Of them as
navigable; snow, very likely, covered the mountain tops; the rainfall
was clearly more abundant - one of the sights of Locri was its daily
rainbow; the cicadas of the territory of Reggio are said to have been
"dumb," on account of the dampness of the climate. They are anything but
dumb nowadays.
Earth-movements, too, have tilted the coast-line up and down, and there
is evidence to show that while the Tyrrhenian shore has been raised by
these oscillations, the Ionian has sunk. Not long ago four columns were
found in the sea at Cotrone two hundred yards from the beach; old
sailors remember another group of columns visible at low tide near
Caulonia. It is quite possible that the Ionian used to be as rocky as
the other shore, and this gradual sinking of the coast must have
retarded the rapid outflow of the rivers, as it has done in the plain of
Paestum and in the Pontine marshes, favouring malarious conditions.
Earthquakes have helped in the work; that of 1908 lowered certain parts
of the Calabrian shore opposite Messina by about one metre. Indeed,
though earthquakes have been known to raise the soil and thereby improve
it, the Calabrian ones have generally had a contrary effect. The
terrific upheavals of 1783-1787 produced two hundred and fifteen lakes
in the country; they were drained away in a style most creditable to the
Bourbons, but there followed an epidemic of malaria which carried off
18,800 people!
These Calabrian conditions are only part of a general change of climate
which seems to have taken place all over Italy; a change to which
Columella refers when, quoting Saserna, he says that formerly the vine
and olive could not prosper "by reason of the severe winter" in certain
places where they have since become abundant, "thanks to a milder
temperature." We never hear of the frozen Tiber nowadays, and many
remarks of the ancients as to the moist and cold climate seem strange to
us. Pliny praises the chestnuts of Tarentum; I question whether the tree
could survive the hot climate of to-day. Nobody could induce "splendid
beeches" to grow in the lowlands of Latium, yet Theophrastus, a
botanist, says that they were drawn from this region for shipbuilding
purposes. This gradual desiccation has probably gone on for long ages;
so Signor Cavara has discovered old trunks of white fir in districts of
the Apennines where such a plant could not possibly grow to-day.
A change to a dry and warm atmosphere is naturally propitious to
malaria, granted sufficient water remains to propagate the mosquito. And
the mosquito contents itself with very little - the merest teacup fui.
Returning to old Calabria, we find the woods of Locri praised by
Proclus - woods that must have been of coniferous timber, since Virgil
lauds their resinous pitch.
