Tsunami in late antiquity

[Ludovicus]

A destructive tidal wave is recorded here, posted on Bread and Circus: Adventures in the Later Roman Empire

 

http://adrianmurdoch.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/03/tsunami-in-late-antiquity.html

 

I like the idea that my favorite period of Roman history, late antiquity, has an online presence, which is still rather new for me.

 

 

In any case, let's wish the Japanese well in the long struggle to rebuild.

 

 

The best-known classical account of an earthquake and tsunami is that of 21 July 365. Ammianus Marcellinus writes about it (26.10.16-19):

 

Slightly after daybreak, and heralded by a thick succession of fiercely shaken thunderbolts, the solidity of the whole earth was made to shake and shudder, and the sea was driven away, its waves were rolled back, and it disappeared, so that the abyss of the depths was uncovered and many-shaped varieties of sea-creatures were seen stuck in the slime; the great wastes of those valleys and mountains, which the very creation had dismissed beneath the vast whirlpools, at that moment, as it was given to be believed, looked up at the sun's rays. Many ships, then, were stranded as if on dry land, and people wandered at will about the paltry remains of the waters to collect fish and the like in their hands; then the roaring sea as if insulted by its repulse rises back in turn, and through the teeming shoals dashed itself violently on islands and extensive tracts of the mainland, and flattened innumerable buildings in towns or wherever they were found. Thus in the raging conflict of the elements, the face of the earth was changed to reveal wondrous sights. For the mass of waters returning when least expected killed many thousands by drowning, and with the tides whipped up to a height as they rushed back, some ships, after the anger of the watery element had grown old, were seen to have sunk, and the bodies of people killed in shipwrecks lay there, faces up or down. Other huge ships, thrust out by the mad blasts, perched on the roofs of houses, as happened at Alexandria, and others were hurled nearly two miles from the shore, like the Laconian vessel near the town of Methone which I saw when I passed by, yawning apart from long decay.

 

The translation is Gavin Kelly's in "Ammianus and the Great Tsunami," JRS 94 (2004), pp. 141-167. See also Rogueclassicism today (or rather from three years ago - click and it will make sense).