Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/236

 220 HISTORY OF GREECE. It will be seen from these circumstances, that Greece, con* eidering its limited total extent, offers but little motive, and still less of convenient means, for internal communication among ita various inhabitants. 1 Each village, or township, occupying its ed. Goller), and Pausanias, also, with the greatest confidence (v. 7, 2), believed that the fountain Arethusa, at Syracuse, was nothing else but the reappear- ance of the river Alpheius from Peloponnesus : this was attested by the actual fact that a goblet or cup (^tu/b/), thrown into the Alpheius, had coma up at the Syracusan fountain, which Timseus professed to have verified, but even the arguments by which Strabo justifies his disbelief of this tale, show how powerfully the phenomena of the Grecian rivers acted upon his mind. " If (says he, Z. c.) the Alpheius, instead of flowing into the sea, fell into some chasm in the earth, there would be some plausibility in supposing that it continued its subterranean course as far as Sicily without mixing with the sea: but since its junction with the sea is matter of observation, and since there is no aperture visible near the shore to absorb the water of the river (ardpa rb naramvov rb favfia row ivoTdfj.ov) t so it is plain that the water cannot maintain its separation and its sweetness, whereas the spring Arethusa is perfectly good to drink." I have translated here the sense rather than the words of Strabo ; but the phenomena of " rivers falling into chasms and being drunk up," for a time, is exactly what happens in Greece. It did not appear to Strabo impossible that the Alpheius might traverse this great distance underground ; nor do we wonder at this, when we learn that a more able geographer than he (Eratosthenes) supposed that the marshes of Rhinokolura, between the Mediterranean and the Red sea, were formed by the Euphrates and Tigris, which flowed underground for the length of 6000 stadia or furlongs (Strabo, xvi. p. 741; Seidel. Fragm. Eratosth. p. 194): compare the story about the Euphrates passing underground, and reappearing in Ethiopia as the river Nile (Pausan. ii. 5, 3). This disap- pearance and reappearance of rivers connected itself, in the minds of ancient physical philosophers, with the supposition of vast reservoirs of water in the interior of the earth, which were protruded upwards to the surface by somo gaseous force (see Seneca. Nat. Qusest. vi. 8). Pomponius Mela mentions an idea of some writers, that the source of the Nile was to be found, not in our (oiKovftevrj) habitable section of the globe, but in the Antichthon, or southern continent, and that it flowed under the ocean to rise up in Ethioria (Mela, i. 9, 55). These views of the ancients, evidently based upon the analogy of Grecian rivers, are well set forth by M. Letronne, in a paper on the situation of the Terrestrial Paradise, as represented by the Fathers of the Church ; cited in A. von Humboldt, Examen Critique de 1'Histoire de la Ge'ographie, etc, vol. iii. pp. 118-130. 1 " Upon the arrival of the king and regency in 1 833 (observes Mr. Strong), no carriage-roads existed in Greece; nor were they, indeed, mnch wanted previously, as iiwn to that period not a carriage, waggon, or cart, or an/