Great Names in History

Last week Curro Romero, a bullfighter, became a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Wasn’t that going very far?  Is a bullfighter an artist?

Curro Romero was. He fought bulls the way a great dancer dances or a great painter paints: struggling to reach some ideal in his head. He happened to do that in front of crowds but you’d have thought he was working alone in his room.

For years he was both an idol and a joke. His admirers said he was the greatest bullfighter of modern times; and his detractors said he was a charlatan—a fraud who lived off a fake reputation.
How could they say that? Was he good or not?

He was usually bad—scandalously bad. While fighting his bull in the ring he would suddenly become afraid and run away or only flap his cape at the bull from a save distance. Many times he refused to kill the bull, which is the most dangerous part of the fight, and it had to be led out of the ring with the help of oxen to be done away with in the corrals. Curro was booed and cursed and rained on with seat cushions and of course fined heavily for breaking the rules that required a bullfighter to kill his animal. This kind of performance of his became proverbial. The police often had to protect him from angry spectators when he left the ring. He hung his head in real contrition—you could see he had disappointed himself too—the real artist.

Few had seen the rare times when Curro was great. His fans said when he “uncorked the little bottle of essences” and you were there, it was like going to heaven. There was nothing like it in this world. If you saw it, you knew you had seen something angelic. Curro hypnotized with his slow capework and the dignity of his poise. The bull charged as though he too were trying with all his might to reach perfection, to “get it right”.

Bullfighters traditionally practice their passes for hours at home in their livingroom. They hold the muleta and concentrate. They call the imaginary bull. They watch it come as in a dream and lead it on with the muleta, so slowly only a dream bull would pass without stopping. When the real bull in the ring did stop and jerk his horns at Curro, it woke him from his dream of perfection and scared him. But when that real bull was “noble”—that is, charged straight and with bull-like determination—and gave Curro the chance to show what was in his soul, he did something that made the crowds at first solemn and then delirious.  As he walked out of the ring amid garlands and kisses and oaths of affection and worship, he looked better than when he was led out by the police, but not much better. You saw he was going over the faena in his mind and maybe had discovered a flaw.

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She lay awake in bed and thought about the new day and what she would wear. It was still dark outside but all Rome was up. Everyone rose before daybreak. She could hear the crowds outside in the street, though her bedroom was at the back of her mansion and the single little window gave out onto a quiet peristyle with a splashing fountain.

She wore her underwear—a linen loincloth tied at the waist and, on top, a tunic, which was a long shirt. She usually kept her linen brassiere on too but her husband had been there last night and it was lying on the floor where he had thrown it. Rich Roman couples didn’t sleep in the same room.

When a man got out of bed, the first thing he did after slipping into his sandals and using the bedpan, was to wind his toga around him. He became rather good at doing that though he sometimes got it wrong and, with a curse, had to start over again. A rich man of course called his servant for help.
And a lady?

The lady rang a little silver bell. Her servant, a Greek slave, came in carrying oil lamps and hung them on hooks along the wall. “What became of my red shawl? Why hasn’t it come back from the dyer yet?”

Nobody washed. There was no bathroom. As soon as the lady was on her feet she sat back down on a stool to wait for the hairdresser. “Where is Irene? Do I have to ring again? I swear I’m going to have that girl whipped.”
Irene was the hairdresser, the ornatrix.

A good ornatrix was hard to find and prized, even loved, by her mistress; there are gravestones with the names of beloved hairdressers and the families they served so well. Bad ornatrices were of course cursed, and more than once.

They had to be very skilled to bring off all the tiers of hair and make them stay put. In the days of the good-old Republic a hairdo was a simple matter: a part down the middle and a bun at the back. A little later, in Caesar’s time, ladies braided their hair and then mounted the braids on pads above their forehead. That style was immortalized in the great busts of Livia and Octavia.

The tiers of braids got higher and higher. By Flavian times (50 AD) they became great towers studded with jewels. Juvenal the poet made fun of one lady who piled her hair up high: “From the front you would take her for Andromache, but from the back she isn’t so tall—you wouldn’t think you were looking at the same person!”

When the lady’s hair was made up, the ornatrix painted her face. She brought out her vast collection of bottles and pots and jars and pyxes and lay them on a table beside her lady, who ordered her to make sure the door to her room was locked. Her husband had a way of barging in; and you know what Ovid said: Art beautifies only when it is concealed.

