Page:The Natural History of Pliny.djvu/150

 116 plint's natural HISTOET. [Book II. changed places with each other although the public high- way was interposed. CHAP. 86. (84.) — WONDEEPUL CIECUMSTANCES ATTENDING EAETHQUAKES. Inundations of the sea take place at the same time with earthquakes^ ; the water being impregnated with the same spirit^, and received into the bosom of the earth which subsides. The greatest earthquake which has occurred in our memory was in the reign of Tiberius"*, by which twelve cities of Asia were laid prostrate in one night. They occurred ' the most frequently during the Punic war, when we had accounts brought to Eome of fifty-seven earthquakes in the space of a single year. It was during this year^ that the Cartliaginians and the Eomans, who were fighting at the lake Thrasimenus, were neither of them- sensible of a very great shock during the battle^. Nor is it an evil merely consisting in the danger which is produced by the motion ; it is an equal or a greater evil when it is considered as a prodigy*^. The city of E-ome never experienced a shock, which was not the forerunner of some great calamity. CHAP. 87. (85.) IN WHAT PLACES THE SEA HAS EECEDED. The same cause produces an increase of the land ; the vapour, when it cannot burst out forcibly lifting up the ^ We have no authentic accounts of tliis mutvial change of place be- tween two portions of land, nor can we conceive of any cause capable of effecting it. Our author mentions this circumstance again in book xvii. eh. 38. 2 See Aristotle, Meteor, ii. 8. 3 " Eodem videUcet spiritu infusi (maris) ac terr£e residentis sinu rccepti." ■* v.c. 770 ; A.D. 17. We have an account of this event in Strabo, lii. 57 ; in Tacitus, Ann. ii. 47 ; and in the Universal History, xiv. 129, 130. We are informed by Hardouin, that coins are still in existence which were struck to commemorate the hberahty of the emperor on the occasion, inscribed " civitatibus Asise restitutis." Lemau'e, i. 410. ^ u.c. 537 ; A.C. 217. ^ This circumstance is mentioned by Livy, xxii. 5, and by Florus, ii. 6- 7 " PrsDsagiis, inquit, quam ipsa clade, sseviores smit terrse motu^.'* Alexaudre in Lemaire, i. 410.