Such in the main are the ancient writers upon which we must chiefly rely in considering the present question. In the interpretation of these sources much has been done by the leading modern writers on the condition of science in ancient times; like Bunbury, Ukert, Forbiger, St. Martin, and Peschel on geography;[348] like Zeller on philosophy, not to name many others;[349] and like Lewis and Martin on astronomy;[350] but there is no occasion to go to much length in the enumeration of this class of books. The reader is referred to the examination of the literature of special points of the geographical studies of the ancients to the notes following this Essay.
Mediæval cosmology and geography await a thorough student; they are imbedded in the wastes of theological discussions of the Fathers, or hidden in manuscript cosmographies in libraries of Europe. It should be noted that confusion has arisen from the use of the word rotundus to express both the sphericity of the earth and the circularity of the known lands, and from the use of terra, or orbis terrae, to denote the inhabited lands, as well as the globe. It has been pointed out by Ruge (Gesch. d. Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 97) that the later Middle Age adopted the circular form of the oekoumene in consequence of a peculiar theory as to the relation of the land and water masses of the earth, which were conceived as two intercepting spheres. The oekoumene might easily be spoken of as a round disk without implying that the whole earth was plane.[351] That the struggle of the Christian faith, at first for existence and then for the proper harvesting of the fruits of victory, induced its earlier defenders to wage war against the learning as well as the religion of the pagans; that Christians were inclined to think time taken from the contemplation of the true faith worse than wasted when given to investigations into natural phenomena, which might better be accepted for what they professed to be; and that they often found in Scripture a welcome support for the evidence of the senses,—cannot be denied. It was inevitable that St. Chrysostom, Lactantius, Orosius and Origines rejected or declined to teach the sphericity of the earth. The curious systems of Cosmas and Aethicus, marked by a return to the crudest conceptions of the universe, found some favor in Europe. But the truth was not forgotten. The astronomical poems of Aratus, Hyginus, and Manilius were still read. Solinus and other plunderers of Pliny were popular, and kept alive the ancient knowledge. The sphericity of the earth was not denied by St. Augustine; it was maintained by Martianus Capella, and assumed by Isidor of Seville. Bede[352] taught the whole system of ancient geography; and but little later, Virgilius, bishop of Saltzburg, was threatened with papal displeasure, not for teaching the sphericity of the earth, but for upholding the existence of antipodes.[353] The canons of Ptolemy were cited in the eleventh century by Hermann Contractus in his De utilitatibus astrolabii, and in the twelfth by Hugues de Saint Victor in his Eruditio didascalica. Strabo was not known before Pope Nicholas V., who ordered the first translation. Not many to-day can illustrate the truth more clearly than the author of L’Image du Monde, an anonymous poem of the thirteenth century. If two men, he says, were to start at the same time from a given point and go, the one east, the other west,—
Si que andui egaumont alassent
Il convendroit qu’il s’encontrassent
Dessus le leu dont il se mûrent.[354]
In general, the mathematical and astronomical treatises were earlier known to the West than the purely metaphysical works: this was the case in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; in the thirteenth the schoolmen were familiar with the whole body of Aristotle’s works. Thus the influence of Aristotle on natural science was early important, either through Arabian commentators or paraphrasers, or through translations made from the Arabic, or directly from the Greek.[355]
Jourdain affirms that it was the influence of Aristotle and his interpreters that kept alive in the Middle Ages the doctrine that India and Spain were not far apart. He also maintains that the doctrine of the sphericity of the earth was familiar throughout the Middle Age, and, if anything, more of a favorite than the other view.
The field of the later ecclesiastical and scholastic writers, who kept up the contentions over the form of the earth and kindred subjects, is too large to be here minutely surveyed. Such of them as were well known to the geographical students of the centuries next preceding Columbus have been briefly indicated in another place;[356] and if not completely, yet with helpful outlining, the whole subject of the mediæval cosmology has been studied by not a few of the geographical and cartographical students of later days.[357] So far as these studies pertain to the theory of a Lost Atlantis and the fabulous islands of the Atlantic Ocean, they will be particularly illustrated in the notes which follow this Essay.
[NOTES.]
[A.] The Form of the Earth.—It is not easy to demonstrate that the earliest Greeks believed the earth to be a flat disk, although that is the accepted and probably correct view of their belief. It is possible to examine but a small part of the earliest literature, and what we have is of uncertain date and dubious origin; its intent is religious or romantic, not scientific; its form is poetic. It is difficult to interpret it accurately, since the prevalent ideas of nature must be deduced from imagery, qualifying words and phrases, and seldom from direct description. The interpreter, doubtful as to the proportion in which he finds mingled fancy and honest faith, is in constant danger of overreaching himself by excess of ingenuity. In dealing with such a literature one is peculiarly liable to abuse the always dangerous argument by which want of knowledge is inferred from lack of mention. Other difficulties beset the use of later philosophic material, much of which is preserved only in extracts made by antagonists or by compilers, so that we are forced to confront a lack of context and possible misunderstanding or misquotation. The frequent use of the word στρογγύλος, which has the same ambiguity as our word “round” in common parlance, often leads to uncertainty. A more fruitful cause of trouble is inherent in the Greek manner of thinking of the world. It is often difficult to know whether a writer means the planet, or whether he means the agglomeration of known lands which later writers called ἡ οἰκουμένη. It is not impossible that when writers refer to the earth as encircled by the river Oceanus, they mean, not the globe, but the known lands, the eastern continent, as we say, what the Romans sometimes called orbis terrae or orbis terrarum, a term which may mean the “circle of the lands,” not the “orb of the earth.” At a later time it was a well-known belief that the earth-globe and water-globe were excentrics, so that a segment of the former projected beyond the surface of the latter in one part, and constituted the known world.[358]
I cannot attach much importance to the line of argument with which modern writers since Voss have tried to prove that the Homeric poems represent the earth flat. That Poseidon, from the mountains of the Solymi, sees Odesseus on the sea to the west of Greece (Od. v. 282); that Helios could see his cattle in Thrinakia both as he went toward the heavens and as he turned toward the earth again (Od. xii. 380); that at sunset “all the ways are darkened;” that the sun and the stars set in and rose from the ocean,—these and similar proofs seem to me to have as little weight as attaches to the expressions “ends of the earth,” or to the flowing of Oceanus around the earth. There are, however, other and better reasons for assuming that the earth in earliest thought was flat. Such is the most natural assumption from the evidence of sight, and there is certainly nothing in the older writings inconsistent with such an idea. We know, moreover, that in the time of Socrates it was yet a matter of debate as to whether the earth was flat or spherical, as it was in the time of Plutarch.[359] We are distinctly told by Aristotle that various forms were attributed to earth by early philosophers, and the implication is that the spherical theory, whose truth he proceeds to demonstrate, was a new thought.[360] It is very unlikely, except to those who sincerely accept the theory of a primitive race of unequalled wisdom, that the sphericity of the earth, having been known to Homer, should have been cast aside by the Ionic philosophers and the Epicureans, and forgotten by educated people five or six centuries later, as it must have been before the midnight voyage of Helios in his golden cup, and before similar attempts to account for the return of the sun could have become current. Ignorance of the true shape of the earth is also indicated by the common view that the sun appeared much larger at rising to the people of India than to the Grecians, and at setting presented the same phenomenon in Spain.[361] As we have seen, the description of Tartarus in the Theogony of Hesiod, which Fick thinks an interpolation of much later date, likens the earth to a lid.