of the Sun are stabled there. To these Aristotle adds (so that I may pass over nothing I know of) that no animal dies except at the ebbing of the tide. This has been observed by many on the Gallic ocean, and has been found true in man alone.

221| From this a true inference arises, that the moon is not without reason thought to be a star of breath; that it is this which saturates the lands, filling bodies as it approaches and emptying them as it withdraws. Hence, as she grows, shellfish grow, and those without blood feel the breath most; but the blood too, even of men, grows and diminishes with her light, and leaves and fodder also feel it (as will be told in its place), her force penetrating all things alike.

222| And so liquid is dried by the heat of the sun, and we have received that this is a masculine star, scorching and sucking up all things. Thus the taste of salt is boiled into the sea spreading widely, either because, the sweet and thin part having been drawn out, which the force of fire most easily draws, all the harsher and thicker is left (and for that reason the top water of the seas is sweeter than the deep; this is a truer cause of the harsh taste than that the sea is the everlasting sweat of the earth), or because very much vapour from the dry land is mixed into it, or because the nature of the earth infects it as it does medicinal waters. There is an example in Dionysius, tyrant of Sicily: when he was driven from that power, a prodigy occurred, that in one day the sea in the harbour turned sweet.

223| On the contrary, they say, the moon's is a feminine and soft star, and it loosens the moisture of the night and draws it, but does not carry it off. This is clear from the fact that she dissolves into decay, by her sight, the slain bodies of wild beasts, and recalls into the head the torpor contracted by those lulled in sleep; she melts ice again and loosens everything with her moistening breath. Thus the changes of nature are balanced and always suffice, some of the stars condensing the elements and others dispersing them. But the moon's nourishment is in fresh waters, as the sun's is in those of the sea.

224| Fabianus gives the deepest sea as 15 stadia. Others report that in the Pontus, opposite the people of the Coraxi (they call it the Depth of the Pontus), about three hundred stadia from the mainland, the sea has an immense depth, no shallows ever having been found. Fresh waters near the sea, bursting forth as though from pipes, make this the more wonderful. For the nature of waters never ceases from marvels. Fresh waters ride on the sea, being lighter beyond doubt; and so sea waters, whose nature is heavier, bear up better what rides upon them. Some fresh waters even pass over other fresh ones, as in the lake Fucinus the river Pitonius carried in, in Lake Como the Addua, in Verbannus the Ticinus, in Benacus the Mincius, in Sebinnus the Ollius, in Lemannus the Rhone: this one beyond the Alps, the others in Italy, passing over many miles in their hospitable crossing, bearing out only their own waters, and none more abundant than those they brought in. This is recorded also of the river Orontes of Syria and many others.

225| Some, indeed, out of hatred of the sea, go beneath the very shallows, like Arethusa, the spring of Syracuse, in which things thrown into the Alpheus are given back, a river that flows through Olympia and pours into the Peloponnesian shore. They go beneath the lands and are given back again: the Lycus in Asia, the Erasinus in Argolis, the Tigris in Mesopotamia; and things sunk in the spring of Aesculapius at Athens are given back at Phalerum. And in the plain of Atina a river that has sunk comes out after 20 miles, and in the territory of Aquileia the Timavus.

226| Nothing can sink in the Asphaltite lake of Judaea, which produces bitumen, nor in the Aretissa of Greater Armenia; this one, being nitrous, nourishes fish. In the Sallentine territory beside the town of Manduria, lies a lake filled to its margins, which is neither lessened by water being drawn off nor increased by water being poured in. In the river of the Cicones and in the Picene lake Velinus, wood thrown in is covered with a stony crust, and in the river Surius of Colchis so much so that the bark, still persisting, often covers what has already become stone. Similarly in the river Silerus beyond Surrentum not only twigs plunged in but also leaves turn to stone, though the water is wholesome to drink. At the outflow of the Reatine marsh a rock grows [and in the Red Sea olives and verdant shrubs spring up].

227| But the nature of very many springs is wonderful for their heat, and this even on the Alpine ridges, and in the very sea between Italy and Aenaria, in the gulf of Baiae and in the river Liris and many others. For there is fresh water to be drawn in the sea in very many places, as at the Chelidonian islands and at Aradus and in the ocean at Gades. In the hot waters of the people of Patavium green plants grow, in those of the people of Pisa frogs, at Vetulonii in Etruria, not far from the sea, fish. In the territory of Casinum a river is called Scatebra, cold, more abundant in summer; in it, as in Arcadia at Stymphalus, water mussels are produced.

