This is surely a deliberate representation of the river Styx and the
undoubted progenitor of the story laid down by Virgil. The original
establishment appears to be the sixth century long before Rome was
even important and was operated as a working shrine possibly until
the reassembled books were themselves destroyed in the fourth century
AD. That was also about when the western empire collapsed and it is
reasonable that the effort to fill in the tunnels took place a lot
later at the behest of the Roman Church for good religious reasons.
The full extent of the tunneling and the water works could have been
a later development drawn from having a local hot spring in place and
a perfectly good legend. Tunneling to depth is quite doable and then
tunneling a deep escape passage for water is also plausible. Once
that was done, it is a way simpler task to advance toward the hot
spring until enough flow is established. All this could be done with
Bronze Age stone working technology.
In the end it is a Roman - Greek artifact that fleshed out and
demonstrated the mythology of Hades and from that inspiration we have
received Hell. I suspect that it was rather convincing but
ultimately a pagan site after Rome converted to Christianity. At
least we now have this to help understand the literary references.
Having read the literary sources, I had always wondered were this had
all come from.
The Unsolved
Mystery of the Tunnels at Baiae
October 1, 2012
There is nothing
remotely Elysian about the Phlegræan Fields, which lie on
the north shore of the Bay of Naples; nothing sylvan, nothing green.
The Fields are part of the caldera of a volcano that is the twin of
Mount Vesuvius, a few miles to the east, the destroyer of Pompeii.
The volcano is still active–it last erupted in 1538, and once
possessed a crater that measured eight miles across–but most of it
is underwater now. The portion that is still accessible on land
consists of a barren, rubble-strewn plateau. Fire bursts from the
rocks in places, and clouds of sulfurous gas snake out of vents
leading up from deep underground.
The Fields, in short,
are hellish, and it is no surprise that in Greek and Roman myth they
were associated with all manner of strange tales. Most interesting,
perhaps, is the legend of the Cumæan sibyl, who took
her name from the nearby town of Cumæ, a Greek colony dating to
about 500 B.C.– a time when the Etruscans still held
sway much of central Italy and Rome was nothing but a city-state
ruled over by a line of tyrannical kings.
The sibyl, so the
story goes, was a woman named Amalthaea who lurked in a cave on
the Phlegræan Fields. She had once been young and
beautiful–beautiful enough to attract the attentions of the sun
god, Apollo, who offered her one wish in exchange for her
virginity. Pointing to a heap of dust, Amalthaea asked for a year of
life for each particle in the pile, but (as is usually the way in
such old tales) failed to allow for the vindictiveness of the gods.
Ovid, in Metamorphoses, has her lament that “like a
fool, I did not ask that all those years should come with
ageless youth, as well.” Instead, she aged but could not die.
Virgil depicts her scribbling the future on oak leaves that lay
scattered about the entrance to her cave, and states that the cave
itself concealed an entrance to the underworld.
The best-known–and
from our perspective the most interesting–of all the tales
associated with the sibyl is supposed to date to the reign
of Tarquinius Superbus–Tarquin the Proud. He was the last of
the mythic kings of Rome, and some historians, at least, concede that
he really did live and rule in the sixth century B.C. According to
legend, the sibyl traveled to Tarquin’s palace bearing nine books
of prophecy that set out the whole of the future of Rome. She offered
the set to the king for a price so enormous that he summarily
declined–at which the prophetess went away, burned the first three
of the books, and returned, offering the remaining six to Tarquin at
the same price. Once again, the king refused, though less arrogantly
this time, and the sibyl burned three more of the precious volumes.
The third time she approached the king, he thought it wise to accede
to her demands. Rome purchased the three remaining books of prophecy
at the original steep price.
What makes this story
of interest to historians as well as folklorists is that there is
good evidence that three Greek scrolls, known collectively as the
Sibylline Books, really were kept, closely guarded, for hundreds of
years after the time of Tarquin the Proud. Secreted in a stone
chest in a vault beneath the Temple of Jupiter, the scrolls were
brought out at times of crisis and used, not as a detailed guide to
the future of Rome, but as a manual that set out the rituals required
to avert looming disasters. They served the Republic well until
the temple burned down in 83 B.C., and so vital were they
thought to be that huge efforts were made to reassemble the lost
prophecies by sending envoys to all the great towns of the known
world to look for fragments that might have come from the same
source. These reassembled prophecies were pressed back into service
and not finally destroyed until 405, when they are thought to have
been burned by a noted general by the name of Flavius Stilicho.
