Bizarre Theories For Tornadoes In Ancient Rome That People Actually Believed

While most Americans likely associate tornadoes with the corridor across the Plains States commonly known as Tornado Alley, the fact is that tornadoes happen everywhere and have been recorded on every continent except Antarctica. This obviously includes Europe, where such storms are less common than in the U.S., but are hardly an unknown occurrence.

The ancient Greeks and Romans would have definitely been familiar with tornadoes (and their marine equivalent, waterspouts), which they called by names such as turbo, typhon, and ecnephias. For ancient people without modern meteorological equipment, such sudden, violent storms must have been very confusing and terrifying. As the Greeks and Romans attempted to understand these phenomena, they considered some theories that might seem pretty strange to a modern reader. Here is a brief rundown on how the philosophers of ancient Rome understood tornadoes, as well as the Greek philosophers whose work they used as a basis for their own.

As with most natural phenomena, for much of their history, the ancient Greeks and Romans attributed tornadoes and other storms to the will and actions of the gods. Greece and Rome were both heavily agricultural societies, so their dependence on favorable weather meant that they did their best to propitiate the gods of the storm. You probably already know that Zeus (or Jupiter to the Romans) was not only king of the gods, but also the one who controlled lightning, rain, and storms. Homer frequently calls him "cloud-gathering Zeus" throughout his epics. Zeus' brother Poseidon (Neptune to the Romans) was also depicted, as lord of the sea, as being able to control the weather and cause storms with his trident. In the "Odyssey," Poseidon is described as "gather[ing] the clouds, and seizing his trident in his hands troubled the sea, and rous[ing[ all blasts of all manner of winds, and hid[ing] with clouds land and sea alike."

But one mythological being associated with windstorms, in particular, was the serpentine giant Typhon, from whose name we get the word "typhoon," who was conceived of by the ancients as the source of whirlwinds and other destructive wind storms. In the early days of creation, Zeus had a giant battle with Typhon that ended with the king of the gods casting the giant into the Underworld, from which his rages and struggles create wind storms on the earth.

Thales' Milesian school produced a number of others who subscribed to his ideas that nature followed laws that we could study, understand, and predict rather than being due merely to the whims of the gods. Two of the most notable of these students were Anaximander (c. 610–c. 546 BCE) and his student Anaximenes (c. 585–c. 528 BCE), considered to be the star students of Thales. While these two men are thought to be among the first philosophers to actually write their ideas down, most of their writings are preserved today only through the quotations of others, like Aristotle. Unlike Thales, who said water was the basis of all things, Anaximander believed that the world came into being through the interaction and clash of opposite elements in the universe — cold air vs. hot fire vs. moist water vs. dry earth, and so on.

He was among the first to devise a scientific theory for wind, which he said was air flowing when too much air massed together and fine vapors were squeezed out. Thunder comes from clouds smashing together, and lightning comes when wind violently separates clouds. Anaximenes, however, believed that the fundamental element was air, and all other elements were formed out of it through condensation. His understanding of weather was based on air condensing and separating in different ways. In retrospect, he wasn't actually too far off from our modern understanding of the water cycle.

In "Meteorologica," Aristotle says that tornadoes, waterspouts, and other wind storms are caused when wind is caught inside a cloud and is struck by winds moving in different directions, which causes it to start to spin in a circular pattern. He never offers an explanation for the vertical descent of the funnel cloud, but he says that it is the sinking of the swirling eddy of air that distinguishes a tornado from other types of wind storms. The sinking wind brings the cloud in which it was trapped down with it, and together the newly formed tornado's "blast overturns anything that lies in its path, and its circular motion whirls away and carries off by force anything it meets." In the broad view, this is actually not a bad understanding of tornado formation compared to how we understand them today. We just have a different view of how air masses of different temperatures are formed.

Less familiar, however, would be Aristotle's conception of what he calls a prēstēr, or firewind, which is a tornado wherein the cloud material is of a fine texture that is thus able to catch fire. Aristotle says that the firewind's "conflagration sets on fire and so colors the neighboring air." As you might imagine, there has been some debate as to what actual phenomenon is being described here, but many interpreters understand it to mean a tornado accompanied by a lightning storm.

While the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BCE) is most associated these days with the pursuit of pleasure thanks to evolving definitions of the word "epicurean," the historical Epicurus was heavily concerned with topics of both ethics and the natural world, not eating fancy food. A central premise of Epicurean ethics is that the primary goal of life should be the elimination of fear, including the fear of the gods and death. As a result, much of his pursuit of the study of the natural sciences was to present rational explanations for natural phenomena and eliminate superstitions that lead to fear. This, of course, included weather. Epicurus thought if he could persuade people that storms were caused by understandable, predictable reasons, they would no longer fear that they were the whim of angry gods.

In Epicurus' "Letter to Pythocles," he presents two explanations for tornadoes: in the first, tornadoes form when wind is caught inside a cloud and pushes it down until it forms a pillar shape, and then external winds strike it horizontally, causing the spinning motion. This explanation is pretty similar to Aristotle's. The second explanation doesn't require a cloud to begin; he suggests that wind just moves in a circle sometimes when it's high enough. This wind circle becomes visible when it is struck by condensation from the atmosphere, which also drives the wind pillar downward.

About 100 years after Lucretius, the Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger (c. 4 BCE–65 CE) put forth his ideas about the causes of meteorological phenomena. Seneca was a Stoic, not an Epicurean, so he didn't have the same interest as Epicurus and Lucretius in freeing people from fear; he just thought the natural world was cool and he wanted to know about it. Shortly before his death, he wrote a beefy seven-volume work filled with his theories on cosmology and weather and such called "Naturales Quaestiones" (literally "Natural Questions," but in the sense of like "investigations into nature"). Seneca wrote about winds, and specifically tornadoes and waterspouts, in Book V of this work.

In his discussion on wind storms, he imagines wind moving in streams much like water moving along a river. When flowing water hits an obstacle like a rock or a tree, it gets deflected and starts to whirl around. Likewise, Seneca posited that wind would fly free and in a straight line as long as nothing was blocking it. But when it bumped into something or got squeezed through a tight pathway, it starts to whirl around on itself until it forms a vortex. As the vortex spins around on a single spot and works itself up into a fury, it becomes a tornado. If the tornado lasts long enough, it will eventually catch fire and become a prester, as Aristotle wrote.

Many of the surviving reports of tornadoes in ancient Rome come from an author from the late Roman Empire, writing in the 4th or 5th century CE, named Julius Obsequens. The only extant work by Julius is a collection of strange disasters and catastrophes that were subsequently interpreted as omens of ill fortune. This book is called the "Book of Prodigies," and since Julius was writing about events in the Roman Republic and early Empire centuries before his time, he was obviously not an eyewitness, but rather used the work of the 1st century CE historian Livy as his major source.

The "Book of Prodigies" records the tornado in the Campus Martius that tore down the pillar of Jupiter, which Julius claims was a warning that many magistrates would die, which caused all the magistrates to resign. He likewise records that in 44 BCE a tornado knocked over a statue erected by the statesman Cicero and broke off its head and hands, an ill omen for Cicero's own assassination following the death of Caesar in which his head and hands were cut off. That same tornado ripped bronze plates inscribed with the law from the temple of the Roman god Fides, predicting the lawlessness that would ensue in the civil war between Augustus and Marc Antony. So in one sense, Julius Obsequens' writings see tornadoes once again become the tools of the gods, in this case as divine warnings.