In the fifteenth chapter of this Book a story is told of Philip of Macedon, who sent down a party of miners to examine an old mine. The men brought back to daylight a wonderful tale of vast caverns with high over-arching roofs, and filled with huge rivers and vast lakes. If the author’s intention was to connect the spaciousness of these underground chambers with the operations of ancient miners, he was sadly mistaken, since at no time has metal-mining led to the excavation of huge caverns; on the contrary, it has always been pursued in narrow shafts and passages. If the report brought back to the king was veracious, his emissaries had only come upon a series of natural grottos and tunnels, such as are of common occurrence in limestone districts, and which have no connection whatever with mining.[117] But the narrative served Seneca’s purpose, since it furnished him with the occasion for a diatribe against the cursed love of gold, which had apparently been rampant in days long before those of Philip, and allowed him to supply from his own imagination some additional lurid horrors of the underground world. [117] It is possible that these ancient mines were driven in search of metal seams or veins traversing limestone, like those of lead among the caverned limestones of Derbyshire. When he gets back to his subject, he enters upon an enumeration of the various winds known to the ancients. He himself thinks that as the heavens are divided into twelve sections, so there are twelve distinct winds, not all felt everywhere, but never exceeding that number. He does not attempt, however, to account for them. In his reference to the names given to the various winds, he gives a quotation from Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_, in which the more conspicuous winds from the different quarters are mentioned. To this quotation he adds a line from Virgil’s graphic picture of the storm in the first book of the _Aeneid_, where Aeolus opens his cave and the south-east, south, and south-west winds rush out in fury upon the sea. Seneca remarks, in passing, that such a collocation of winds as Virgil enumerates could never have happened in a single tempest. The poet, however, has made no mistake. In a great cyclonic storm the wind veers round with the compass from south-east by south to south-west. And even if Virgil had added the north wind, which the philosopher says he left out, he would only have followed the invariable course of the winds in the cyclones of the northern hemisphere, which circle round towards the north as the storm area is passing eastward. In conclusion, the author points out the teleological significance of the winds, and is thence led to repeat the time-honoured reproach against human iniquity which turns the winds from their beneficent intention to purposes of war. BOOK VI