228| At Dodona, the spring of Jupiter, though it is icy and puts out torches plunged into it, kindles them if they are brought to it after being quenched. The same fails always at midday, for which reason they call it anapauomenon, then, increasing, overflows toward midnight, and from that point gradually fails again. In Illyria, garments spread out above a cold spring are set alight. The pool of Jupiter Hammon is cold by day and boils at night. Among the Trogodytae a spring is called the Spring of the Sun, sweet, and coldest around midday; then, gradually growing warm, toward midnight it is troublesome with heat and bitterness.

229| The spring of the Po, in the middle of the summer days, as though pausing, is always dry. On the island of Tenedos after the summer solstice a spring always overflows, from the third hour of the night until the sixth, and on the island of Delos the spring Inopus rises and falls in the same way as the Nile and together with it. Opposite the river Timavus a small island lies out at sea, with hot springs that swell and shrink in step with the sea's tide. In the territory of Pitinum beyond the Apennine, the river Novanus, a torrent at every solstice, dries up in winter.

230| In the Faliscan territory all water drunk makes cattle white; in Boeotia the river Melas makes sheep black, the Cephisus, flowing from the same lake, white; the Penius black again, and the Xanthus near Ilium reddish, whence the river's name. In the Pontus the river Axiaces waters plains in which mares, pastured there, give black milk and nourish a people. In the Reatine territory a spring called Neminie rises now in one place and now in another, signifying a change in the price of grain. At Brundisium, in the harbour, a spring supplies sound water to sailors. Among the Lyncestae the water called acidula makes people drunk like wine; the same happens in Paphlagonia, and in the district of Cales.

231| On the island of Andros, in the temple of Father Liber, Mucianus, three times consul, believes that a spring always pours forth the taste of wine on the Nones of January. The day is called Theodosia. Near Nonacris in Arcadia the Styx, differing neither in smell nor colour, kills at once when drunk; likewise on the hill Liberosus of the Tauri there are three springs fatal without remedy and without pain. In the Carrinensian territory of Spain two springs flow close by, one rejecting everything, the other swallowing it. Among the same people another shows all its fish of a golden colour, though outside that water they differ in nothing.

232| In the Comensian territory near Lake Como a copious spring swells and subsides every single hour. On the island of Cydonea, before Lesbos, a hot spring flows only in spring. The lake Sannaus in Asia is tainted by wormwood growing round it. At Colophon, in the cave of Clarian Apollo, there is a pool by drinking of which marvellous oracles are given, the life of the drinkers being shorter. Rivers flowing backward our own age also saw, in the last days of the emperor Nero, as we have related in the account of his reign.

233| Who is unaware that every spring is colder in summer than in winter? And, among those truly astonishing works of nature, that bronze and lead sink in a lump, yet float when spread out; that of things of the same weight some sink and others are borne up; that loads move more easily in water; that the Syrian stone, however large, floats, yet sinks when broken up; that fresh corpses slip to the bottom and, when they swell, are lifted up; that empty vessels are drawn out no more easily than full ones; that rain waters are fresher for the salt-pans than the rest, and that salt is not formed unless fresh waters are mixed in;

234| that sea waters freeze more slowly and catch fire more quickly; that in winter the sea is warmer, and in autumn saltier; that everything is calmed by oil, and for that reason divers sprinkle it from the mouth, since it softens the harsh nature and carries light down; that snow does not fall on the open sea; and that, although all water is borne downward, springs leap upward, even at the roots of Aetna, which burns to such a degree that it belches out sand in a ball of flame for fifty or a hundred miles.

235| Let us now also give some wonders of fire, the fourth of nature's elements, but first those from waters. At Samosata, a city in Commagene, there lies a pool that gives off a burning mud, which they call maltha. When it has touched anything solid, it clings; moreover, at a touch it even follows those who flee. So they defended their walls when Lucullus was assaulting them: his soldier burned in his own arms. It is set alight by water; experiments have shown that it is put out only by earth. The nature of naphtha is similar. This is the name given to a substance that flows about Babylon and in the Austaceni of Parthia, in the manner of liquid bitumen. It has a great affinity with fires, and flames leap to it at once from any quarter at which it is seen. So they say that Medea burned her rival: when she had come to the altar to sacrifice, her garland caught fire.