Her forehead became snow-white, as well as her arms. That was done with chalk and lead-white. Irene reddened her cheeks and lips with the lees of wine or ochre; and she drew her eyebrows and the lines around her eyes with a paste of ashes or antimony. There were only bad hand mirrors of polished metal and the light in her room was not good, even with the door to the peristyle wide open, so a lady had to trust her ornatrix very far.

See Part Two and learn how the lady dressed to become a dazzling beauty in a full-length robe and silk shawl, and with a red ribbon in her hair.

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The crypt was chilly and musty. He remembered waiting for the oracle at Delphi, which was fragrant with bay leaves and barley.
His mind began to drift. He began thinking about the march that would begin that same afternoon and he wished he had brought along something to write with or could begin dictating orders to a scribe. A shame to be wasting time like this.

Finally the voice came. “Pilgrim, come forth!” This time it was a girl’s voice. It was cheerful, not lugubrious or trance-like as he had suspected it would be. Pilgrim, eh? So the old priest hadn’t forgotten that one and was directing the oracle. Damn!

Caesar walked forward a few paces and saw an open niche on the wall. A cloth like a curtain hung on the other side and blocked his view of the oracle.
“Blessed is the man who comes to the god,” she said. “Welcome!”

The girl spoke very slowly and clearly in faultless Greek. She had been chosen to be an oracle as a child and educated by other, older oracles in a school for priestesses. They all spoke Greek and their model was the Delphic Pythia or perhaps the oracles at the Temple of Apollo in Athens. Hearing such competent Greek charmed Caesar, who loved language and good diction. He had expected to hear an ignorant girl talk clumsily. This oracle spoke classical Greek better than he himself. That was the way a god would speak, all right. Now that was a start!

He reached up and moved the curtain aside to see the girl. A woman of about his own age sat on a tripod, so high her head nearly touched the ceiling. She wore a simple tunic and her blonde hair was cut short. She looked intelligent. She didn’t notice Caesar. He looked around the room where she sat and was relieved to see she was alone: the High Priest had gone. Caesar quietly closed the curtain again.

“Child of the gods,” began the oracle. “Caesar!” She had learned his name. “Do not be troubled. Fortune has favored you above all other men. She will assist you and protect you until your work is accomplished here above. You must have faith—She will not abandon you, though now it seems that you have been cast aside. Do not complain, as you did yesterday after seeing the statue of Alexander. Yes—by your age he had conquered the world. But his place in Fortune’s plan was less important than yours.”

“Less important?” said Caesar. “Less important than being a tax-collecting quaestor in Spain, two thousand miles from Rome? Less important than collecting debts from Pompey’s clients here? It is Pompey whom Fortune has favored, not Caesar.
Caesar is nobody. My military career went nowhere. Sure, at Mytilene I won the the civic crown but so have half the centurions in the army. Compare that to my Uncle Marius’s record. He beat King Jugurtha and saved the country. Then he beat the Cimbri and the Teutons and saved it again. He was consul seven times. Even my father was praetor.
And as a lawyer I did no better. I showed promise—promise! They told me I spoke as well as Cicero—very helpful! But that didn’t help me win my first case against Dolabella. I had to leave Rome to protect myself afterwards. Between Sulla’s people and the oppositon of the Optimates, I simply can’t get anywhere. Or rather, I get to Hispania Ulterior.”

“You were sent here by the gods.”

“Then they must have no use for me either,” whined Caesar.

“Man of little faith! You are not to presume to know more than they, Caesar.
Don’t you even believe the words that you yourself pronounced at your Aunt Julia’s funeral last year—that you are descended from a hero-king and a goddess? Do you dare to be cynical even here, in the presence of the god?”

Caesar accepted her scolding. For the last time in his life he became the serious child his mother and his Aunt Julia had brought up.
“I was so moved at Julia’s funeral because I was ashamed of myself. She had so much faith in me. I spent half my boyhood at Aunt Julia’s. My Uncle Marius was the consul. They loved me and believed they were bringing up a future consul. I sat at table with them and listened to all the great men of Rome—all the great men who were not Optimates, of course, and whom Marius had forced out of Rome. Sulla was in Asia with his army and we all knew that there would be trouble, probably a civil war, when he came home. But during those years Rome belonged to us, to the people. I was sure I was going to have a brilliant future. Then Sulla came back, he took terrible vengeance and the Optimates got back into power. Since then they have been foiling every plan I ever had. Aunt Julia’s education was not enough. All my talents are not enough. It was only with much bribing that I was able to become quaestor.”

