Astronomical Myths: Based on Flammarions's "History of the Heavens"

by J. F. Blake; Camille Flammarion

Fig. 32.—Homeric Cosmography.

The centre of the terrestrial disc was occupied by the continent and isles of Greece, which in the time of Homer possessed no general name. The centre of Greece passed therefore for the centre of the whole world; and in Homer's system it was reckoned to be Olympus in Thessaly, but the priests of the celebrated Temple of Apollo at Delphi (known then under the name of Python) gave out a tradition that that sacred place was the real centre of the habitable world.

The straits which separate Italy from Sicily were so to speak the vestibule of the fabulous world of Homer. The threefold ebb and flow, the howling of the monster Scylla, the whirlpools of Charybdis, the floating rocks—all tell us that we are quitting here the region of truth. Sicily itself, although already known under the name of Trinacria, was filled with marvels; here the flocks of the Sun wandered in a charming solitude under the guardianship of nymphs; here the Cyclops, with one eye only, and the anthropophagous Lestrigons scared away the traveller from a land that was otherwise fertile in corn and wine. Two historical races were placed by Homer in Sicily, namely the Sicani, and the Siceli, or Siculi.

To the west of Sicily we find ourselves in the midst of a region of fables. The enchanted islands of Circe and Calypso, and the floating island of Eolus can no longer be found, unless we imagine them to have originated, like Graham's Island in this century, from volcanic eruptions or elevations, and to have disappeared again by the action of the sea.

The Homeric map of the world terminated towards the west by two fabulous countries which have given rise to many traditions among the ancients, and to many discussions among moderns. Near to the entrance of the ocean, and not far from the sombre caverns where the dead are congregated, Ulysses found the Cimmerians, "an unhappy people, who, constantly surrounded by thick shadows, never enjoyed the rays of the sun, neither when it mounted the skies, nor when it descended below the earth." Still farther away, and in the ocean itself, and therefore beyond the limits of the earth, beyond the region of winds and seasons, the poet paints for us a Fortunate Land, which he calls Elysium, a country where tempests and winter are unknown, where a soft zephyr always blows, and where the elect of Jupiter, snatched from the common lot of mortals, enjoy a perpetual felicity.

Whether these fictions had an allegory for their basis, or were founded on the mistaken notions of voyagers—whether they arose in Greece, or, as the Hebrew etymology of the name Cimmerian might seem to indicate, in the east, or in Phenicia, it is certain that the images they present, transferred to the world of reality, and applied successively to various lands, and confused by contradictory explanations, have singularly embarrassed the progress of geography through many centuries. The Roman travellers thought they recognised the Fortunate Isles in a group to the west of Africa, now known as the Canaries. The philosophical fictions of Plato and Theopompus about Atlantes and Meropis have been long perpetuated in historical theories; though of course it is possible that in the numerous changes that have taken place in the surface of the earth, some ancient vast and populous island may have descended beneath the level of the sea. On the other side, the poetic imagination created the Hyperboreans, beyond the regions where the northern winds were generated, and according to a singular kind of meteorology, they believed them for that reason to be protected from the cold winds. Herodotus regrets that he has not been able to discover the least trace of them; he took the trouble to ask for information about them from their neighbours, the Arimaspes, a very clear-sighted race, though having but a single eye; but they could not inform him where the Hyperboreans dwelt. The Enchanted Isles, where the Hesperides used to guard the golden fruit, and which the whole of antiquity placed in the west, not far from the Fortunate Isles, are sometimes called Hyperborean by authors well versed in the ancient traditions. It is also in this sense that Sophocles speaks of the Garden of Phœbus, near the vault of heaven, and not far from the sources of the night, i.e. of the setting of the sun.

Avienus explains the mild temperature of the Hyperborean country by the temporary proximity of the sun, since, according to the Homeric ideas, it passes during the night by the northern ocean to return to its palace in the east. This ancient tradition was not entirely exploded in the time of Tacitus, who states that on the confines of Germany might be seen the veritable setting of Apollo beyond the water, and he believes that as in the east the sun gives rise to incense and balm by its great proximity to the earth, so in the regions where it sets it makes the most precious of juices to transude from the earth and form amber. It is this idea that is embedded in the fables of amber being the tears of gold that Apollo shed when he went to the Hyperborean land to mourn the loss of his son Æsculapius, or by the sisters of Phaëton, changed into poplars; and it is denoted by the Greek name for amber, electron—a sun-stone. The Grecian sages, long before the time of Tacitus, said that this very precious material was an exhalation from the earth that was produced and hardened by the rays of the sun, which they thought came nearer to the earth in the west and in the north.

Florus, in relating the expedition of Decimus Brutus along the coast of Spain, gives great effect to the Epicurean views about the sun, by declaring that Brutus only stopped his conquests after having witnessed the actual descent of the sun into the ocean, and having heard with horror the terrible noise occasioned by its extinction. The ancients also believed that the sun and the other heavenly bodies were nourished by the waters—partly the fresh water of the rivers, and partly the salt water of the sea. Cleanthes gave the reason for the sun returning towards the equator on reaching the solstices, that it could not go too far away from the source of its nourishment. Pytheas relates that in the Island of Thule, six days' journey north of Great Britain, and in all that neighbourhood, there was no land nor sea nor air, but a compound of all three, on which the earth and the sea were suspended, and which served to unite together all the parts of the universe, though it was not possible to go into these places, neither on foot nor in ships. Perhaps the ice floating in the frozen seas and the hazy northern atmosphere had been seen by some navigator, and thus gave rise to this idea. As it stands, the history may be perhaps matched by that of the amusing monk who said he had been to the end of the world and had to stoop down, as there was not room to stand between heaven and earth at their junction.

Homer lived in the tenth century before our era. Herodotus, who lived in the fifth, developed the Homeric chart to three times its size. He remarks at the commencement of his book that for several centuries the world has been divided into three parts—Europe, Asia, and Libya; the names given to them being female. The exterior limits of these countries remained in obscurity notwithstanding that those boundaries of them that lay nearest to Greece were clearly defined.