The Anatomy of Melancholy

The Turks recently attempted to cut through the isthmus between Africa and Asia. Sesostris, Darius, and some of the pharaohs of Egypt had undertaken this before, but unsuccessfully, as Diodorus Siculus and Pliny record. For the Red Sea, being three cubits higher than Egypt, would have flooded the whole country: “they abandoned the undertaking,” they left off. Yet, as the same Diodorus writes, Ptolemy resumed the work many years later and completed it at a more suitable place.

Demetrius, Julius Caesar, Nero, Domitian, and Herodes Atticus likewise attempted to make the Isthmus of Corinth navigable, to provide a quicker and less dangerous passage between the Ionian and Aegean seas. But as this could not readily be done, the Peloponnesians built a wall like our Picts’ Wall near Schoenus, where Neptune’s temple stood, across the narrowest part of the isthmus. Diodorus mentions it in Book 11, and Herodotus in Book 8, Urania.

Our more recent writers call it the Hexamilion. Murad the Turk demolished it; the Venetians repaired it in 1453, in fifteen days, with 30,000 men. Some people, says Acosta, would have a passage cut from Panama to Nombre de Dios in America. The French historians de Thou and de Serres, meanwhile, speak of a remarkable waterway planned in France under Henry IV, from the Loire to the Seine and from the Rhône to the Loire.

A similar scheme, from the Saône to the Moselle, had previously been attempted by the emperor Domitian, as Cornelius Tacitus relates in Book 13 of his Annals, and afterwards by Charlemagne and others.

In former times great sums were spent on cutting or repairing river channels and passages. Aurelian did this on the Tiber, making it navigable to Rome to bring grain from Egypt to the city: “he dug out the shallows of its rising bed,” says Vopiscus, “and built up the banks of the Tiber”; he deepened fords, built banks, and so on. Dilapidated harbours were also restored, as the emperor Claudius attempted at Ostia with immense effort and expense, as I have said, and as the Venetians do today to preserve their city.

In most regions of Europe, many excellent ways of enriching their territories have been encouraged and devised: introducing plants from the Indies among us, for example, and silkworms. The mulberry leaves alone on the plains of Granada bring 30,000 crowns a year into the King of Spain’s treasury, besides supporting the many trades and craftspeople employed in this work in the kingdom of Granada, Murcia, and throughout Spain. In France, salt brings in a great revenue, and so forth.

Whether such things might be undertaken as successfully here is open to debate: silkworms, I mean, vines, fir trees, and so on. Cardan urges Edward VI to plant olives, and is fully persuaded that they would thrive on this island.