“You speak as though your life were through,” said the oracle. “The best you are meant to do lies ahead. What was the dream the gods sent you?”

“A nightmare, Oracle, a dream full of troubled, unnatural, vicious acts.”

“Don’t be afraid,” said the girl. “Perhaps the vicious acts were not so at all.”

“In the dream I slept with my mother,” said Caesar.

“And you possessed her?”

“I raped her.”

The oracle never hesitated. “That wasn’t your mother but the very Earth, Gea. You possessed the earth itself, the common parent of all mankind. The name of Caesar will live for thousands of years, long after those of Marius and Pompey have been forgotten. You are the man who has been chosen to save your nation from destruction. Because of you, Rome will continue to rule and to civilize the earth until it is ready for another kind of empire and a greater design of the heavenly Creator.”

I wish I could believe that, thought Caesar.
In fact, he did believe it. He had always felt his own superiority to the men around him. He took it for granted. He could never simply watch or suffer the circumstances of his life: his clear vision of them made him intervene. Wherever he went it seemed to him that men needed the direction apparently only he could give them. That was what he could never understand. Most men seemed so helpless—was he the only one who saw the obvious? Why was it his duty to stop and take the world by the hand?
“I can’t possess the world from this end of it,” said Caesar.
“You can possess the world wherever it pleases the gods to give it to you. Go back to Rome,” said the oracle. “Speak to the propraetor and ask for a discharge. Your work here as quaestor is finished. Today—now—your mission has begun.”
“And today’s march north? I can’t simply leave. I am so deeply in debt, I…”
“In Rome you will find help. There is a wealthy man there who will aid you. Go now. The god is with you.”

Caesar walked up the dark stairs of the cellar and out into the open courtyard of the Herakleion. It had stopped raining. The cloud cover had torn open in places and let the sunlight through. His lictors were waiting with the horses. He liked the oracle’s order to ask for a discharge and return to Rome and he was already planning what he would say to the propraetor. He was impatient to begin. Caesar never did learn patience—maybe the gods who had made him impatient, never meant to correct the fault.

Before leaving for Rome he bribed one of the priests to allow a sculptor to make a mold of the temple door reliefs. They were cast in bronze and packed on a ship out of sight of the Herakleion. They would have been a wonderful and surprising—a unique—adornment to his house in Rome. Unfortunately, it was not part of the gods’ plans to allow the reliefs to reach Ostia, the Roman port. They sent a storm to sink the ship.

Return to Caesar’s Troubling Dream (Part One)

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A few days after his wedding Cervantes must already have suspected that he had made a mistake. His wife was pretty and passably wealthy but he couldn’t stand her little town. How was he going to spend the rest of his life on a farm? He had wasted his youth first marching around Italy and then playing cards in an old Turkish bath in Algiers while he was a prisoner of the pirates. Would he waste the next best years being a country gentleman, hunting partridges and rabbits and husbanding vineyards?

Every chance he got he left the farm and went to Madrid to see old friends, including maybe his lover La Franca and their daughter.
But it seemed like it was always time to return to the damned farm.

Wasn’t he glad to see his young wife? No one knows. Perhaps he really loved her, perhaps he had only married her for her money. However that was, after nineteen months he pulled out of Esquivias.
“I’m going down to Seville to look for a job,” he told Catalina.

He had a good friend there, a former comic actor named Tomás. Tomás had decided that making monkey shines on a stage was never going to bring him much money so he left Madrid and went home to Seville, where he ran an inn now. It wasn’t just any inn—it was probably the most luxurious one in Seville. The best people in town stopped in there—nobles, rich empresarios, high government officials. “Come on down south and stay at my place,” Tomás had written to Cervantes. “Good jobs are dealt out here at my tables over drinks. I can introduce you to some very important people. Probably in less than a week you will nail something.” Cervantes had grown up in Seville and loved the booming city. It was the biggest, the busiest city in Spain at the time. “Save me a room,” he wrote Tomás. “I’m coming.”

