The canal Nero did not finish

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33775, 22 February 1975, Page 12

The canal Nero did not finish

(By

K. W. ANTHONY)

According to a famous legend the Emperor Nero fiddled while Rome burned; but that was not the limit of his musical accomplishmen ts. When he started building the Corinth Canal, across the isthmus that separates the Peloponnesus from the rest of Greece, he not only turned the first spadeful

of earth himself, using a golden spade, but he also sang a song in honour of the occasion, to his own accompaniment on the lyre. Nero was not the first nor the last man to realise the advantage of making a canal to save shipping the long pnd hazardous passage round

the south coast of Greece. Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar both contemplated the idea but did nothing about it. There was certainly some difficult terrain in the way, but the isthmus was only four miles across, and Nero ordered the work to be pressed ahead. Then the writer Philostratus put forward the theory that the sea was at a higher level at one end of the projected canal than at the other. Already beset by accidents and delays, the work was halted. Curiousjy enough, many centuries later, a sinmar fallacy was to defer the construction of the Suez Canal.

In ancient times the Corinth Canal gained a reputation of ill omen. Certainly it did Nero no good. His name had become a byword for extravagance, tyranny and cruelty, and while he was in Greece, revolts broke out in Spain and Germany. Dissatisfaction He hurried back to Rome, only to find that there, too, dissatisfaction with his rule had come to a head. The Senate turned against him, and Nero was sentenced to death. Still only 30 years old, he cheated the executioner by committing suicide.

For more than 1800 years his canal lay unfinished and abandoned. But his plans were sound enough in themselves. This was proved by the fact that when French engineers revived the scheme in the 19th century, they started work at the precise spot where Nero had begun with such pageantry so long before.

And so Nero’s canal was completed at last. Some of the engineering difficulties encountered in the construction are strikingly illustrated by a Greek stamp issued in 1927 — just 34 years after the canal was finally opened.