VOL. XII

IRRIGATION AMONG THE GREEKS AND THE ROMANS

Last year, having been invited to address the Geology Club of Barnard College, I recalled that some time before, when I attended a meeting of that Club, an address was made on irrigation in the Western parts of our own country. I planned, then, to address the Club on Irrigation in Classical Times and Lands. But, on investigation, I discovered that it finds no place in certain standard handbooks of classical antiquities. The long article, Agricultura, in Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities3 (London, 1890), contains not a word about irrigation. Equally silent on the subject is the article entitled Landwirtschaft, in Friedrich Lübker's Reallexikon des Klassischen Altertums, eighth edition, by J. Geffcken and E. Ziebarth (Teubner, Leipzig, 1914). There is no discussion of Greek agriculture in Whibley, A Companion to Greek Studies, and no reference to irrigation in the all too brief account of Roman agriculture in Sandys, A Companion to Latin Studies.

In the article Ackerbau, by Hugo Blümner, in Baumeister, Denkmäler des Klassischen Altertums, 1.10, reference is made, briefly, to irrigation in ancient times. In Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopädie der Classischen Altertumswissenschaft, in the article Ackerbau, by F. Olck (1894), Volume I, First Half, Column 267, in the account of Greek agriculture, 23 lines are devoted to irrigation and drainage together; in columns 278-279 irrigation and drainage in Roman agriculture are discussed together, in an even worse jumble. In the part that relates to Greek irrigation, the most important statement runs as follows:

Die Irrigation im kleinen wurde bei eigentlichem Ackerlande wohl nur selten angewandt, besonders bei der Hirse vermittelst kleiner Wasserfurchen. Xen. an. II 4, 13. Geop. II 38, 1.

In the article on Agriculture in the Encyclopedia Britannica", less than a page is devoted to the agriculture of ancient Greece and ancient Rome. Nothing at all is said of irrigation in Greece. There is one reference to irrigation as practiced by the Italians, in a translation of a passage in the first book of the Georgics. The Britannica again, in the article on Irrigation, contains but a single reference of the most fugitive sort to irrigation in Greece and Italy.

Stranger than all this, however, is the fact that there is no systematic discussion of irrigation in Cato's

No. 10

De Agri Cultura, or in Varro's De Re Rustica. That Columella refers to the matter will appear later.

It appears, then, that in the books, ancient and modern, to which one naturally turns first in connection with this subject, one finds little or no help. It seems worth while, therefore, to group passages I have found in ordinary reading in which reference is made by Greek or Latin writers to irrigation, and to combine with these a few additional passages, from Columella and the Digest, supplied by Pauly-Wissowa.

Herodotus 1.193 declares that the land of the Assyrians lacks water but that there is rain enough to make the grain sprout. The ripening, however, of the grain is due, he continues, to water from the river, that is, to irrigation. This water, he adds, is not, as in Egypt, supplied by the action of the river itself, but by sweeps worked by hand.

'Babylonia, like Egypt, is everywhere cut up into canals. The largest of these is navigable. Babylonia is the best of known lands for the production of the fruits of Ceres. It bears grain so richly that it yields two hundred fold, and sometimes, at it best, three hundred fold'.

cum

We may compare Pliny, N. Η. 18.161: Babyloniae tamen bis secant <frumentum, segetes>, tertium depascunt, alioquin folia tantum fierent. Sic quoque cum quinquagesimo faenore messis reddit eximia fertilitas soli, diligentioribus verum centesimo. Neque est cura difficilis quam diutissime aqua rigandi, ut praepinguis et densa ubertas diluatur. Limum autem non invehunt Euphrates Tigrisque, sic ut in Aegypto Nilus, nec terra ipsa herbas gignit. Ubertas tamen tanta est ut sequente anno sponte restibilis fiat seges, impressis vestigio seminibus.

