ABSTRACT
The significance of water in general and springs in particular to the classical imagination is hard to overstate. Indeed, according to Hesiod, the origins of the universe are recounted by the Muses taking their inspiration from the Hippocrene spring on Mount Helicon. Poets ever since have looked to this spring, created by the hoofstomp of Pegasus. Other springs created by physical contact point to the violence, much of it sexual, in the mythology of springs, notably that of Arethusa. The ritual depicted by the poet Horace for the Fons Bandusia likewise points to bloodshed. In the letters of Pliny, we read about votive inscriptions erected at the Fons Clitumnus, some of which he finds amusingly lowerclass. But springs were visited by all classes.
