It is an observation of L’Abbé du Bos that Italy is warmer at present than it was in ancient times. “The annals of Rome tell us,” says he, “that in the year 480 A.U.C. the winter was so severe that it destroyed the trees. The Tiber froze in Rome, and the ground was covered with snow for forty days. When Juvenal describes a superstitious woman, he represents her as breaking the ice of the Tiber that she might perform her ablutions.
“‘Hybernum fracta glacie descendet in amnem,
Ter matutino Tyberi mergetur.’
“He speaks of that river’s freezing as a common event. Many passages of Horace suppose the streets of Rome full of snow and ice. We should have more certainty with regard to this point had the ancients known the use of thermometers; but their writers, without intending it, give us information sufficient to convince us that the winters are now much more temperate at Rome than formerly. At present the Tiber no more freezes at Rome than the Nile at Cairo. The Romans esteem the winter very rigorous if the snow lies two days, and if one sees for eight-and-forty hours a few icicles hang from a fountain that has a north exposition.”
The observation of this ingenious critic may be extended to other European climates. Who could discover the mild climate of France in Diodorus Siculus’s description of that of Gaul? “As it is a northern climate,” says he, “it is infested with cold to an extreme degree. In cloudy weather, instead of rain, there fall great snows, and in clear weather it there freezes so excessive hard that the rivers acquire bridges of their own substance, over which not only single travellers may pass, but large armies, accompanied with all their baggage and loaded waggons. And there being many rivers in Gaul—the Rhone, the Rhine, etc.—almost all of them are frozen over, and it is usual, in order to prevent falling, to cover the ice with chaff and straw at the places where the road passes.” “Colder than a Gallic winter” is used by Petronius as a proverbial expression.
“North of the Cevennes,” says Strabo, “Gaul produces not figs and olives, and the vines which have been planted bear not grapes that will ripen.”
Ovid positively maintains, with all the serious affirmation of prose, that the Euxine Sea was frozen over every winter in his time, and he appeals to Roman governors, whom he names, for the truth of his assertion. This seldom or never happens at present in the latitude of Tomi, whither Ovid was banished. All the complaints of the same poet seem to mark a rigour of the seasons which is scarce experienced at present in Petersburg or Stockholm.
Tournefort, a Provençal, who had travelled into the same {p164} countries, observes that there is not a finer climate in the world; and he asserts that nothing but Ovid’s melancholy could have given him such dismal ideas of it.
But the facts mentioned by that poet are too circumstantial to bear any such interpretation.
Polybius says that the climate in Arcadia was very cold, and the air moist.