236| But among the marvels of mountains, Aetna burns always by night, and for so long an age the supply of fire has sufficed, snowy in the winter seasons and covering the ash it has thrown out with frost. Nor does nature rage in that mountain alone, announcing to the lands their burning: in the territory of Phaselis the mountain Chimaera burns, and with an immortal flame by day and by night; Ctesias of Cnidos relates that its fire is kindled by water and put out by earth or dung. Likewise in Lycia the mountains of Hephaestus, touched by a blazing torch, burn, and to such a degree that the very stones of the streams and the sands burn in the waters themselves, and that fire is fed by rain; they tell that if anyone draws a furrow with a stick set alight from them, streams of fire follow. The summit of Cophas in Bactria burns by night.

237| A plain burns in Media and in Sittacene on the border of Persia, and at Susa, at the White Tower, in 15 chimneys, the largest of which burns even by day. At Babylon a kind of pool of the size of an iugerum burns; among the Ethiopians, near mount Hesperus, the fields burn at night like stars; likewise in the territory of the Megalopolitani. For if that pleasant crater of the Nymphaeum, which does not scorch the foliage of the dense grove above it and burns always beside a cold spring, falls silent, it portends dire things to the people of Apollonia, as Theopompus relates; it is increased by rains and discharges bitumen, which has to be tempered with that undrinkable spring and is in any case thinner than any other bitumen. But who would wonder at these things?

238| In the middle of the sea the islands Hiera and Lipara, of the Aeolian group near Italy, burned along with the sea itself for some days during the Social War, until an embassy of the senate made atonement. Yet the Ethiopian ridge called Theon ochema burns with the greatest conflagration, and throws out flames scorched by the heat of the sun. In so many places, by so many fires, nature burns the lands!

239| Furthermore, since the principle of this one element is prolific, and begets itself, and grows from the smallest sparks, what are we to think must be the nature of the earth in so many funeral pyres, which feeds without harm to itself the most greedy voracity in the whole world? Let there be added to these the innumerable stars and the huge sun; let there be added human fires, and those implanted in the nature of stones, and of wood rubbed together; now the clouds and the origins of lightning-bolts: it will surely surpass all wonders that there has been any day on which everything did not burst into flame, since even concave mirrors, held against the rays of the sun, kindle fire more readily than any other fire.

240| What of the innumerable small ones, but natural, that gush out? In the Nymphaeum a flame comes out of a rock, which is kindled by rain; one comes out too at the Scantian waters, this one weak, when it passes, and not lasting long on any other material (an ash tree, evergreen, covers this fiery spring); one comes out in the territory of Mutina on fixed days of Vulcan. It is found in authors that in the fields below Aricia the earth burns if a coal has fallen on it; in the Sabine and Sidician territory an oiled stone flames; in the Sallentine town of Gnatia, when wood is laid on a certain sacred rock there, flame at once appears; and on the altar of Juno Lacinia, placed in the open air, the ash stays unmoved though storms blow from every side;

241| indeed that sudden fires also arise, both in waters and in bodies, even human ones: that the lake Trasimene burned entire; that from the head of Servius Tullius, asleep in his boyhood, a flame flashed out; that Lucius Marcius in Spain, after the Scipios had been killed, while addressing an assembly and urging the soldiers to vengeance, burned in a similar manner, Valerius Antias relates. More of this soon and in more orderly fashion; for now wonders are being set out in a kind of mixture of all things. But my mind, now passing beyond the interpretation of nature, hastens to lead the minds of readers as though by the hand over the whole world.

242| Our part of the earth, the part I am describing, floating as it were in the ocean that surrounds it, as has been said, stretches furthest from east to west, that is, from India to the Pillars of Hercules consecrated at Gades: L̅X̅X̅X̅V̅. L̅X̅X̅V̅I̅I̅I̅ paces according to Artemidorus as authority, but according to Isidorus X̅C̅V̅I̅I̅I̅. X̅V̅I̅I̅I̅. Artemidorus adds a further 991,500 from Gades, going round the Sacred Promontory, to the Artabrian Promontory, where the front of Spain juts out furthest.