He stayed at Tomás’s inn for two weeks. What kind of talk did he hear? Spain had just beaten the Portuguese in a decisive naval battle and everyone was euphoric—cocky. “That’s one enemy down,” said the men at the inn. “Now let’s go get those damned English.” They had heard about the execution of the Catholic Queen Mary Stuart and wanted revenge on the Protestants. “And we’re getting sick and tired of those English pirates, who have been getting away with murder for decades. It’s time to hang the whole lot—right boys?” And they would raise glasses of wine and vow to undo the English. King Philip saw that the whole country was in a mood of revenge and heroism and he decided to take advantage of it. “How many ships do you think we can assemble?” he asked the Duke of Alba. “The time is right to win back England for the Church.” For the Crown too.

One day while the inn was crowded with customers Tomás called Cervantes over. “See those two men by the window? The fat one is Antonio de Guevara. The King has just appointed him Head Comissary for a great Armada. That other fellow is Diego de Valdivia, Guevara’s adjutant. I’m going to introduce you to them. They are looking for commissaries to collect provisions for the fleet. The money is very good.”

The two nobles told Cervantes exactly what he would have to do. “The King needs wheat and oil to make the sailors’ biscuits. Of course the Crown cannot afford the huge sums necessary to pay for all that. But His Majesty is sure every Spaniard will want to cooperate in the undertaking, which the Almighty has surely ordained.”

“I see,” said Cervantes. “Requisitioning. The grain and oil will be collected by force.”

“Correct,” said the big Guevara. “Our commissaries will collect from each landowner an amount that we have fixed. You will simply go to his residence and present the official writ. Then at the granary you will supervise the actual transferral of the grain and oil to the King’s siloes. The Crown will pay you twelve reales a day.”

“And if the landowner or farmer refuses to open his bins?”

“As His Majesty’s commissary you will have full powers to oblige him to do so. Should the man refuse to cooperate, you will have him imprisoned.”

Cervantes was back on the farm when his offical appointment came through. What did he tell Catalina as he prepared to go south? Neither knew he would spend the next fifteen years collecting taxes in all the towns and villages of Andalucía. “Your mother wanted me to administer your family fortune, right?” he must have said. “Well, within two years I will double it—or my name is Charlie.”

He did and he didn’t. At one time he had thousands of maravedis in his hands but they disappeared mysteriously. “There are really only two ways he could have lost that money,” says a biographer. “Either he made bad investments or he gambled it away.”

“Cervantes must have been quite a card-shark,” says another of his biographers, “after all those years in the army and in the Turkish bath. In his stories he shows familiarity with all the games of the time.”
Perhaps at the gaming table they called him Charlie.

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This is the tower of the Castle of Oreja.

It can’t have long. Already in the eighteenth century a traveller wrote in his journal: “… any day now it will collapse.” The cracks in the walls are big enough to put your arm in. And after a good rain whole shoulders of the great gypsum cliffs come crashing down. One that fell some years ago shaved away the very ground in front of the tower, so that just left of the main door—watch your step as you look inside the tower!—there is a drop of two hundred feet.

Oreja is nothing special. There are more than a thousand ruined castles and fortresses in Spain. Many like Oreja are now out in the middle of nowhere because the roads they guarded are no longer used.
Oreja watches over a ford of the Tagus River. She has been guarding the ford for well over 2000 years. The Romans called her Aurelia. There must have been at least a watchtower on the cliffs in ancient times.

The present tower that is ready to fall is all that is left of a huge complex of defense works built by both Moors and Christians. There were fierce battles here and at the foot of the cliff, in the river valley. The Moors took the castle away from the Christians in 1113; and the Christians didn’t get it back until 1139. King Alfonso VII sieged Oreja with a huge army but still it took him more than nine months to force the Moorish defenders to surrender the castle. Afterwards he handed it over to the Knights of Santiago (St. James) to defend for him.

That’s one of the famous battles Oreja saw, and that one is fact. But there is another one that would make Oreja more famous if anyone could be sure it happened here. Both Livy and Polybius mention it. Somewhere on the Tagus about where Oreja is Hannibal defeated a big army of native Iberians—Olcades and Carpetani—before he started off with his troops and his elephants for Rome. He made the enemy army cross the river to come after him and then cut them down with his cavalry while they were swimming. “It was certainly here at the foot of the castle,” said a nineteenth century writer. “For years farmers have been finding in the fields and on the banks of the river old battle detritus, spearheads, clay sling pellets, even a Carthaginian helmet and an old sword.”

