Here in America, spring is tornado season.
Polar fronts sweep down from Canada, tropical air surges up from the Gulf of Mexico, and
storms form where the airmasses clash, producing wild temperature swings, severe thunderstorms,
and an average of about 1,200 tornadoes each year.
The winds inside a tornado are the most powerful on earth, capable of ripping houses from their
foundations, wrapping cars around telephone poles, and scouring asphalt from streets.
The strongest tornadoes – EF-4s and EF-5s – are almost unimaginably destructive.
A single F5 twister in 1925 tore a path 220 miles long and up to a mile wide, destroying
15,000 homes and killing nearly 700 people.
Though not as violent or numerous as their American counterparts, tornadoes occur in
many parts of Europe, including Greece and Italy, where they were observed and discussed
in antiquity.
The earliest classical explanations of the weather were mythological.
The thunderbolt, famously, was the weapon of Zeus, and Poseidon could summon tempests
with his trident.
The fire-breathing monster Typhoeus, father of the storm winds, hurled hurricanes at the
gods.
As early as the seventh century BC, however, philosophers began to posit rationalist theories
about the weather.
Before we investigate those, and outline the evidence for ancient tornadoes, a brief word
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Returning to ancient theories about storms.
Thales, the first Greek philosopher, connected changes in the weather with the motions of
the heavens.
His student Anaximander hypothesized that thunderstorms were produced by currents of
wind agitating clouds.
The first truly systematic discussion, however, was Aristotle’s Meteorology, a treatise
that ambitiously set out to investigate the composition and phenomena of the earth, sky,
and everything else beneath the moon’s orbit.
Aristotle believed that the sun’s heat draws forth warm, dry air from the land and cool,
damp air from the sea.
The interactions of warm and cool air produce the weather.
Wind, according to Aristotle, is generated when currents of warm air – which tend to
rise – meet the rotating sphere of the heavens.
When two rising currents of warm air converge, they struggle for dominance, forming a circular
eddy in the clouds.
If this eddy sinks, carrying the cloud down to earth, a tornado is born.
Sometimes, where the currents of air have an exceptionally fine texture, they catch
fire – apparently a description of the lightning that often accompanies tornadic thunderstorms.
Although Aristotle’s discussion would remain influential for the rest of antiquity, other
philosophers proposed alternative explanations of tornadoes.
Theophrastus, for example, described them as hollow clouds they drew air upward.
Seneca believed that they were caused by the deflection of strong winds.
Hundreds of tornadoes must have occurred over the course of classical history, but the vast
majority are unknown – either because they struck remote places, because descriptions
of such things seemed beneath the dignity of history, or because the works that mentioned
them have vanished.
Fortunately, we still have a rather odd little treatise titled the Book of Prodigies, compiled
in the fourth century by a certain Julius Obsequens.
This compilation of disasters that occurred between the mid-Republican era and the reign
of Augustus contains three apparent descriptions of tornadoes – turbines in Latin – striking
ancient Rome.
The first of these occurred in 156 BC, when a storm – apparently a small tornado – roared
through the center of Rome, destroying a portico near the Circus Flaminius, damaging many houses
in the neighborhood, and obliterating the riverside mansion of the Pontifex Maximus.
In 60 BC, another tornado touched down in the vicinity of Rome.
It appeared with a sudden thunderstorm in late afternoon, tore up groves of trees by
their roots, destroyed a bridge, and levelled a number of buildings.
Finally, in 44 BC – not long, apparently, before the assassination of Julius Caesar
– what appears to have been another tornado touched down in the heart of Rome, overturning
a statue of Cicero, breaking the doors of a temple, and destroying many buildings and
trees.
The brief reports in the Book of Prodigies are more tantalizing than informative.
Although something like the disasters he records probably occurred, Obsequens was interested
in signs and omens, not accurate weather reporting.
His description of the damage caused by the tornado of 44, for example, notes that the
overthrow of Cicero’s statue portended the great man’s death – just as the tornado
itself, like the comets and earthquakes he also mentions, foretold the assassination
of Caesar.
We have much more detail for the early modern period.
On the evening of June 11, 1749, for example, a tornado formed over the Tyrrhenian Sea and
tore a twenty-mile path along the Tiber.
Entering the southeast corner of Rome, it left a trail of devastation about 200 feet
wide, stripping roofs from buildings and even cobbles from the streets, before leaping the
walls and heading toward Tivoli.
As recently as November 2016, an F3 tornado formed just north of Rome.
Like the 1749 tornado, it began as a waterspout.
Coming ashore at the town of Ladispoli, it caused extensive damage to houses and apartment
buildings, flipped cars, uprooted trees, and killed two people.
We have no way of knowing the intensity of the few ancient tornadoes mentioned by our
sources.
But if any of these were as strong as the 2016 twister, they must have caused terrible
damage to the teeming, crumbling city of ancient Rome.
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