GAIUS PLINIUS SECUNDUS was born at Como in AD 23; his Natural History preserves a vivid geographical picture of nature of his time; but such is his narratives that UN scholarship could not understand its usefulness, and forgot to keep some of its substantial lines in UN World Climatic Report which addresses concerns of nations on climatic changes.
In Pliny’s Natural History thus one finds an understandable geographical picture of a volcano of antiquity which devastated the ‘inhabited-world’ where life first appeared on earth. It highlights change of climates of his time which is just a little over two thousand years behind of our times only.
Eminent translators who translated Natural History always visualised the European continent before them while searching for the places in this encyclopaedic works of the ancient world. This work does not speak on the geographical situation of the European continent at all but whole of the ‘inhabited world’ which marks the ‘first land’ of human civilization and this depicts a small patch of land near the Sun Temple at Konark in Odisha(India).
‘His interest in nature cost him his life at the age of 56. He was in command of the fleet at Misenum on the Bay of Naples in AD 79 when the eruption of Vesuvius took place on August 23 and 24. Pliny had gone to investigate the strange cloud – ‘shaped like an umbrella pine’, according to his nephew – rising from the mountain. He sailed across the bay to obtain a nearer view; he landed at Stabiae, and there he was killed by poisonous fumes. The circumstances are recorded by his nephew in a letter to Tacitus (Pliny, Epp. VI. xvi). Vespasian had died, and had been succeeded by his son Titus two months before’.
In Bk.II of NH, the incidents of earthquakes which happened at different times have been recorded, and these he had collected from various sources. This is most important to study the climatic changes that suffocate the living world today. And it is equally important to read the exact lines of Pliny which locate the places where earthquakes occurred then; he has also given a clear picture of the effects of earthquakes on some places during his times, and also earlier to his times on some of the other places which today stand before us in all nakedness of their past history.
Earthquakes are accompanied by inundations of the sea, which is presumably caused to flood the land by the same current of air, or drawn into the bosom of the earth as it subsides. The greatest earthquake in human memory occurred when Tiberius Caesar was emperor, twelve Asiatic cities being overthrown in one night; the most numerous series of shocks was during the Punic War, when reports reached Rome of fifty-seven in a single year; it was the year when a violent earthquake occurring during an action between the Carthaginian and Roman armies at Lake Trasimene was not noticed by the combatants on either side. Nor yet is the disaster a simple one, nor does the danger consist only in the earthquake itself, but equally or more in the fact that it is a portent; the city of Rome was never shaken without this being a premonition of something about to happen(II, lxxxvi)
New lands are also formed in another way, and suddenly emerge in a different sea, nature as it were balancing accounts with herself and restoring in another place what an earthquake has engulfed(II, lxxxviii)
The cause of the birth of new lands is the same, when that same breath although powerful enough to cause an upheaval of the soil has not been able to force an exit. For lands are born not only through the conveyance of soil by streams (as the Echinades Islands when heaped up from the river Achelous and the greater part of Egypt from the Nile—the crossing from the island of Pharos to the coast, if we believe Homer, having formerly taken twenty-four hours) or by the retirement of the sea as once took place at Circei; such a retirement is also recorded to have occurred to a distance of 10,000 paces in the harbour of Ambracia, and to a distance of 5,000 at the Athenian port of Piraeus; and at Ephesus, where once the sea used to wash up to the temple of Diana. At all events if we believe Herodotus, there was sea above Memphis as far as the mountains of Ethiopia and also towards the plains of Arabia, and sea round Ilium, and over the whole territory of Teuthras and where the Maeander has spread prairie-land.( II, lxxxvii)
The famous islands of Delos and Rhodes are recorded in history as having been born from the sea long ago, and subsequently smaller ones, Anaphe beyond Melos, Neae between Lemnos and the Dardanelles, Halone between Lebedos and Teos, Thera and Therasia among the Cyclades in the 4th year of the 145th Olympiad; also in the same group Hiera, which is the same as Automate, 130 years later; and 2 stades from Hiera, Thia 110 years later, in our age, on July 8 in the year of the consulship of Marcus Junius Silanus and Lucius Balbus.( II, lxxxix)
Before our time also among the Aeolian Islands near Italy, as well as near Crete, there emerged from the sea one island 2500 paces long, with hot springs, and another in the 3rd year [126 BC] of Olympiad 163 in the bay of Tuscany, this one burning with a violent blast of air; and it is recorded that a great quantity of fish were floating round it, and that people who ate of them immediately expired. So also the Monkey Islands are said to have risen in the bay of Campania, and later one among them, Mount Epopos, is said to have suddenly shot up a great flame and then to have been levelled with the surface of the plain. In the same plain also a town was sucked down into the depths, and another earthquake caused a swamp to emerge, and another overturned mountains and threw up the island of Procida.