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1. Take the initiative, keep the initiative. This gave Hannibal a tremendous advantage. His enemy had constantly to try to guess his intention and defend himself against several alternative attacks. The enemy Roman consul was forever on the defensive, waiting, wondering, guessing, bracing himself for the blow.
When the consul Longus, bent on making Hannibal stand and fight him, lined up his army for the battle, Hannibal ordered his men to go back to camp. He refused to fight. At that time he was not prepared for a general battle, says Polybius, “and made it a principle never to be drawn into a decisive engagement unless by deliberate choice, and certainly not on a casual impulse.”

2. Be quick. Surprise. Hannibal decamped by night from Capua and got to Rome before the Romans in Capua ever realized he was gone. He crossed Etruria through a swamp because that was the way everyone assumed he wouldn’t go.

3. Be crafty, lay a trap. Hannibal’s plans were always ways of fooling his enemy, misleading him, enticing him into combat, surprising him with hidden forces, seeming to be somewhere else. Everyone remembered the way he got out of the difficult pass in Campania, with Fabius’s army all around him. Along a path that paralleled the only road out, which was heavily guarded by Roman troops, he stampeded a herd of cattle at night with lighted torches on their horns. The guards, thinking the cattle were Hannibal’s soldiers, rushed to confront them, abandoning their positions on the mountain. While they were dealing with the bulls, Hannibal quickly sent his amy through the pass. That was his most ingenious trick. But all his tactics were ploys and ruses and feints, even when not outright traps.

4. Be flexible. Have a plan but be able to alter it or even drop it as circumstances change. Bad generals believe they will one day meet the enemy squarely on the field and have a nice pitched battle. Those generals toy in their minds with troop dispositions—where to put their cavalry, where to stand their light-armed soldiers, how deep to build their phalanx, and so on. “That will be the decisive day,” they tell themselves, and hope for good luck.
For Hannibal every day was that decisive day. The great battle was now, it was always going on. He didn’t merely march until he came to a perfect situation for battle. He created the situation or took advantage of one. He was stubborn only about his objective, not about his means.
He was at every moment aware of his advantages and disadvantages. And of the enemy’s.

5. Fight for tomorrow as well as today. Think two steps ahead, not just one.

6. Understand your enemy; learn his weaknesses. Hannibal always sent out spies to learn the enemy’s plans. He interviewed prisoners and guides to get information. As soon as new Roman consuls were given command, he sent informers to find out who they were. Was the new general a hothead? Had he ever led troops in battle? What was the result? Was he cocky or impatient, did he like to tip the bottle?

After Hannibal had beaten his first consuls, along came another one called Flaminius with his army. Hannibal learned from his informers that this Flaminius was “on fire with ambition” and that he believed in his own good luck. “Here’s a man after my own heart,” thought Hannibal and arranged a trap for Flaminius’s army. He knew the man would attack with his whole force at the first opportunity, good or not, so Hannibal lured him along a narrow road between a mountain (where his own army lay hidden) and a lake. Flaminius was fool enough to believe that HE had the advantage and sent his whole army into Hannibal’s trap, where it was annihilated.

7. Be daring. Come down with your army across the Alps with elephants and attack Rome on Roman ground, far from your own country and without logistic support except what you can steal.

8. Keep your mouth shut. Hannibal never told anyone what he was doing.

9. Be all of the above except when you are faced with an enemy who is all of the above. In that case, be like Fabius, the Roman general. Cautious, prudent, unrisking, defensive, back-holding. No war manual ever told anyone to be like Fabius. But under the circumstances his was the winning strategy.

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When you first see the windmills on the great hill of Consuegra you will remember Don Quijote.
He thought they weren’t windmills but evil giants standing haughtily in front of him; and he bravely tilted his lance and charged, the world’s champion.
They do look very strange.

Spanish windmills are nothing like the ones you see in Holland or France. They don’t look like houses or sheds: there is no more architecture to them than there is to a child’s sandcastle made with his pail. Simple cylinders of mud and stone, with a cap on. And of course the propellers or blades, without their sails now because no one makes flour with a windmill anymore.

Spaniards whitewash them, the same as they do their houses. There is usually the slightest window halfway up to the top, for light, and a few more square holes near the top. Spanish houses never liked big windows either. Along with the light the terrible heat comes in.

