Histories

Herodotus

Herodotus. Godley, Alfred Denis, translator. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press; William Heinemann, Ltd., 1920-1925 (printing).

The Aeginetans did this out of a grudge against the Samians; for previously the Samians, in the days when Amphicrates was king of +Nisos Samos [26.8,37.75] (island), Samos, Aegean Islands, Greece, Europe Samos, sailing in force against +Aegina [23.433,37.75] (inhabited place), Aegina, Attica, Central Greece and Euboea, Greece, Europe Aegina, had hurt the Aeginetans and been hurt by them. This was the cause.

I have written at such length of the Samians, because the three greatest works of all the Greeks were engineered by them. The first of these is the tunnel with a mouth at either end driven through the base of a hill nine hundred feet high;

the whole tunnel is forty-two hundred feet long,[*](Remains of this work show that the tunnel was only 1100 feet long.) eight feet high and eight feet wide; and throughout the whole of its length there runs a channel thirty feet deep and three feet wide, through which the water coming from an abundant spring is carried by pipes to the city of +Nisos Samos [26.8,37.75] (island), Samos, Aegean Islands, Greece, Europe Samos.

The designer of this work was Eupalinus son of Naustrophus, a Megarian. This is one of the three works; the second is a breakwater in the sea enclosing the harbor, sunk one hundred and twenty feet, and more than twelve hundred feet in length.