e, as a pasture is oft overlaid with
cattle, they had wont in former times to disburden themselves, by sending
out colonies, or by wars, as those old Romans; or by employing them at home
about some public buildings, as bridges, roadways, for which those Romans
were famous in this island; as Augustus Caesar did in Rome, the Spaniards
in their Indian mines, as at Potosi in Peru, where some 30,000 men are
still at work, 6000 furnaces ever boiling, &c. [578]aqueducts, bridges,
havens, those stupend works of Trajan, Claudius, at [579]Ostium,
Dioclesiani Therma, Fucinus Lacus, that Piraeum in Athens, made by
Themistocles, ampitheatrums of curious marble, as at Verona, Civitas
Philippi, and Heraclea in Thrace, those Appian and Flaminian ways,
prodigious works all may witness; and rather than they should be [580]idle,
as those [581] Egyptian Pharaohs, Maris, and Sesostris did, to task their
subjects to build unnecessary pyramids, obelisks, labyrinths, channels,
lakes, gigantic works all, to divert them from rebellion, riot,
drunkenness, [582]_Quo scilicet alantur et ne vagando laborare desuescant_.

Another eyesore is that want of conduct and navigable rivers, a great
blemish as [583]Boterus, [584]Hippolitus a Collibus, and other politicians
hold, if it be neglected in a commonwealth. Admirable cost and charge is
bestowed in the Low Countries on this behalf, in the duchy of Milan,
territory of Padua, in [585]France, Italy, China, and so likewise about
corrivations of water to moisten and refresh barren grounds, to drain fens,
bogs, and moors. Massinissa made many inward parts of Barbary and Numidia
in Africa, before his time incult and horrid, fruitful and bartable by this
means. Great industry is generally used all over the eastern countries in
this kind, especially in Egypt, about Babylon and Damascus, as Vertomannus
and [586]Gotardus Arthus relate; about Barcelona, Segovia, Murcia, and many
other places of Spain, Milan in Italy; by reason of which, their soil is
much impoverished, and infinite commodities arise to the inhabitants.

The Turks of late attempted to cut that Isthmus betwixt Africa and Asia,
which [587]Sesostris and Darius, and some Pharaohs of Egypt had formerly
undertaken, but with ill success, as [588]Diodorus Siculus records, and
Pliny, for that Red Sea being three [589]cubits higher than Egypt, would
have drowned all the country, _caepto destiterant_, they left off; yet as
the same [590]Diodorus writes, Ptole