Asia
Minor, together with a juster appreciation of the remains as a whole,
must be held to modify this view. Among the earliest examples of Greek
work are the tunnels or _emissaria_ which drained Lake Copais in
Boeotia; these, though not strictly aqueducts, were undoubtedly the
precursors of such works, consisting as they did of subterranean tunnels
([Greek: hyponomoi]) with vertical shafts ([Greek: phreatiai]), sixteen
of which are still recognizable, the deepest being about 150 ft. They
may be compared with that described by Polybius as conveying water from
Taurus to Hecatompylos, and with numerous other remains in Asia Minor,
Syria, Phoenicia and Palmyra. Popular legend ascribed them to Cadmus,
just as Argos referred the irrigation of its lands to Danaus. They are
undoubtedly of great antiquity.

The insufficiency of water, supplied by natural springs and cisterns
hewn in the rock, which in an early age had satisfied the small
communities of Greece, had become a pressing public question by the time
of the Tyrants, of whom Polycrates of Samos and Peisistratus of Athens
were distinguished for their wisdom and enterprise in this respect. The
former obtained the services of Eupalinus, an engineer celebrated for
the skill with which he had carried out the works for the water-supply
of Megara (see _Athen. Mittheil._ xxv., 1900, 23) under the direction of
the Tyrant Theagenes (c. 625 B.C.). At Samos the difficulty lay in a
hill which rose between the town and the water source. Through this hill
Eupalinus cut a tunnel 8 ft. broad, 8 ft. high and 4200 ft. long,
building within the tunnel a channel 3 ft. broad and 11 ells deep. The
water, flowing by an accurately reckoned declivity, and all along open
to the fresh air, was received at the lower end by a conduit of masonry,
and so led into the town, where it supplied fountains, pipes, baths,
cloacae, &c., and ultimately passed into the harbour (Herod, iii. 60).
In Athens, under the rule of the Peisistratids (c. 560-510 B.C.), a
similarly extensive, if less difficult, series of works was completed to
bring water from the neighbouring hills to supplement the inadequate
supply from the springs. From Hymettus were two conduits passing under
the bed of the Ilissus, most of the course being cut in the rock.
Pentelicus, richer in water, supplied another conduit, which can still
be traced from the modern village of Chalandri by the air shafts built
several feet above the ground, and a