252Nor does each thing keep its own form, and nature, renewer of things, makes some shapes from others: nothing in the whole world perishes, believe me, but it varies and renews its appearance, and to begin to be something other than what it was before is called being born, and to cease to be that same thing is called dying. 257Though perhaps those things are moved here, and these there, yet in sum all things remain constant. 259For my part I would believe that nothing lasts long under the same appearance: so you have come from gold to iron, ages, so has the fortune of places so often been reversed.
262I have seen what had once been the most solid land become sea, I have seen lands made from the sea: and far from the ocean sea-shells have lain, and an old anchor has been found on the tops of mountains. 266And what was a plain, the running of waters has made a valley, and by flood a mountain has been carried down into the sea, and from marshy ground the soil grows dry with parched sand, and places that had endured thirst are wet with standing pools. 270Here nature has sent forth new springs, but there she has shut them up, and so many rivers leap forth through the ancient tremors of the earth or, blinded, sink back.
273So when the Lycus has been swallowed by a chasm in the earth, it emerges far from there and is reborn from another mouth; so the great Erasinus is now drunk down, now, having glided in a hidden channel, is given back in the Argive fields; and they say the Mysus, having repented of its source and its former bank, now flows elsewhere as the Caicus; 279and the Amenanus too, rolling Sicilian sands, now flows, and at times dries up when its springs are stopped. 281Once it was drunk; now the Anigros pours out waters you would not wish to touch, since there (unless all faith is to be taken from poets) the creatures of double form washed the wounds that the bow of club-bearing Hercules had made.
285What? 285does not the Hypanis too, rising in the Scythian mountains, which had been sweet, become spoiled with bitter salts? 287Antissa and Pharos and Phoenician Tyre had once been surrounded by waves; none of them is now an island. 289The old settlers had Leucas joined to the mainland: now the sea surrounds it. 290Zancle too is said to have been joined to Italy, until the sea took away their common border and drove back the land with water between. 293If you look for Helice and Buris, Achaean cities, you will find them beneath the waters, and sailors still often point out the tilted towns with their sunken walls. 296There is near Pittheus' Troezen a mound, steep and without any trees, once a stretch of the flattest plain, now a mound; 298for (a thing dreadful to relate!) the fierce force of the winds, shut up in dark caverns, longing to breathe out somewhere and struggling in vain to enjoy a freer sky, since there was no crack in all its prison and it was not passable for blasts, swelled the ground and stretched it, as the breath of the mouth inflates a bladder, or the hide stripped from a two-horned goat; 305that swelling of the place has remained and has the look of a high hill, and has hardened over long time.
307Though very many things heard and known to me come to mind, I shall relate a few more. 308What? 308does not water too both give and take on new shapes? 309Your water, horned Ammon, is cold at midday and grows warm at sunrise and sunset. 311The Athamanians are said to kindle wood by applying water to it, when the moon has waned to her smallest orb. 313The Cicones have a river which, when drunk, turns the inward parts to stone, which coats with marble the things it touches. 315The Crathis, and the Sybaris that borders it, near our shores, make hair like amber and gold. 317And what is more marvellous, there are waters that can change not only bodies but also minds.
319Who has not heard of Salmacis with its obscene water, and the Ethiopian lakes? 320If anyone has drunk of these with his throat, he either goes mad or suffers a strange heaviness of sleep. 322Whoever has relieved his thirst at the Clitorian spring shuns wine and, abstemious, delights in pure water, whether there is a power in the water opposed to warm wine, or because, as the natives say, the son of Amythaon, after rescuing the frenzied daughters of Proetus from madness by spells and herbs, cast the purgings of their minds into those waters, and the hatred of wine remained in the waves. 329Unlike it in effect flows the Lyncestian river; 330whoever drinks of it with too immoderate a throat staggers just as if he had drunk unmixed wine.
332There is a place in Arcadia (the ancients called it Pheneus), suspect for its double-natured waters; fear them by night: drunk at night they harm, by day they are drunk without harm.