The existence of the
Sibylline Books certainly suggests that Rome took the legend of the
Cumæan sibyl seriously, and indeed the geographer Strabo, writing at
about the time of Christ, clearly states that there actually was “an
Oracle of the Dead” somewhere in the Phlegræan Fields. So it is
scarcely surprising that archaeologists and scholars of romantic bent
have from time to time gone in search of a cave or tunnel that might
be identified as the real home of a real sibyl–nor that some have
hoped that they would discover an entrance, if not to Hades, then at
least to some spectacular subterranean caverns.
Over the years several
spots, the best known of which lies close to Lake
Avernus, have been identified as the antro della sibilla–the
cave of the sibyl. None, though, leads to anywhere that might
reasonably be confused with an entrance to the underworld. Because of
this, the quest continued, and gradually the remaining searchers
focused their attentions on the old Roman resort of Baiæ (Baia),
which lies on Bay of Naples at a spot where the Phlegræan Fields
vanish beneath the Tyrrhenian Sea. Two thousand years ago, Baiæ was
a flourishing spa, noted both for its mineral cures and for the
scandalous immorality that flourished there. Today, it is little more
than a collection of picturesque ruins–but it was there, in 1932,
that the entrance to a hitherto unknown antrum was discovered,
concealed behind a recently installed pizza oven.
The antrum at
Baiæ proved difficult to explore. A sliver of tunnel, obviously
ancient and manmade, disappeared into a hillside close to the ruins
of a temple. The first curious onlookers who pressed their heads into
its cramped entrance beat a hurried retreat–the pitch-black
passageway was uncomfortably hot and wreathed in sulfurous smoke.
There the mystery rested while the Second World War intervened, and
it was not revived until, early in the 1950s, the site came to the
attention of Robin Paget.
Paget was not a
professional archaeologist. He was a Briton who worked at a nearby
NATO airbase, lived in Baiæ, and excavated mostly as a hobby. As
such, his theories need to be viewed with caution, and it is worth
noting that when the academic Papers of the British School
at Rome agreed to publish the results of the decade or more that
he and an American colleague named Keith Jones spent digging in the
tunnel, a firm distinction was drawn between the School’s
endorsement of a straightforward description of the findings and its
refusal to pass comment on the theories Paget had come up with to
explain his perplexing discoveries. These theories eventually made
their appearance in book form but attracted little
attention–surprisingly, because the pair claimed to have stumbled
across nothing less than a real-life “entrance to the underworld.”
Paget was one of the
handful of men who still hoped to locate the “cave of the sibyl”
described by Virgil, and it was this obsession that made him willing
to risk the inhospitable interior. He and Jones pressed their way
though the narrow opening that had lain concealed behind the oven and
found themselves inside a high but narrow tunnel, eight feet tall
but just 21 inches wide. The temperature inside was uncomfortable
but bearable, and although the airless interior was still tinged with
volcanic fumes, the two men pressed on into a passage that, they
claimed, had probably not been entered for 2,000 years.
Following the tunnel
downward, Paget and Jones calculated that it fell only around 10 feet
in the first 400 feet of its length before terminating in a solid
wall of rubble that blocked the way. But even the scanty evidence the
two men had managed to gather during this early phase of their
investigation persuaded them that it was worth pressing on. For one
thing, the sheer amount of spoil that had been hauled into the
depths suggested a considerable degree of organization–years later,
when the excavation of the tunnel was complete, it would be estimated
that 700 cubic yards of rubble, and 30,000 man-journeys, had been
required to fill it. For another, using a compass, Paget
determined that the mysterious passage had been oriented to the
sunrise on midsummer’s day. This suggested that it served some
ritual purpose.
