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This chapter explores the catacombs and sewers of Paris: a maze of underground galleries that were essential to the proper functioning of the city above them. They create a vast network that resemble the vascular, respiratory and digestive systems of the human body. Unlike London, Paris was built with the very material taken from what later became the hole-ridden foundations of the city. To prevent Paris from collapsing, Louis XVI created an administration for the inspection and maintenance of the disused underground quarries of the city and its suburbs. At the same time, the Parisians increasingly complained and petitioned against the pestilential air exhaled by the city’s graveyards, as their grounds were as swollen as the belly of a corpse under the pressure of the gases of decomposition. This led to the closure of the graveyards and the relocation of the remains in the underground ossuary of Montsouris.

There was no single story about the deaths of Peter and Paul. Instead, there existed a cluster of traditions with some overlap on basic points, but much variety on other details. This chapter explores the accounts of where the apostles were killed and what happened to their bodies after their deaths. The earliest sources tend to be imprecise or simply silent about the exact locations of the martyrdoms, so the picture is far from clear in the sources. After the executions, the bodies of the apostles travel in divergent ways in different texts, being placed in as many as three different burial places along the way.

To get a sense of the relationship between karst geology and Greek settlement, we will look at examples from the Greek mainland, the islands of the Aegean, and Sicily. There is no attempt here to be comprehensive, as the necessary field work has not been done to make that possible, but rather these examples are selected to suggest the way that karst water potential played an important role in site selection and development. The major examples selected are Athens and Corinth for mainland Greece, Rhodes for the Aegean Islands, Assos and Priene for Ionia, and Syracuse and Akragas for Sicily. Other places will be cited briefly if the details from those sites are particularly illuminating. Karst phenomena, as we have seen, are found throughout the Greek world. Since Athens is perhaps the best documented Greek city, and has in addition a phenomenal karst system as its monumental focus, it receives here a section of its own, Chapter 18, The Well-Watered Acropolis. In Chapter 11, Planning Water Management, we discuss Corinth’s water system in comparison with that of her daughter city Syracuse. Here, however, we will consider the aspects of water at Corinth that derive from the karst geology of the area. This city is an excellent example of the adaptation of urban requirements to karst terrane, the siting of an ancient Greek city to take advantage of this natural resource. Ancient Corinth was built on gradually sloping terraces below the isolated protuberance of Acrocorinth, which acts as a reservoir, with the flow of waters through it resulting in springs (Fig. 8.1). That karst waters are to be found in perched nappes even at high altitudes accounts for the spring of Upper Peirene not far below the summit of Acrocorinth, as well as the two fountains half-way down the road from its citadel, and the fountain called Hadji Mustapha, at the immediate foot of the citadel (as reported by the late seventeenth century traveler, E. Celebi, cited in Mackay, 1967, 193–95.) The aquifers also supply the aqueduct (probably ancient) from Penteskouphia southwest of Acrocorinth.

The ancient Greeks could not afford inefficient and impractical cities. This one insight has guided my research ever since I attended the International Water Resources Association conference in Rome in 1986 and learned how concerned modern water engineers and policymakers are about careful utilization of water resources. We twentieth century Americans can afford waste, because we are both rich and spendthrift. But the ancients were living very close to the edge in an ecosystem that sustains human life only if it is carefully, respectfully managed. How successful they were in city site selection and in city building is evident from the fact that so many of their cities survived for such long times—Athens nearly 5000 years; the great capital Byzantium-Constantinople-Istanbul since the eighth century B.C., a lifespan of about 2800 years; and even obscure towns like Morgantina, Sicily, for 450 years. Given a hot and semiarid Mediterranean climate with rain only in the winter months, careful attention to water supply and distribution was essential for a Greek city. As long ago as the second millennium B.C., the Mycenaeans who lived in mainland Greece and the Minoans of Crete took great care of the water supply and drainage of their sites, using cisterns, wells, pipelines, rock-cut channels, and so on (Evans, 1964 reprint, vol. I, 103–05, 141–43, 333–36, 378–84, 389–98; Broneer,1939, 317–433; Mylonas 1966; Knaus, Heinrich, and Kalcyk, 1980). Because of the gap in the archaeological record, we cannot be sure whether any of their knowledge about water management survived the collapse of these civilizations and the 400 years or so of the “Dark Ages” that followed. Some ideas such as cisterns seem to be both so basic and so easy for a single family to execute, that it is likely their use persisted no matter how primitive conditions became. Others, such as the use of pressure pipes, seem to require a fairly sophisticated society and probably the existence of a group of architect-engineers to carry out the building process, and therefore we would not expect them to survive but to be independently re-invented when later Greek society reached technological sophistication.

