per gallery is cut only two metres on the west and none on the east, the lower one seven metres on the west and 7·30 on the east, with a well of 4·20 metres in depth. In the last shaft the two galleries are three metres apart, and in the fifteenth only 2·15 metres, thus showing a tendency to diverge. This would seem to prove that there was no intention of ultimately uniting the two galleries by cutting away the rock between. It is more probable that the upper galleries were begun first, and that some consideration induced the engineers to change the grade and give a greater fall to the tunnel. The mean section of the lower gallery is about two metres, the fall from Copais to its mouth is 0·011 metre to the lineal metre, and its total length completed would have been about twenty-four hundred metres. The cutting of so long a tunnel through so hard a rock with the primitive means at the disposal of the ancients shows not only an audacity of plan and a persistent obstinacy in execution, but also a skill in the art of the engineer and the miner that would be no discredit even to the present age.
Who were the authors of these great works concerning which history is silent and which are themselves their only witnesses? Perhaps this question will never be satisfactorily answered. Leake and others attribute all, the wells of Kephalari as well as the canals, to the Minyans, while some believe that Crates of Chalcis was responsible for the parts exhibiting the most engineering skill, and others ascribe them to some of the earlier Roman emperors. Curtius, in his Die Deichbauten der Minyer, a paper read before the Berlin Academy in 1893, carefully distinguishes two distinct works and methods of work: (1) the utilization of the natural exutories toward which the waters were led by means of dykes and canals, and (2) the formation of an artificial emissary to draw off: either all the water or the excess of water from the lake. The first, grand and simple in design, he attributes to the primitive or Homeric age; the last, marked by careful calculation and executed with the skill of the practiced engineer, he ascribes to the age of Alexander, and presumably to Crates, the only name mentioned in connection with it. Unless the future shall bring to light some inscribed stone or other monument which shall give us definite information concerning the promoter who planned or the engineer who executed these vast works, we shall have to accept the judgment of Curtius and give the credit of them to Crates, the miner of Chalcis.[1]
- ↑ I am indebted for much of the material in this article to two articles, by Michel L. Kambanis, in the Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique, published in 1892 and 1893, entitled Le Desséchement du Lac Copais par les Anciens; and to an article by Dr. Alfred Philippson, in the Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin, 1894, entitled Der Kopais-See in Griecheuland und seine Umgebung.