It took Paget and
Jones, working in difficult conditions with a small group of
volunteers, the better part of a decade to clear and explore what
turned out to be a highly ambitious tunnel system. Its ceremonial
function seemed to be confirmed by the existence of huge numbers of
niches for oil lamps–they occurred every yard in the tunnels’
lower levels, far more frequently than would have been required
merely to provide illumination. The builders had also given great
thought to the layout of the complex, which seemed to have been
designed to conceal its mysteries.
Within the portion of
the tunnels choked by rubble, Paget and Jones found, hidden behind an
S-bend, a second blockage. This, the explorers discovered, marked the
place where two tunnels diverged. Basing his thinking on the remains
of some ancient pivots, Paget suggested that the spot had at one time
harbored a concealed door. Swung closed, this would have masked the
entrance to a second tunnel that acted as a short-cut to the lower
levels. Opened partially, it could have been used (the explorer
suggested) as a remarkably effective ventilation system; hot,
vitiated air would be sucked out of the tunnel complex at ceiling
level, while currents of cooler air from the surface were constantly
drawn in along the floor.
But only when the men
went deeper into the hillside did the greatest mystery of the tunnels
revealed itself. There, hidden at the bottom of a much steeper
passage, and behind a second S-bend that prevented anyone approaching
from seeing it until the final moment, ran an underground stream.
A small “landing stage” projected out into the sulfurous waters,
which ran from left to right across the tunnel and disappeared into
the darkness. And the river itself was hot to the touch–in
places it approached boiling point.
Conditions at this low
point in the tunnel complex certainly were stygian. The temperature
had risen to 120 degrees Fahrenheit; the air stank of sulfur. It was
a relief to force a way across the stream and up a steep ascending
passage on the other side, which eventually opened into an
antechamber, oriented this time to the helical sunset, that Paget
dubbed the “hidden sanctuary.” From there, more hidden staircases
ascended to the surface to emerge behind the ruins of water tanks
that had fed the spas at the ancient temple complex.
What was this “Great
Antrum,” as Paget dubbed it? Who had built it–and for what
purpose? And who had stopped it up? After a decade of exploration, he
and Jones had formulated answers to those questions.
The tunnel system, the
two men proposed, had been constructed by priests to mimic a visit
to the Greeks’ mythical underworld. In this interpretation, the
stream represented the fabled River Styx, which the dead had to cross
to enter Hades; a small boat, the explorers speculated, would have
been waiting at the landing stage to ferry visitors across. On the
far side these initiates would have climbed the stairs to the hidden
sanctuary, and it was there they would have met… who? One
possibility, Paget thought, was a priestess posing as the Cumæan
sibyl, and for this reason he took to calling the complex the “Antrum
of Initiation.”
The tunnels, then, in
Paget’s view, might have been constructed to allow priests to
persuade their patrons–or perhaps simply wealthy travelers–that
they had traveled through the underworld. The scorching temperatures
below ground and the thick drifts of volcanic vapor would certainly
have given that impression. And if visitors were tired, befuddled or
perhaps simply drugged, it would have been possible to create a
powerfully otherworldly experience capable of persuading even the
skeptical.
In favor of this
argument, Paget went on, was the careful planning of the tunnels. The
“dividing of the ways,” with its hidden door, would have allowed
a party of priests–and the “Cumæan sibyl” too, perhaps–quick
access to the hidden sanctuary, and the encounter with the “River
Styx” would have been enhanced by the way the tunnels’ S-bend
construction concealed its presence from new initiates. The system,
furthermore, closely matched ancient myths relating visits to the
underworld. In Virgil’sAeniad, for instance, the hero, Aeneas,
crosses the Styx only once on his journey underground, emerging from
Hades by an alternate route. The tunnel complex at Baiæ seemed to
have been constructed to allow just such a journey–and Virgil, in
Paget’s argument, had lived nearby and might himself have been an
initiate in Baiæ’s mysteries.
