ollinare in Classe. Strabo,
however, who wrote his _Geography_ a few years after Augustus had
chosen Ravenna for his port upon the Adriatic, has left us a
description both of it and the country in which it stood, from which
must be drawn any picture we would possess of so changed a place. He
speaks of it, as we have seen, as "a great city" situated in the
marshes, built entirely upon piles, and traversed by canals which were
everywhere crossed by bridges or ferry-boats. While at the full tide
he tells us it was swept by the sea and always by the river, and thus
the sewage was carried off and the air purified, and this so
thoroughly, that even before its establishment by Augustus the
district was considered so healthy that the Roman governors had chosen
it as a spot in which to train gladiators.[1] That river we know from
Pliny[2] was called the Bedesis; and the same writer tells us that
Augustus built a canal which brought the water of the Po to Ravenna.

[Footnote 1: Strabo, v. 7.]

[Footnote 2: Pliny, iii. 20.]

Tacitus in his _Annals_[1] merely tells us that Italy was guarded on
both sides by fleets at Misenum and Ravenna, and in his _Histories_[2]
speaks of these places as the well known naval stations without
stopping to describe them. While Suetonius,[3] though he mentions the
great achievement of Augustus, does not emphasise it and does not
attempt to tell us what these ports were like.

[Footnote 1: Tacitus, Ann. iv. 5.]

[Footnote 2: Tacitus, Hist. ii. 100; iii. 6, 40.]

[Footnote 3: Suetonius, _Augustus_.]

Perhaps the best description we have of Augustan Ravenna comes to us
from a writer who certainly never saw the port in its great Roman
days, but who probably followed a well established tradition in his
description of it. This is Jornandes, who was born about A.D. 500 and
was first a notary at the Ostrogothic court and later became a monk
and finally bishop of Crotona. In his _De Getarum Origins et Rebus
Gestis_ he thus describes Ravenna:

"This city (says he) between the marshes, the sea, and the Po is only
accessible on one side. Situated beside the Ionian Sea it is
surrounded and almost submerged by lagoons. On the east is the sea, on
the west it is defended by marshes across which there remains a narrow
passage, a kind of gate. The city is encircled on the north by a
branch of the Po, called the Fossa Asconis, and on the south by the Po
itself, which is called the Eridanus, and which is there