River
Fl. Sarnus
Sarno
Listen to the story
The river Sarnus is drawn on the Tabula but never named: an unlabelled line that rises in a small isolated range of hills, arcs across three roads and meets the sea near the station of Stabiae, close to Pompeii. It is the Sarno in Campania. In Roman times it flowed past Pompeii, whose harbour lay at its mouth. On the parchment a clear erasure shows where the copyist scraped away a mistaken second course. Coins of Nuceria show its river god as a youth with ram's horns, and the historian Procopius later knew the river as Draco, the dragon.