Strabo, 16.1.9-10, when dealing with the alluvial plain of the Tigris-Euphrates basin about Babylon, had discussed irrigation, and had shown "an unusually clear knowledge of the whole process of river irrigation", according to Professor W. L. Westermann, Classical Philology 12.240, in an article to which other references will be made below. Professor Westermann argues (241-242) that Strabo derived his knowledge not from any ancient scientific treatise upon the subject (we know of no such treatise, he says), but from travel in Egypt with his friend Aelius Gallus, during whose prefecture in Egypt, 27-24 B.C., Augustus cleared out the irrigation ditches in Egypt (see below).

The passage cited above from Herodotus makes one think of Xenophon, Anabasis 1.7.14. There we read that, as Cyrus and the ten thousand Greeks were nearing Babylon, they came one day to a 'trench', thirty feet broad and eighteen feet deep. This 'trench' had been carried inland across the plain for about thirtysix miles to the Wall of Media. Then come sentences which, because they interrupt the narrative, many editors regard as an interpolation, from the notes of some editor or copyist. They may be translated as follows:

'Here are canals, flowing from the river Tigris; they are four in number, each one hundred feet broad, and very deep, and grain-bearing vessels sail on them. They empty into the Euphrates. They are about three miles apart, and there are bridges on them'.

Of the 'trench', referred to above, Xenophon now says that the King of Persia had built it, when he heard of Cyrus's coming, to serve as a line of defense. There was a passage only twenty feet wide between the trench and the river Euphrates.

But let us return to the bracketed words concerning the canals. They have to do with the irrigation work in Babylonia. Evidence enough in support of this work is to be found in the Anabasis 2.3.10:

'They came upon ditches and channels full of water, so that it was not possible to cross them without bridges. These bridges they made in part out of fallen palm trees, in part out of trees which they felled for the purpose'.

This passage means that the Greeks, now on their way home under the guidance of the Persians, had come upon the elaborate system of irrigation whereby the natural fertility of Babylonia was increased. In paragraph 13 of this chapter we read that Klearchus made all possible haste, 'because he suspected that the ditches were not always thus full of water, for it was not yet the time to irrigate the plains'. It was now October, and the time for irrigation was, of course the summer. Xenophon adds that Klearchos suspected that the King had let the water into the plain, in order that the Greeks might at once find themselves confronted with all sorts of difficulties with respect to their homeward journey.

In 2.4.13 Xenophon writes as follows:

'Presently they crossed two canals, the first by a regular bridge; the other was spanned by seven boats. These canals issued from the Tigris, and from them a whole system of minor trenches was cut, leading over the country larger ones to begin with, and then smaller and smaller, till at last they became the merest runnels, like those in Greece used for watering millet fields'.

In Euripides, Medea 824-842 we have the famous passage in which the poet sings the praises of Athens:

'Happy indeed from days of old are the sons and the daughters of Erechtheus, and children are they of the blessed gods, feeding on the most glorious wisdom of a holy land, a land never ravaged, and ever pacing lightly through air most brilliant, in a land where the Pierian Muses, the stainless Nine, bore fair-haired Harmonia. And story tells, too, how, drawing the streams from Cephissus, the lovely-flowing Cephissus, the lady of Cyprus breathes o'er Attica breezes, well controlled, sweet-scented <and dewy with the waters of the Cephissus>, and they tell also that always, flinging about her tresses fragrant wreathes of rose-flowers,

she sends to Athens the Loves, assessors of wisdom, coworkers of virtue of every sort'.

Here we have, as Professor Earle remarked in his notes, "irrigation poetized". The Cephissus is the main stream of Athens; the Ilissus, in modern times at least, has been a mere brooklet, except in heavy rains. Attic farmers, ancient and modern, cut irrigating channels from the Cephissus. Baedeker, Greece (1909), says, on page 97:

"The water of the Cephissus is exhausted by irrigation before it reaches the sea".

See also E. A. Gardner, Ancient Athens, 7, 16, 135; C. H. Weller, Athens and its Monuments, 18.

In Aristophanes, Nubes 282, the chorus of clouds, entering, says:

'Let us soar from the deep-sounding bosom of Father Ocean to the leaf-tressed peaks of the lofty hills. There, from some height that gives wide vision, let us look down on the sacred land with its watered grain'.

Other references to irrigation may be found in Theophrastus, in the work entitled in English, On the Causes of Plants, 3.6.3; Plato, Laws, Book 8, 844 A. Pauly-Wissowa adds Plato, Laws, Book 6, 761.

There is a story, found in a fragment of Hesiod, and in Strabo 1.2.15, that Danaus, by discovering subterranean reservoirs of water, made 'Argos have water which before was unwatered'. This story may, though it need not, imply irrigation.

Strabo (4.6.7), in describing the gold mines in the country of the Salassi, states that they used the river Durias (now the Dorea Baltea) in washing the gold; indeed, they emptied the main bed of the river by the trenches they cut to draw the water to various points to aid in gold washing. This operation, though advantageous in gold hunting, hurt agriculture below, by depriving farmers of the use of this high lying river for irrigation purposes.

Plutarch, Themistocles 31, tells us that Themistocles, when he was Water Commissioner at Athens, had caused a statue known as the Water-Carrier, a maid in bronze, two cubits high, to be made, out of the fines he exacted from those whom he convicted of tapping and stealing the public water. This may refer to irrigation (compare the allusion, cited below, in Middleton, Remains of Ancient Rome 2.119, to mention of a like matter by Frontinus).

(To be concluded)

C. K.

THE PLACE OF WINCKELMANN IN THE HISTORY OF CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP1

The ninth of December, 1917, was the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who has been called the founder of the scientific study of classical archaeology and the father of the

An expansion of a few paragraphs from the author's paper. The Two-hundredth Anniversary of Winckelmann, in The Monist 28.76-122 (January, 1918).

modern criticism of art. It is a fitting time2, therefore, to consider the influence which this man has exerted upon the world of aesthetics and to estimate the value of the service which he performed for posterity. By his life-work he overthrew the false taste in art and the wrong conception of classical learning which dominated Europe in his day, and he laid the firm and lasting foundations of a new point of view and a new science.

To understand the significance of the change wrought by Winckelmann's influence we must understand how it had come about that Italian taste, with its prejudice in favor of Latin studies over Greek and its indifference to the latter, slowly dominated Euro• pean ideals and culture for two hundred years before Winckelmann's time. It will be necessary for us briefly to touch upon the salient points in the history of classical learning in the various countries of Europe which brought about these conditions.

The study of Greek, which had been so enthusiastically begun by the Greek immigrants and Italian humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as well as the great period of Italian art beginning with 1300, which was so intimately connected with the commercial prosperity of the free states of Central and North Italy, began to languish after the first quarter of the sixteenth century. In the century before Byzantium fell, Petrarch, "the first of modern men", while chiefly interested, like his contemporaries, in Latin studies, also learned the rudiments of Greek and collected manuscripts of Homer and Plato. In 1333 he discovered, at Liege, the manuscript of Cicero's Pro Archia, and in 1345, at Verona, Cicero's letters to Atticus and Quintus, and thus gave a new impetus to the study of that writer. His contemporary, Bocaccio, found manuscripts of Ausonius and Martial; Salutati recovered Cicero's letters Ad Familiares in 1389, and the great humanist Poggio, in the years 1415-1417, found, at Cluny, Langres, and elsewhere in France and Germany, thirteen speeches of Cicero, besides many other manuscripts. Other scholars, Traversari, Landriani, Aurispa, continued these discoveries; thus Aurispa in 1423 brought 238 manuscripts of Greek writers from the East. The early Renaissance theory of a humanistic education is illustrated by many extant treaties in which the study of Latin was particularly inculcated. In 1392 Vergerio wrote the first, in which he maintained that Latin was the foundation of a liberal education; by 1400, however, he was studying Greek with Chrysoloras, one of the pioneers in spreading Greek in the West. In 1405, Bruni, another pupil of Chrysoloras, wrote a tract in which he laid down the principle that a 'sound and thorough knowledge of Latin' was the basis of true learning and he drew up a course of reading in Latin literature. Vegio, the Vergilian scholar, wrote a similar treatise before 1458, and Aeneas Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II, in 1450

composed a brief educational scheme in which Latin was predominant. In the earlier half of that century Vittorino da Feltre founded the first Renaissance School at Mantua and here Latin study was the chief interest, though attention was also paid to the great Greek writers.

