Footnote 330: Pauthier's Marco Polo, p. 361; Yule's Marco Polo, p. li.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 331: Ramusio, apud Yule's Marco Polo, vol. i. p. xxxvii.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 332: Yule's Marco Polo, vol. i. p. cxxxi.[Back to Main Text]
"But for to speake of riches and of stones,
And men and horse, I trow the large wones
Of Prestir John, ne all his tresorie,
Might not unneth have boght the tenth partie."
Chaucer, The Flower and the Leaf, 200.
The fabulous kingdom of Prester John is ably treated in Yule's Cathay, vol. i. pp. 174-182; Marco Polo, vol. i. p. 204-216. Colonel Yule suspects that its prototype may have been the semi-Christian kingdom of Abyssinia. This is very likely. As for its range, shifted hither and thither as it was, all the way from the upper Nile to the Thian-Shan mountains, we can easily understand this if we remember how an ignorant mind conceives all points distant from its own position as near to one another; i. e. if you are about to start from New York for Arizona, your housemaid will perhaps ask you to deliver a message to her brother in Manitoba. Nowhere more than in the history of geography do we need to keep before us, at every step, the limitations of the untutored mind and its feebleness in grasping the space-relations of remote regions.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 334: These Arimaspians afford an interesting example of the uncritical statements of travellers at an early time, as well as of their tenacious vitality. The first mention of these mythical people seems to have been made by Greek travellers in Scythia as early as the seventh century before Christ; and they furnished Aristeas of Proconnesus, somewhat later, with the theme of his poem "Arimaspeia," which has perished, all except six verses quoted by Longinus. See Mure's Literature of Antient Greece, vol. iv. p. 68. Thence the notion of the Arimaspians seems to have passed to Herodotus (iii. 116; iv. 27) and to Æschylus:—
ὀξυστόμους γὰρ Ζηνὸς ἀκραγεῖς κύνας
γρῦπας φύλαξαι, τόν τε μουνῶπα στρατὸν
Ἀριμασπὸν ἱπποβάμον', οἳ χρυσόῤῥυτον
οἰκοῦσιν ἀμφὶ νᾶμα Πλούτωνος πόρου·
τούτοις σὺ μὴ πέλαζε.
Prometheus, 802.
Thence it passed on to Pausanias, i. 24; Pomponius Mela, ii. 1; Pliny, Hist. Nat., vii. 2; Lucan, Pharsalia, iii. 280; and so on to Milton:—
"As when a gryphon through the wilderness,
With winged course o'er hill or moory dale,
Pursues the Arimaspian who by stealth
Had from his wakeful custody purloined
The guarded gold."
Paradise Lost, ii. 944. [Back to Main Text]