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Furthermore, portions of water will freeze sooner than the spring from which they are drawn, for the air more readily masters the smaller amount. If you will draw from a well cold water in a jarPresumably Plutarch is thinking of a jar of porous earthenware, such as are commonly used to cool water in the Near East. and let it down again into the well in such a way that the jar does not touch the water, but is suspended in the air, and if you wait a short time, you will find that the water has become colder.Cf. Mor. 690 b-e. This is very good evidence that the First Cause of coldness is not water but air. Certainly, none of the great rivers freezes through its entire depth; for the air does not penetrate down into the whole, but merely renders stationary as much as, by contact and proximity, it includes within the range of its coldness. And this is the reason why barbariansThe Thracians, according to 968 f ff. infra; cf. also Pliny, Nat. Hist. viii. 103; Aelian, De Natura Animal. vi. 24; xiv. 26. do not cross frozen rivers until they have tried them out with foxes: if the ice is not thick, but merely superficial, the foxes perceive this by the sound of the current running underneath and return to the bank. Some even catch fish by weakening and softening the ice with hot water - enough of the ice, at least, to admit their lines; so the cold has no effect at a depth. Yet the water near the surface undergoes so great a change through freezing that ships are crushed by it when it is forced in on itself and squeezed tight, as those relate who recently passed the winter with CaesarProbably the reference is to Trajan and the Second Dacian War (a.d. 105-107). Plutarch’s intimate friends, Sosius Senecio, is known to have taken part in it. on the Danube. Nevertheless, what happens in our own case is ample testimony: after warm baths and sweats we are cooler, since our bodies are relaxed and porous, so that we take in a good deal of cold along with the air.Cf. Mor. 690 c-d. The same thing happens to water, too: it freezes faster when it has first been heated, thus becoming more susceptible to air; and those who draw off boiling water and suspend it in the air do this, surely, only to secure the admixture of great quantities of air.Cf. Mor. 690 c-d. So now, Favorinus, the argument that attributes the primal force of cold to the air depends on such plausibilities as these.