Meanwhile an equal claim for the study of Greek was made by the educator Guarino, who had studied with Chrysoloras for five years at Constantinople. His love of Greek is evidenced by the pretty tale, that, while he was returning to Italy, the loss of a case of manuscripts by shipwreck caused him such distress that his hair turned gray in a single night. He composed grammars of both Latin and Greek and translated Strabo and Plutarch. His method is seen in passages from his son's treatise entitled De Ordine Docendi et Studendi, which appeared in 1459. In this work he maintained that the essentials of a liberal education consisted not only in the ability to write Latin verse, but also in 'familiarity with the language and literature of Greece', for 'without a knowledge of Greek, Latin scholarship is, in any sense, impossible'. By the fall of Constantinople, Italy became in the language of her recent poet Carducci 'the sole heir and guardian of ancient civilization'. But the great Revival had, as we have seen, long been under way. Many Greeks had migrated to Italy before that eventBessarion, Gaza, Chalcondylas, etc.; a few others, like Lascaris, Mus urus, Callierges, came later. The latter three helped in reviving interest in the study of Greek with the aid of the new art of printing. Still, the chief aim of the new humanism was the imitation of the style of Latin models.

The Renaissance ended with the sack of Rome in 1527. Even before that date Greek studies had declined and the interest in them had passed beyond the Alps. Let us see what caused this change. The decline in classical studies was primarily due to the loss of political independence in the Italian States during the disasters which befel them in the time of Michelangelo. Italy, the richest of lands, became the prey of foreign armies, and was no longer able, under the leadership of the Popes, to present a united front against invasion. An army of the Emperor Charles V sacked Rome in 1527 and took Pope Clement prisoner. In the same year another imperial army besieged Florence, which surrendered in 1530. The subsequent re-establishment of the Medici in that city in 1533 as hereditary dukes of the capital, and later of all Tuscany, meant the loss of Italian freedom. From this time until 1796-nearly two hundred and fifty years-Italy had no political history of its own; its annals were filled with dynastic and territorial changes and it became the theater of wars fought mostly by foreign princes for ambitions in which Italians had little interest. The cultured aristocracies which had long cultivated humanistic studies were irretrievably ruined. The predominant influence of the Church was unfriendly to the reverence of pagan, especially Hellenic, ideals, Constantinople, Italian learning and culture had received its characteristic Roman bias. This preference for Latin over Greek studies slowly spread over all Europe, until finally, in Winckelmann's day, Italian taste, founded on a wholly mistaken notion, ruled all cultivated nations.

and this attitude was bound to divert Italy from the classical heritage. Besides, the Greek elements in Roman literature and art had become so thoroughly assimilated at the close of antiquity in the Imperial Age, that now there were few Italians who had any idea of their independent origin. The Mohammedans were holding Greek lands in slavery; no one visited them to bring back a true knowledge to counteract the tendency to treat Roman studies as superior to Greek and to look upon them as original. Patriotism, moreover, led Italians to exalt their own land as the center of the old Roman Empire. They knew Italy's debt to Rome in both literature and art and enthusiastically imitated Roman models without knowing that these, for the most part, were copies from the Greeks. The very fact that the Italian language was the daughter of Latin made it easy for them to unlock the treasures of Latin literature. All these tendencies had finally made it the custom in Italy to ignore Greek studies and to prefer everything Roman.

