ABSTRACT
THE figure seen above, who looks like a fiddler playing in the middle of the stream, constitutes an omen that the governor or commandant of the fortress will fall suddenly to his death, or that a careless and sleepy sentinel, sentenced to death according to the regulations of the castle, will be pitched over the high battlements. 1 However, this stretch of water is incessantly haunted by phantoms and monstrous apparitions, just as Solinus in the above-mentioned chapter relates of Mount Atlas, where fires glow in the darkness and the sounds of satyrs singing and dancing echo everywhere. 2 There can be heard melodious flutes and clashing cymbals along the seashore, as I recounted in Ch. 10 of Bk III, on the sister Fates and the nymphs, as Pliny does too in a passage in Bk IX, Ch. 5, whose matter resembles what I am dealing with and is well worth knowing about. It reads: An embassy was dispatched from Olysippo purely to announce to the Emperor Tiberius that Triton had been seen in his customary shape and heard playing on a conch shell in a certain cave. And it is no false report about the Nereids, that they have rough, scaly bodies, though otherwise their form is human. For such a creature has been spied on the same shore, and the people of that coast have also listened from afar to her dismal moans at the hour of her death, etc.’ 3
