[897] Nothing could be more meagre than the allusions to this subject; even the treatise on geometry by Boethius, which seems to have been the only one current, contains little more than enunciations of propositions.
[898] I have already referred to the geography of this period, see [p. 182].
Altera pars orbis sub aquis jacet invia nobis,
Ignotaeque hominum gentes, nec transita regna,
Commune ex uno lumen ducentia sole, etc.
Manilius (Weber), i, 375.
The Christian fathers ridicule the antipodes severely. “More rational to say that black was white”; Lactantius, Div. Inst., iii, 24; Epitome, 39. “The earth stands firm on water [going back to Thales] and does not turn”; Chrysostom, Genesis, Hom. xii, 3, 4 (in Migne, iv, 101); In Titum Hom. iii, 3 (in Migne, xi, 680); cf. Cosmas Ind., op. cit., x, for other theological authorities on cosmology.
[900] Such as that five represents the world, being made up of three and two, which typify male and female respectively; or that seven equates Minerva, the virgin, neither contained or containing; and other Pythagorean notions; see M. Capella, vii, and the arithmetic of Boethius.
[901] Such is the well-known system elaborated by Hipparchus and Ptolemy, but the Pythagoreans put the sun at the centre, though without definite reasons and with imaginative details; see Diogenes Laert. and Delambre’s Hist. Astron. Ant. Although Democritus, Epicurus, and others held that there were an infinite number of worlds (κόσμοι), they regarded the objective universe as only one of them, and had no idea that myriads of systems similar to that in which they lived lay before their eyes.