Mr. Petrie on the History and Antiquities of Tara Hill. 165 



It was probably from this favourable circumstance of the invention of the water- 

 mill, and the facility thereby afforded to the Cappadocian people for making 

 cheap, good, and abundant flour, that the Cappadocian bakers obtained high 

 celebrity, and were much in demand for two or three centuries posterior to the 

 invention of mills, throughout all the Roman world. Coincident with the era 

 of the inventor, as mentioned by Strabo, is the date of the Greek epigram on 

 water-mills by Antipater, a poet of Syria, or Asia Minor, who is supposed to 

 have lived sixty or eighty years before Christ. This epigram may be thus 

 translated : — 



" Ye maids who toil'd so faithful at the mill, 

 Now cease from work, and from these toils be still ; 

 Sleep now till dawn, and let the birds with glee 

 Sing to the ruddy morn on bush and tree ; 

 For what your hands performed so long, so true, 

 Ceres has charged the water-nymphs to do : 

 They come, the limpid sisters, to her call, 

 And on the wheel with dashing fury fall. 

 Impel the axle with a whirling sound ; 

 And make the massy mill-stone reel around. 

 And bring the floury heaps luxuriant to the ground." 



" The greater convenience and expedition in working of these water-mills soon 

 made them be spread over the world. In about twenty or thirty years after 

 their invention, one was set up on the Tiber. They must have been not uncom- 

 mon in Italy in the age of Vitruvius, for he gives a description of them. Yet it 

 is rather surprising that Pliny, whose eye nothing of art or nature escapes, has 

 taken no notice of them." 



This learned writer, however, errs respecting Pliny. The following passage 

 is quite conclusive on this subject: " Major pars ItalicB ruido utitur pilo, rotis 

 etiam quas aqua verset obiter, et molat." (Hist. Nat. lib. 18, c. 10.) Whita- 

 ker shews that a water-mill was probably erected by the Romans at every 

 stationary city in Roman Britain : they were certainly numerous during their 

 time ; and this fact strongly corroborates the date assigned to the erection of the 

 mill near Tara, as well as the tradition which refers its origin to Scotland, and 

 particularly to the Roman portion of it, which lay nearest to Ireland, and was, 

 during the reign of Cormac, in the possession of the Picts. 