Dating the
construction of the complex was a greater challenge. The explorers
found little evidence inside the tunnels that might point to the
identity of the builders–just a mason’s plumb bob in one of the
niches and some ancient graffiti. But, working on the assumption that
the passages had formed part of the surrounding temple complex, they
concluded that they could best be dated to the late archaic period
around 550 B.C.–at pretty much the time, that is, that the Cumæan
sibyl was said to have lived. If so, the complex was was almost
certainly the work of the Greek colonists of Cumæ itself. As for
when the tunnels had been blocked up, that–Paget thought–must
have taken place after Virgil’s time, during the early Imperial
period of Roman history. But who exactly ordered the work, or why, he
could not say.
In time, Paget and
Jones solved at least some of the Great Antrum’s mysteries. In 1965
they persuaded a friend, Colonel David Lewis of the U.S. Army, and
his son to investigate the Styx for them using scuba apparatus. The
two divers followed the stream into a tunnel that dramatically
deepened and discovered the source of its mysterious heat: two
springs of boiling water, superheated by the volcanic chambers of the
Phlegræan Fields.
Whether Paget and
Jones’s elaborate theories are correct remains a matter of debate.
That the tunnel complex served some ritual purpose can hardly be
doubted if the explorers’ compass bearings are correct, and the
specifics of its remarkable construction seem to support much of what
Paget says; the alternative explanation–that the tunnel was dug by
the Roman army and once lead to a subterranean restaurant–seems to
be considerably more far fetched. In particular, it is hard to see
the channel of boiling water deep underground as anything other than
a deliberate representation of one of the fabled rivers that girdled
Hades–if not the Styx itself, then perhaps the Phlegethon, the
mythic “river of fire” that, in Dante’s Inferno, boils the
souls of the departed. Historians of the ancient world do not dispute
that powerful priests were fully capable of mounting elaborate
deceptions–and a recent geological report on the far
better known Greek oracle site at Delphi demonstrated that fissures
in the rocks nearby brought intoxicating and anaesthetic gases to the
surface at that spot, suggesting that it may have been selected and
used for a purpose much like the one Paget proposed at Baiæ.
Yet much remains
mysterious about the Great Antrum–not least the vexed question of
how ancient builders, working with primitive tools at the end of the
Bronze Age, could possibly have known of the existence of the “River
Styx,” much less excavated a tunnel that so neatly intercepted it.
There is no trace of the boiling river at the surface–and it was
not until the 1970s, after Paget’s death, that his collaborators
finally discovered, by injecting colored dyes into its waters, that
it flows into the sea miles away, on the northern side of Cape
Miseno.
Little seems to have
changed at Baiæ since Paget’s day. His discoveries have made
remarkably little impact on tourism at the ancient resort, and even
today the network of passages he worked so long to clear remain
locked and barely visited. A local guide can be hired, but the
complex remains difficult, hot and uncomfortable to visit. Little
attempt is made to exploit the idea that it was once thought to be an
entrance to the underworld, and, pending reinvestigation by trained
archaeologists, not much more can be said about the tunnels’ origin
and purpose. But even among the many mysteries of the ancient world,
the Great Antrum on the Bay of Naples surely remains among the most
intriguing.
Sources
C.F. Hardie. “The Great Antrum at Baiae.” Papers of the British School at Rome 37 (1969); Peter James and Nick Thorpe. Ancient Inventions. London: Michael O’Mara, 1995; A.G. McKay. Cumae and the Phlegraean Fields. Hamilton, Ont: Cromlech Press, 1972; Daniel Ogden. Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; R.F. Paget. “The ‘Great Antrum’ at Baiae: a Preliminary Report. Papers of the British School at Rome 35 (1967); R.F. Paget. In the Footsteps of Orpheus: The Story of the Finding and Identifications of the Lost Entrance to Hades, the Oracle of the Dead, the River Styx and the Infernal Regions of the Greeks. London: Robert Hale, 1967; H.W. Parke. Sibyls and Sibylline Prophecy in Classical Antiquity. London: Routledge, 1988; P.B. Wale. “A conversation for ‘The Antrum of Initiation, Baia. Italy’.” BBC h2g2, accessed 12 August 2012; Fikrut Yegul. “The Thermo-Mineral Complex at Baiae and De Balneis Puteolanis.” The Art Bulletin 78:1, March 1996.
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