The passage appears to be paraphrased from similar lines which are preserved in Achilles Tatius (Isag. in Phænom. Arat.; Petavius, Uranolog. p. 153), and by him attributed to the Hermes of Eratosthenes. See also Tibullus, Eleg. iv., Ovid, and among the men of science, Aristotle, Meteorol., ii. 5, §§ 11, 13, 15; Strabo, Geogr., i. 2, § 24; ii. 5, § 3; Pliny, Hist. Nat., ii. ch. 68; Mela, De chorographia, i. 1; Cicero, Republ., vi. 16; Tusc. Disp., i. 28.
[277] Aristotle, Meteorol., ii. 1, § 10; ii. 5, § 15; De caelo, ii. 14 ad fin. Letronne, finding the latter passage inconvenient, reversed the meaning by the arbitrary insertion of a negative (Discussion de l’opinion d’Hipparque sur le prolongement de l’Afrique au sud de l’Equator in Journal des Savans, 1831, pp. 476, 545). The theory which he built upon this reconstructed foundation so impressed Humboldt that he changed his opinion as to the views of Aristotle on this point (Examen critique, ii. 373). Such an emendation is only justifiable by the sternest necessity, and it has been shown by Ruge (Der Chaldäer Seleukos, Dresden, 1865), and Prantl (Werke des Aristoteles uebersetzt und erläutert, Bd. ii.; Die Himmelsgebäude, note 61), that neither sense nor consistency requires the change.
[278] Herodotus, ii. 23; iii. 115; iv. 36, 40, 45.
[279] Geminus, Isagoge. Polybius’s work on this question is lost, and his own expressions as we have them in his history are more conservative. It is, he says, unknown, whether Africa is a continent extending toward the south, or is surrounded by the sea. Polib. Hist. iii. 38; Hampton’s translation (London, 1757), i. 334.
[280] Ptolemy, Geogr., vii. 3, 5.
[281] The circumnavigation of Africa by Phœnicians at the command of Necho, though described and accepted by Herodotus, can hardly be called an established fact, in spite of all that has been written in its favor. The story, whether true or false, had, like others of its kind, little influence upon the belief in the impassable tropic zone, because most of those who accepted it supposed that the continent terminated north of the equator.
[282] Ptolemy, Geogr., i. 11-14. Eratosthenes and Strabo located their first meridian at Cape St. Vincent; Marinus and Ptolemy placed it in the Canary group. See Vol. II. p. 95.
[283] Geminus, Isagoge, ch. 13; Achilles Tatius, Isagoge in Phænom. Arati; Cleomedes, De circulis sublimis, i. 2. The first two are given in the Uranologion of Petavius, Lond., Paris, 1630, pp. 56, 155.
The classes were always divided on the same principle, and each contained two groups so related that they could apply to one another reciprocally the name by which the whole class was designed. These names, however, are not always applied to the same classes by different writers. 1. The first class embraced the people who lived in the same half of the same temperate zone; to them all it was day or night, summer or winter, at the same time. They were called σύνοικοι by Cleomedes, but περίοκοι by Achilles Tatius. 2. The second class included such peoples as lived in the same temperate zone, but were divided by half the circumference of that zone; so that while they all had summer or winter at the same time, the one group had day when the other had night, and vice versa. These groups could call one another περίοικοι according to Cleomedes, but ἀντίχθονες according to Tatius. 3. The third class included those who were divided by the torrid zone, so that part lived in the northern temperate zone and part in the southern, but yet so that all were in the same half of their respective zones; i. e., all were in either the eastern or western, upper or lower, hemisphere. Day and night were shared by the whole class at once, but not the seasons, the northern group having summer when the southern had winter, and vice versa. These groups could call one another ἄντοικοι. 4. The fourth class comprised the groups which we know as antipodes, dwelling with regard to one another in different halves of the two temperate zones, so that they had neither seasons nor day or night in common, but stood upon the globe diametrically opposed to one another. All writers agree in calling these groups ἀντίποδες. The introduction of the word antichthones in place of perioeci was due, apparently, to a misunderstanding of the Pythagorean antichthon. This name was properly applied to the imaginary planet invented by the early Pythagoreans to bring the number of the spheres up to ten; it was located between the earth and the central fire, and had the same period of revolution as the earth, from the outer, Grecian, side of which it was never visible. This “opposite earth,” Gegenerde, was later confused with the other, western, or lower hemisphere of the earth itself. It was also sometimes applied to the inhabitants of the southern hemisphere, as by Cicero in the Tusculan Disputations (i. 28), “duabus oris distantibus habitabilem et cultum; quarum altera quam nos incolimus,
Sub axe posita ad stellas septem unde horrifer
Aquiloni stridor gelidas molitur nives,