Can we discern differences in the way water was managed at larger and smaller Greek cities? Let us take two Greek cities in Sicily as case studies, examining them in some detail as to area, population, date, geological situation, and the water system elements known at each. The aim of this exercise is to begin to understand the impact of scale differences on the clusters of water system elements in ancient cities. Useful examples are Akragas—modern Agrigento—and Morgantina (Figs. 15.1, 15.2). Akragas is located on the south coast of Sicily, approximately in the center, and occupies a dramatic site on a hill between two rivers. The earliest settlement—and later the medieval town—were located on the highest peak of the 280-meter hill (Storia della Sicilia, 1979, map 1), but during classical and Hellenistic times the city spread down the hill to the wide and gentle valley to the south, which then rises again to form a ridge that separates that valley from the plain leading to the sea. In the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. a line of temples was built along the lower ridge, forming today the single largest, best preserved, and most impressive group of Greek temples anywhere. These architectural glories were possible because of the size and wealth of the city, the same factors that necessitated and made possible the extensive water system of the city. In contrast, Morgantina was built inland, on a ridge at the juncture of the Catania plain with the plateaus of the center of Sicily. This ridge stands 578 to 656 meters above sea level, higher by 300 to 350 meters than the valleys to the north and south, but lower than the site of the nearest modern town, Aidone (885 meters), about 3 kilometers away. Morgantina began as a prehistoric settlement of migrant tribes from Italy whose king, Merges, gave his name to the city. The earliest Sikel settlement was on Cittadella, the easternmost wedge of the ridge, during the archaic period, no later than the sixth century.

Looking back through twenty years of work on this topic, I can sum up what I have learned under two major categories: general truths and site-specific insights. Within each of these categories, I differentiate between items that were not known by me when I started and items that as far as I can tell were not known at all. First let us consider the findings that have general application. Primary are findings connected with the geological basis of Greek settlement. The ones in italics have not been known before at all, as far as I can tell. For each discovery, there is a brief discussion. 1. Relation of karst patterns to settlement in the ancient Greek world. In Part IV of this volume we have discussed this topic in a preliminary fashion. As is the case with so many details of the human situation, the relevant knowledge is in the hands of two disciplines that rarely perceive that they have any questions in common. Karst has been studied by hydrogeologists and ancient Greek settlements by classicists, with an impenetrable membrane separating the two fields of knowledge. Nevertheless, my study has conclusively demonstrated that one cannot understand either the choice of an ancient Greek site or the subsequent history of the settlement without factoring in the geological base and the water resources this base provided (Fig. 7.1). It is a pity that the lead of the noted classicist Judeich (1905 and 1931) was not followed sooner, since he illustrated his section on water supply with a geological map and section. 2. Utilization of karst in urban water systems. The work of modern engineers and geologists in such countries as Yugoslavia makes us aware that karst waters can be tapped or, to put it more strongly, harnessed for settlements. Many of their modern solutions are not dependent on advanced technology but rather on careful observation and clever manipulation. The ancient Greeks were fully capable of both. The famous pinecone experiment on the Tripoli plain of the sixth century B.C. is strong indication that the ancient engineers were examining data with an eye to manipulating karst for human purposes, and in fact we have a story, from the same area, of water being diverted down a sinkhole to drown out an unsuspecting enemy settlement.

This chapter focuses on the fresh sensory stimuli, simultaneously savoured and distrusted by British visitors to Paris, who, as they mulled over what they had seen, exhibited a complex mixture of aesthetic, emotional and moral responses. The first section considers Paris as a visual experience, by this period available in Britain through various new scopic inventions such as the panorama, whose influence on Dickens’ representation of Paris is discussed. The arrangement of Parisian public spaces for seeing and being seen embraces British writers’ treatment of parks, fêtes and carnivals, the Louvre, expositions universelles, and the theatre. The second section discusses the deathly frissons the British sought out in visiting the sites of the 1789 revolution, the Catacombs and the Morgue.