For another way also in which nature has made islands is when she tore Sicily away from Italy, Cyprus from Syria, Euboea from Boeotia land. Atalantes and Macrias from Enboea, Besbicus from Bithynia, Leucosia from the Sirens’ Cape.( II, xc)
Again she has taken islands away from the sea and joined them to the land- Antissato Lesbos, Zephyrius to Halicarnassus, Aethusa to Myndus, Dromiscos and Pernes to Miletus, Narthecusa to Cape Parthenius. Hybanda, once an Ionian island, is now 25 miles distant from the sea, Ephesus has Syria as part of the mainland, and its neighbour Magnesia the Derasides and Sapphonia. Epidaurus and Oricum have ceased to be islands.( II, xci)
Cases of land entirely stolen away by the first of all (if we accept Plato’s story [Tim. 24 E]), the vast area covered by the Atlantic, and next, in the inland seas also, the areas that we see submerged at the present day, Acarnania covered by the Ambracian Gulf, Achaea by the Gulf of Corinth, Europe and Asia by the Sea of Marmora and the Black Sea. Also the sea has made the channels of Leucas, Antirrhium, the Dardanclles and the two Bospori.( II, xcii)
And to pass over bays and marshes, the earth is eaten up by herself. She has devoured the highest mountain in Caria, Cibotus, together with the town of that name, Sipylus in Magnesia, and previously the very celebrated city in the same place that used to be called Tantalis, the territories of Galene and Galame in Phoenicia with the cities themselves, and the loftiest mountain range in Ethiopia, Phegium—just as if the coasts also did not treacherously encroach!( II, xciii)
The Black Sea has stolen Pyrra and Antissa in the neighbourhood of Lake Maeotis, the Gulf of Corinth Helice and Bura, traces of which are visible at the bottom of the water. The sea suddenly snatched away more than 30,000 paces together with most of the human beings from the Island of Ceos, and half the city of Tyndaris in Sicily, and all the gap in the coast of Italy, and similarly Eleusis in Boeotia.( II, xciv)
For let earthquakes not be mentioned, and every case where at least the tombs of cities survive, and at the same time let us tell of the marvels of the earth rather than the crimes of nature. And, I will swear, not even the heavenly phenomena could have been more difficult to recount: the wealth of mines so varied, so opulent, so prolific, brought to the surface in so many ages, although every day all over the world so much devastation is wrought by fires, collapse of buildings, shipwrecks, wars, frauds, and so great is the consumption of luxury and of the multitudes of mankind; such a variety of patterned gems, such many-coloured markings in stones, and among them the brilliance of a certain stone a that only allows actual daylight to penetrate through it; the profusion of medicinal springs; the flames of fire flickering up in so many places, unceasing for so many centuries; the lethal breaths either emitted from chasms or due to the mere formation of the ground, in some places fatal only to birds, as in the region of Soracte near Rome, in others to all living creatures except man, and sometimes to man also, as in the territory of Sinuessa and of Pozzuoli—the places called breathing holes, or by other people jaws of hell—ditches that exhale a deadly breath; also the place near the Temple of Mephitis at Ampsanctus in the Hirpinian district, on entering which people die; likewise the hole at Hierapolis in Asia, harmless only to the priest of the Great Mother; elsewhere prophetic caves, those intoxicated by whose exhalations foretell the future, as at the very famous oracle at Delphi. In these matters what other explanation could any mortal man adduce save that they are caused by the divine power of that nature which is diffused throughout the universe, repeatedly bursting out in different ways?( II, xcv)