243| The measurement runs by a double route. From the river Ganges and its mouth, where it pours out into the Eastern ocean, through India and Parthyene to Myriandrus, a Syrian city lying on the Gulf of Issus, L̅I̅I̅.X̅V̅; from there, by the nearest sea route, to the island Cyprus, then Patara in Lycia, Rhodes, Astypalaea, an island in the Carpathian sea, Taenarum in Laconia, Lilybaeum in Sicily, and Caralis in Sardinia, X̅X̅I̅.X̅I̅I̅I̅; then to Gades 12,050; and this measurement as a whole, from the Eastern sea, comes to L̅X̅X̅X̅V̅.L̅X̅X̅V̅I̅I̅I̅.

244| The other route, which is more certain and can mostly be travelled by land: from the Ganges to the river Euphrates L̅I̅.L̅X̅I̅X̅; from there to Mazaca in Cappadocia 244,000; then through Phrygia and Caria to Ephesus 499,000; from Ephesus across the Aegean sea to Delos 200,000; to the Isthmus 212,500; from there by land [and the Laconian sea] and the Corinthian Gulf to Patrae in the Peloponnese 90; to Leucas 87,500; to Corcyra the same; to Acroceraunia 82,500; to Brundisium 87,500; to Rome 360,000; to the Alps, as far as the village of Scingomagus, 519,000; through Gaul to Illiberis by the Pyrenean mountains 468,000; to the ocean and Spain's coast 831,000; the crossing to Gades 7,500; and this measurement, by Artemidorus' reckoning, comes to L̅X̅X̅X̅I̅X̅X̅L̅V̅.

245| The breadth of the earth, from the southern quarter to the north, is smaller by about half: Isidorus reckons it at L̅I̅I̅I̅I̅.L̅X̅I̅I̅. This makes it plain how much has been taken away by the heat on this side and by the cold on that. For I do not suppose that land is lacking, or that the earth is not the shape of a globe, but that the uninhabitable parts on either side are unexplored. This measurement runs from the shore of the Ethiopian ocean, where habitation just begins, to Meroe 625,000; from there to Alexandria 12,050; Rhodes 584,000; Cnidus 87,500; Cos 25,000; Samos 100; Chios 94,000; Mytilene 65,000; Tenedos 119,000; the promontory of Sigeum 12,500; the mouth of the Pontus 312,500; the promontory of Carambis 350,000; the mouth of the Maeotis 312,500; the mouth of the Tanais 275,000; and this course can be made shorter, by short cuts across the sea, by 79,000.

246| Beyond the mouth of the Tanais the most careful authors have ventured no extravagant figure. Artemidorus judged that what lies further on is unexplored, although he admitted that Sarmatian tribes live around the Tanais, towards the north; Isidorus added 12,050 as far as Thule, which is a conjecture amounting to divination. For my part I understand that the territories of the Sarmatians are known over a distance no smaller than the one just stated. And in any case, how large must a region be that holds countless tribes forever changing their homes? Hence I believe that the further extent of the uninhabitable zone is much greater; for I know too that immense islands off Germany were discovered not long ago.

247| These are the facts about length and breadth that I think worth recording. As for the whole circumference, Eratosthenes, a man skilled in every refinement of learning but in this field above all others, and one whom I see approved by everyone, gave it as 252,000 stadia, a measure which by Roman reckoning makes thirty-one million five hundred thousand paces: an audacious venture, but grasped by argument so subtle that one is ashamed not to believe it. Hipparchus, who is remarkable both in refuting him and in all his other diligence, adds a little under 26,000 stadia.

248| Dionysodorus' figure rests on a different kind of credit; for I will not withhold the greatest example of Greek vanity. He was a Melian, famous for his knowledge of geometry, and he died in old age in his native land. His funeral was conducted by his female relatives, to whom the inheritance belonged. These women, while performing the rites over the following days, are said to have found in the tomb a letter in Dionysodorus' name addressed to those above: that he had made his way from the tomb to the lowest point of the earth, and that the distance there was 42,000 stadia. Nor were geometers lacking to interpret this: they said the letter meant that it had been sent from the center of the earth's globe, since that is the longest distance downward from the surface and is also the center of the sphere. From this followed a calculation by which they declared the circumference to be 252,000 stadia. Harmonic theory, which compels the nature of things to agree with itself, adds 12,000 stadia to this measure, and makes the earth the ninety-sixth part of the whole universe.

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