There are normally two floors inside. The first is used for storage. The grinding takes place on the second floor, just under the hood, where the propellers turn a huge flat stone.

The propellers are fixed to the hood, which can revolve. Hanging down at the back is a long pole. The miller pushes it to make the propellers face the wind. When the windmill was in use, the miller had to dress the propellers with canvas, as though they were the sails of a ship. The guides who show you the windmills nowadays love to fascinate with the old jargon. There were names for all the parts of the great “ship” and the millers were experts in wind and weather, like real sailors.

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Cervantes had a useless left hand—a war wound. Nowadays we would call him a disabled veteran.

The man who had the cheek to write a second part of Don Quijote called Cervantes an “old one-armed guy.” That really burned him. “If my wounds don’t shine so brightly in the eyes of one [Avellaneda] who sees them, at least they are esteemed in the eyes of those who know where they came from.”

They came from the Battle of Lepanto. He was hit twice in the chest and once in the left hand by arquebus bullets.

Compared to many, he got off easy. Forty of the soldiers packed into his little skiff died, including the captain, and a hundred were wounded. Cervantes fought heroically. And he had insisted on going into battle though he had a high fever and had been vomiting all night and might have retired honorably behind the lines.

There are many accounts of that famous battle by soldiers who took part, writers many of them. They had all marched to war with romantic visions of glory.
The Battle of Lepanto was no parade. You wonder how any of the soldier-sailors survived at all—on either side. Nearly 600 ships and 180,000 men clashed in a hellish confusion of cannon-fire and desperate no-quarter fighting. Cannon, arquebus, and musket fire came from all sides, the boats had no room to manuever, there was constant ramming and hand-to-hand combats after boarding. Everywhere ships were on fire. In the middle of the battle the Turks’ slave-oarsmen revolted (understandably). There was no way to stop the slaughter. No one could hear above the cannons and the shouting or breathe in the gunsmoke. The sea was full of dead and dying men, and red with their blood. Thousands drowned or were scorched by the flames.

Cervantes’ chest wounds were serious and he was taken back to a hospital in Italy. His younger brother, who had also fought at Lepanto, probably helped care for him until he was out of danger. His hand never did become normal. Yet the disability was not serious enough for him to give up soldiering. He took part in another expedition and stayed in the army for another year before calling it quits. He finally decided to go home and become a writer.

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The Roman circus was a race-track.

None has survived intact but enough of the one in Mérida, Spain, is left to give you the feeling of the place. It was built at the time of Christ.

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It was one of the most important race-tracks in the Empire—big enough for thirty thousand spectators. The track itself was enormous—thirty thousand square meters (three soccer fields).
In the center, dividing the track in two, was a long narrow island called the spina, full of rich decoration such as obelisks and statues of all kinds. At the head of the track were carceres—the little rooms where the chariots waited before taking positions at the starting gate.

The Romans loved these horse-races even better than the gladiator combats in the amphitheaters. The best charioteer of all times was probably Gaius Apuleius Diocles, a Portuguese (Lusitanian). He triumphed in Rome but he no doubt got his start at the Mérida track.

.a scene from the movie Ben Hur
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No one knows exactly when the last race took place in the Mérida circus. Chariot racing declined when Christianity was made the official religion of the empire. The Councils of Elvira and Arles expressly prohibited the profession of chariot driver (and clowns). Yet there is an inscription in one of the carceres that declares that in 340 the circus was renovated. And there is a sixth-century tombstone in a Mérida graveyard to honor a famous chariot driver called Sabiniano.

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The Ctesibius pump in the Museo Arqueológico Nacional de Madrid

In one of the ancient copper mines of Spain (Sotiel) this ingenious pump was discovered. It is the famous sipho described by Pliny the Elder and Vitruvius, in perfect condition after two thousand years.

This kind of pump, which looks like some nineteenth-century contraption, was in fact invented by Ctesibius of Alexandria, a sort of Merlin who lived in 250BC.
It consists of two identical cylinders, each with a piston, that converge in a chamber with valves that open and close alternately to let water pass through without interruption.

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Mining engineers believe this one was not used to empty water out of the mine but rather to spray cold water on rocks that had been heated, to fragment them. Or perhaps to put out fires in the mine, as in this eighteenth-century etching showing another version of the Ctesibius pump in action.

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Didn’t the old backyard pumps in America work on the same principle?

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