Hesiod, who lived a century after Homer, thus states the scientific attainments of his time:—"The space between the heavens and the earth is exactly the same as that between the earth and Tartarus beneath it. A brazen anvil, if tossed from heaven, would fall during nine days and nine nights, and would reach the earth upon the tenth day. Were it to continue its course towards the abode of darkness, it would be nine days and nine nights more in accomplishing the distance." It is worth while remarking that this statement is at variance with that of Homer, who makes Vulcan, when precipitated from heaven by Jupiter, land at Lemnos in a single day: he had travelled, therefore, nearly twenty times faster than one of his own anvils. Hesiod intended to convey, by this illustrations, an imposing idea of the loftiness of the heavens. In the eyes of modern astronomy, nothing can be more paltry. The time that an anvil thrown from Halcyon, the brightest star of the Pleiades, towards our globe, would require to reach it, may perhaps be imagined from the fact that the rays of light emitted by Halcyon travel five centuries before they strike the earth! It is thus that the positive revelations of modern science surpass in marvels the most daring inventions of ancient fable.
THE EARTH ACCORDING TO ANAXIMANDER.
Anaximander, four hundred years after Homer, held that the earth, instead of being flat, was in the form of a cylinder, convex upon its upper surface. Its diameter was three times greater than its height; and its form was round, as if it had been shaped by a turner's lathe. The Oracle of Delphi was the centre of his system.
Somewhat later, Thales, one of the Seven Sages, declared his belief that the earth was spherical, and remained suspended in mid air without support of any kind. This frightful doctrine made few proselytes: it was not likely, indeed, that any one but a sage would adopt a theory which made him the inhabitant of a globe abandoned and isolated in the midst of space.
In the fifth century before Christ, Herodotus, the most celebrated traveller of antiquity, and consequently capable of forming rational ideas upon the subject of geography, rectified many errors which had crept into the popular belief, though Homer was still considered infallible by the masses of the people. "I know of no such river as the ocean," he says, ironically: "this denomination seems to be a pure invention of Homer and the old poets. I cannot help laughing when I hear of the river Ocean, and of the spherical form of the earth, as if it were the work of a turner." He displaced the centre of the inhabited surface, which the Greeks had at first made Mount Olympus and afterwards Delphi, making Rhodes the fortunate possessor of the privilege. Socrates, a century later, (400 b.c.,) asserted that the earth was in the form of a globe, sustained in the middle of the heavens by its own equilibrium.
About the year 230 b.c., Eratosthenes, a Greek of Cyrene, succeeded in reducing geography to a system, under the patronage of the Ptolemies of Egypt, which gave him access to the immense mass of materials gathered by Alexander and his successors and accumulated at the Alexandrian Library. The spherical form of the earth was now quite generally considered by scientific men to be the correct theory, though it could never be substantiated till some navigator, sailing to the east, should return by the west. Eratosthenes, proceeding upon this principle, made it his study to adjust to it all the known features of the globe. The great ocean of Homer and Herodotus, surrounding the world, still remained in his system. He compared, however, the magnitude of the regions known in his time with what he conceived to be the whole circumference, and became convinced that only a third part of the space was filled up. He conjectured that the remaining space might consist of one great ocean, which he called the Atlantic, from Mount Atlas, which was fancifully believed to support the globe. He supposed, too, that lands and islands might be discovered in it by sailing towards the west.
We shall now proceed to give such a description of the vessels used by the Greeks after the time of Homer, as the confused and incomplete data which have reached us will enable us to furnish.