In some places, the earth trembles when trodden on–for instance in the Gabii district not from the city of Rome about 200 acres shake when horsemen gallop over them, and similarly in the Reate district. Certain islands are always afloat, as in the districts of Caecubum and of Reate mentioned above and Modena and Statonium, and in Lake Vadimo, the dense wood near the springs of Cutilia which is never to be seen in the same place by day and by night, the islands in Lydia named the Reed Islands which are not only driven by the winds, but can be punted in any direction at pleasure with poles, and so served to rescue a number of the citizens in the Mithridatic war. There are also small islands at Nymphaeum called the Dancing Islands, because they move to the foot-beats of persons keeping time with the chanting of a choral song. On the great lake of Tarqainii in Italy two islands float about carrying woods, their outline as the winds drive them forward now forming the shape of a triangle and now of a circle, but never a square.( II, xcvi)
Near the town of Harpasa in Asia stands a jagged rock that can be moved with one finger, but that also resists a push made with the whole body. On the peninsula of Tanri in the state of Parasinum there is some earth which heals all wounds. But in the neighbourhood of Assos in the Troad a stone is produced that causes all bodies to waste away; it is called the Flesh-eater. There are two mountains near the river Indus, the nature of one of which is to hold all iron and that of the other to reject it; consequently if a man has nails in his shoes, on one of the mountains at each step he is unable to tear his foot away from the ground and on the other he cannot set it down on the ground. It is recorded that at Locri and Croton there has never been a plague or earthquake, and that in Lycia an earthquake is always followed by forty days’ fine weather. Corn sown in the Arpi district does not come up, and at Mncian Altars in the district of Veil and at Tuscumin and in the Ciminian Forest there are places where stakes driven into the ground cannot be pulled out. Hay grown in the Crustninium district is noxious on the spot but healthy when conveyed elsewhere.( II, xcviii)
But among mountain marvels—Etna always glows at night, and supplies its fires with fuel sufficient for a vast period, though in winter cloaked with snow and covering its output of ashes with hoar frost. Nor does nature’s wrath employ Mount Etna only to threaten the lands with conflagration. Mount Chimaera in the country of Phaselis is on fire, and indeed burns with a flame that does not die by day or night; Ctesias of Cnidos states that water increases its fire but earth or dung puts it out. Also the Mountains of Hephaestus in Lycia flare up when touched with a flaming torch, and so violently that even the stones of the rivers and the sands actually under water glow ; and rain only serves to feed this fire. They say that if somebody lights a stick at it and draws a furrow with the stick, streams of fire follow it. At Cophantium in Bactria a coil of flame blazes in the night, and the same in Media and in Sittacene the frontier of Persia: indeed at the White Tower at Susa it does so from fifteen smoke-holes, from the largest in the daytime also. The Babylonian Plain sends a blaze out of a sort of fishpool an acre in extent; also near Monnt Hesperius in Ethiopia the plains shine at night like stars. Like¬wise in the territory of Megalopolis: for if that agree¬able Bowl of Nymphaeus, which does not scorch the foliage of the thick wood above it and though near a cold stream is always glowing hot, ceases to flow, it portends horrors to its neighbours in the town of Apollonia, as Theopompus has recorded. It is augmented by rain, and sends forth asphalt to mingle with that unappetizing stream, which even without this is more liquid than ordinary asphalt. But who would be surprised by these things? During the Allies’ War Holy Island and Lipari among the Aeolian Islands near Italy burnt in mid sea for several days, as did the sea itself, till a deputation from the senate performed a propitiatory ceremony. Nevertheless the largest volcanic blaze is that of the ridge in Ethiopia called the Gods’ Carriage, which discharges flames that glow with truly solar heat…In so many places and by so many fires does nature burn the countries of the earth.( II, cx)(Pliny’s Historia Naturalis is available on the NET)