Tiphysque novos detegat orbes;
Nec sit terris Ultima Thule.
(After the lapse of years, ages will come in which Ocean shall relax his chains around the world, and a vast continent shall appear, and Tiphys—the pilot—shall explore new regions, and Thule shall be no longer the utmost verge of the earth.)
“A prediction,” says the commentator, “of the Spanish discovery of America.”
Before Seneca’s lines were written, Plato had narrated the Egyptian legend that, engulfed in the ocean, but sometimes visible, was the island of Atalantis, supposed to mean the Western world.
Pulci, the friend of Lorenzo de Medici, in his Morgante Maggiore, written before the voyage of Columbus and before the physical discoveries of Galileo and Copernicus, introduces this remarkable prophecy; (alluding to the vulgar belief that the Columns of Hercules were the limits of the earth.)
Know that this theory is false: his bark
The daring mariner shall urge far o’er
The western wave, a smooth and level plain,
Albeit the earth is fashioned like a wheel.