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I pass over in silence ... the subterranean aqueducts (agog hydaton) and also those that are suspended trough walls and that can be called airborne rivers, which as they say arrive from some distant place through a journey of a very long span of days, and the channels (dioruges) through the mountains that are in their way, and the reservoirs (dexamenai) that received them once and at that time at least played the part of seas and lakes for them, either covered and invisible or open and visible, which could be sailed on with ships - some of these now grow huge trees either inside in the cavern (kytos) or above on the roofs, and for those who won them they serve as fields and gardens - and the multitude of the pillars (kiones) and arches (hapsides) in them, and again others that are subterranean and excavated, which turn the city into an upper storey and make it suspended and which are a hollow what is underneath, and the public water-pipes (demosioi hyponomoi), of which a great many also exist there. And what should I say about the baths (loutra) whose multitude one does not believe when told of their existence and about the water fountains (krenai), which flow in houses and through the city?
Comment by Crow 2008: Chrysoloras was in Italy at the end of the fourteenth century and this highly rhetorical account forms part of his comparison between ruins of old and new Rome, see Bauer (1996), 144-5.
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