As we have seen, the chief aim of the Italian humanists had been from the first to imitate Latin models. We see this in Petrarch's Africa, in the Latin poems of Politian, Sannazaro, and many others. Petrarch had imitated not only Vergil-the chief Latin name throughout the Middle Ages-but Cicero also, on discovering the manuscripts of the Pro Archia. The imitation of Cicero thus early begun was continued by a long line of humanists. The brilliant Erasmus, who, though born in the Netherlands, exerted his greatest influence elsewhere, in his celebrated dialogue entitled Ciceronianus, which appeared in 1528, mentioned one hundred and six of these imitators. In this work he denounced the slavish imitation of the great Roman writer, and maintained that 'to speak properly, we should adapt ourselves to the age in which we live-an age which differs completely from that of Cicero'. At Paris in 1500 he had taught that 'without Greek the amplest knowledge of Latin was imperfect'. He studied Greek in Italy for three years, 1506-1509, and taught it in Cambridge in 1511; in 1516 he edited the New Testament in the original, at Basel, and he helped in the organization of the College of Louvain by giving an importance to Greek equal to that of Latin and Hebrew. The influence against him in Italy, however, was too strong. The elder Scaliger defended the Ciceronians in 1531 and again in 1536, by declaiming against Greek in favor of Latin. The Frenchman Étienne Dolet in 1535 similarly spoke for the Latins and the contest was continued by many others into the seventeenth century. Scaliger's book of Latin verses the Poetice, which appeared posthumously in 1561-remained a standard of taste in Italy and elsewhere down to the eighteenth century. Though the French historian de Thou exalted him above all scholars, both ancient and modern, for his learning and ability, we know that he looked upon classical studies only as an agreeable relaxation from the severer pursuits of life. Thus, within a century of the fall of

In France the Greek tradition inaugurated by Janus Lascaris, who died in 1503, and which included Budaeus, the pupil of Lascaris, the elder Scaliger, who came to France in 1529, and such names as Turnebus, Lambinus, and Stephanus, soon began to wane. The French Schools were deserted by the younger Scaliger for Holland in 1593, by Casaubon for England in 1610, and by Salmasius for Holland in 1631. By the end of the barren seventeenth century classical enthusiasm had fallen so low that it yielded to a taste which took delight in ridiculing Greek studies. The age of the great Louis-the founder, in 1663, of the Academy of Inscriptions-was marked in the years 16871692 by the inane literary quarrel between Perrault and Boileau over the relative merits of the ancients and the moderns. In his book, Parallele des Anciens et des Modernes, Perrault, after superficially surveying ancient and modern literature, decided in favor of the latter. This diatribe against the ancients was chiefly aimed at the objective and impersonal character of their art. He compared the immortal lays of Homer with the ballads of the Parisian street singers and found the blind bard's heroes of lower stature than the courtiers of Versailles. This superficial book started a controversy which passed over to England and which again, in the days of de la Motte and Fénelon, returned to the land of its birth. La Motte was an enemy of Greek and similarly measured Homer by the rules of French romantic poetry. Voltaire, the dates of whose long life included those of Winckelmann, while expressing regret that 'the most beautiful language of the world' was neglected in France, and while praising the descriptive power and the naturalness of Homer, still had little higher conception of the divine poet than his contemporaries had. As we should expect from so slavish an imitator of Vergil, he was content to set the second, fourth, and sixth books of the Aeneid above not only the Iliad, but above all the other creations of the Greek poets. He even thought that the Gerusalemme Liberata was the equal of the Iliad. He admired Demosthenes's lofty tone, but looked upon Aristophanes as a mere farçeur. Even Plato did not appeal to him because of his Christian spirit in making vice too repulsive and virtue too attractive. In his opinion Cicero was the equal of any Greek thinker. These are opinions which we might expect from this "inveterately superficial" writer, who, according to Carlyle, never gave utterance to a great thought. His idea of how an epic should be written is evidenced by his Henriade, which, by general consent, has been relegated in our day to the place of a School text.

In England, humanism-early represented by such names as Linacre, Grocyn, Lilye-had not yet recovered