“Pythagoras left no writings—Aristotle speaks only of his school—but Diogenes Laertius in one passage (‘Vitæ,’ VIII. I. Pythag. 25), quotes an authority to the effect that Pythagoras asserted the earth to be spherical and inhabited all over, so that there were antipodes, to whom that is over which to us is under.... Plato makes Socrates say that he took up the work of Anaxagoras, hoping to learn whether the earth was round or flat (‘Phædo,’ 46, Stallb. I, 176).” In Plutarch’s essay, “On the face appearing in the orb of the moon,” one of the characters is lavish in his ridicule of the sphericity of the earth and of the theory of antipodes. (Justin Winsor, “Narrative and Critical History,” Boston, 1889, Vol. I. pp. 3–5, notes; Lucretius, “De Rerum,” V. pp. 1052, etc., and vi. p. 630; Virgil (Publius V. Maro), “Georgics,” I. p. 247; Tacitus (Publius Cornelius), “Germania,” p. 45.)
Speaking of the lower hemisphere or antipodes, as well as of islands of magnetic power drawing vessels on their rocks, Albertus Magnus says, in the book “De Natura Locorum,” contained in his “Philosophus Philosophorum Princeps”: “Perhaps also some magnetic power in that region draws human stones, even as the magnet draws iron.” See the Legends, in Reisch’s—Reysch’s—“Map of the World,” Rome, 1508 (“Christ. Colombus,” by J. B. Thatcher, New York, 1903, Vol. I. pp. 165–166).
At the beginning of the fourteenth century, the roundness of the earth and the antipodes were generally recognized. Mention thereof is to be found in the “Trésor” of Brunetto Latini, in the “Divina Commedia,” in the “Convito” (Dante, Opere Minori, Vol. I. p. 93), and in the “Acerba” of Francesco degli Stabili (Cecco d’Ascoli), at ff. 8–11, lib. i. cap. 3; as well as in most cosmographical treatises of the fourteenth century (Libri, Vol. II. p. 197, note).
Cecco D’Ascoli. Last page of the earliest known edition of his “Acerba” Venetia 1476. Printed nineteen times up to and including the edition of 1546. Now in the Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève, Paris.
Lactantius. “De Divinis Institutionibus.” Page taken from the 1465 edition. In the Bibliothèque Ste. Geneviève, Paris.
The passage in Lactantius (lib. iii. cap. 24), begins Ineptum credere. In the 1570 edition, it commences at Chap. XXIII, “Aut est ...” p. 178. In the “Works of Lactantius,” Edinburgh, 1871, Vol. I. chap. xxiv. pp. 196–197, the translator, Wm. Fletcher, says that he thus ridicules the antipodes and the roundness of the earth: “... the rotundity of the earth leads, in addition, to the invention of those suspended antipodes,” whilst, at Vol. II. chap. xxxix. p. 122, Lactantius says again that “about the antipodes, also, one can neither hear nor speak without laughter.”
In “Christian Schools and Scholars,” Augusta Th. Drane, London, 1867, p. 70, Albertus describes the antipodes and the countries they embrace.
Robert Steele, in his “Mediæval Lore,” London, 1893, p. 75, has it: “And fables tell, that there, beyond the antipodes be men that have their feet against our feet.”