The Historians' History of the World 01

Spain had long been known through the explorations and commercial enterprises of the Phœnicians and Greeks, and when it became a part of Roman territory, it was as familiarly known as Gaul or Britain. But these bounds, India on the east, Britain at the north, Spain in the west, and Upper Egypt toward the equator were the limits of the known world as understood by the classical mind. The vague traditions probably based on fact, as recorded by Herodotus, that a company of Phœnicians had sailed out of the Red Sea and gone by water about all the southern continent, to reappear from the west by way of the pillars of Hercules—or present Gibraltar,—served to give support to the theory that all the continental mass was encompassed in a universal sea, rather than to extend geographical knowledge in any precise sense.

Considering, then, the limitations of ancient geographical knowledge, it is wonderful how clear, precise, and correct an idea as to the shape, and even in a general way, as to the size, of the earth were attained by the classical geographers. To be sure, the Oriental thinkers applied the same poetical conceptions to cosmology that dominated them in other fields. The Hindu conceived the world as resting on the back of a mammoth elephant, which stood in turn on the back of a tortoise, and was transported thus across a boundless sea of milk. Greek mythology gives us the familiar picture of a human giant, Atlas, supporting the world. But such poetic conceptions as these, whatever their force may once have been with the Greeks, had been supplanted before the close of the classical epoch by ideas of a strictly scientific nature.

Not long after the beginning of the Christian era there lived a Greek named Strabo, whose status as a truly scientific geographer is gladly acknowledged to-day. Strabo’s remarks on cosmology may well be quoted here as showing the heights to which the science of geography had attained among the Greeks. Making due allowance for the changed phraseology of another age, these are such things as might be said by a geographer of to-day, yet they were written over two thousand years ago:

“We have treated these subjects at length in the first Book of the Geography. At present we shall make a few remarks on the operations of nature and of Providence conjointly. On the operations of nature, that all things converge to a point, namely, the centre of the whole, and assume a spherical shape around it. The earth is the densest body and nearer the centre than all others: the less dense and next to it is water: but both land and water are spheres, the first solid, the second hollow, containing this earth within it. On the operations of Providence, that it has exercised a will, is disposed to variety, and is the artificer of innumerable works. In the first rank, as greatly surpassing all the rest is the generation of animals, of which the most excellent are gods and man, for whose sake the rest were formed. To the gods Providence assigned heaven; and the earth to men: the extreme parts of the world; for the extreme parts of the sphere are the centre and the circumference. But since water encompasses the earth, and man is not an aquatic, but a land animal, living in the air, and requiring much light, Providence formed many eminences and cavities in the earth, so that these cavities should receive the whole or a great part of the water which covers the land beneath it; and that the eminences should rise and conceal the water beneath them, except as much as was necessary for the use of the human race and the animals and plants about it.

“But as all things are in constant motion, and undergo great changes (for it is not possible that such things of such a nature, so numerous and vast, could be otherwise regulated in the world), we must not suppose the earth or the water always to continue in this state, so as to retain perpetually the same bulk, without increase or diminution, or that each preserves the same fixed place, particularly as the reciprocal change of one into the other is most consonant to nature from their proximity; but that much of the land is changed into water, and a great portion of water becomes land, just as we observe great differences in the earth itself. For one kind of earth crumbles easily, another is solid and rocky, and contains iron; and so of others. There is also a variety in the quality of water; for some waters are saline, others sweet and potable, others medicinal, and either salutary or noxious; others cold or hot. Is it therefore surprising that some parts of the earth which are now inhabited should formerly have been occupied by sea, and that what are now seas should formerly have been inhabited land? So also fountains once existing have failed and others have burst forth; and similarly in the case of rivers and lakes; again, mountains and plains have been converted reciprocally one into the other. On this subject I have spoken before at length, and now let this be said: