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Strabo
1. River running under earth
and sea
Strabo may have reinforced Coleridge's imagining of rivers like the Alpheius
or the Nile flowing underground, and then arising in fountains.
That basic idea seems to have been a fairly common piece of classical lore,
but Coleridge may have been recalling it from Strabo.
Text
People tell the mythical story that the river Arethusa is the Alpheius,
which latter, they say, rises in the Peloponnesus, flows underground through
the sea as far as Arethusa, and then empties thence once more into the
sea.
Marvelous tales of this sort are stretched still further by those who make
the Inopus cross over from the Nile to Delos. And Zoilus the rhetorician
says…that the Alpheius rises in Tenedos.
--Geography, VI, ii, 4 (C270&C271) |
 Other sources
William Bartram |