mattstee

 © RM, 2008. All rights reserved. Helicon Publishing is a division of RM.

The Greeks speculated on the shape of the earth, the science of geodesy. The Ionian Greeks of western Anatolia (Turkey) were the first to hypothesize that the earth was not a flat disk: Anaximander of Miletus during the sixth century BCE, who reputedly drew the first map of the world, believed that the earth was a cylinder. Parmenides, a century later, speculated that the earth must have zones of heat and cold: torrid, frigid, and temperate zones. The Athenian Plato, in his dialogue Phaedo, followed the Pythagoreans in arguing that since the sphere is the most perfect form, this must be the earth’s shape. Plato’s student, the greatest scientist of classical Greece, Aristotle, provided empirical proof of the earth’s sphericity by observing the earth’s shadow cast upon the surface of the moon during a lunar eclipse. However, Aristotle still had a limited view of earth, underestimating the extent of Asia, believing that the Caspian Sea flows into the outer Ocean, and conceiving that India marks the eastern extreme of the continent. Aristotle had the genius to conceive of a hemispheric world, north and south, perhaps basing his ideas on the reports of Phoenician and Carthaginian sailors.

The speculative Greeks, and later the Romans, wondered what lay to the west, across the Atlantic. The fifth-century historian Herodotus’s report that the Phoenicians circumnavigated Africa in about 600 BCE, sailing from the Indian to the Atlantic oceans, was believed by few, who were beholden to the myth of the ring of fire encircling earth’s equator. There circulated other vague reports that the Carthaginians explored the North Atlantic to the British Isles, the Azores in the North Atlantic, and the west African coastline almost to the equator. Diodorus Siculus, the Greek historian of the first century BCE and author of Universal History, reported that the Carthaginians discovered a vast, fruitful, and temperate island with large rivers in the Atlantic Ocean. So wonderful were these isles that upon returning to Carthage all who knew of them were murdered so as to keep the islands secret and prevent a mass migration from Carthage.

The Greek biographer and scientist Plutarch, ever on the lookout to substantiate myth with fact, studied the nature and origin of stories about the Isles of the Blessed and Calypso’s island of Ogygia. This island is featured in Homer’s Odyssey. Homer placed the island, where Calypso held Odysseus against his will for seven years, somewhere in the west, which made sense since Calypso was the daughter of Atlas. Later legends placed Ogygia in the Atlantic, where Cronos, a god of Phoenician origin, held sway. In his dialogue “Concerning the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon,” Plutarch discussed in detail the myth, trying to put the best face on what might be true about it. He hypothesized that Ogygia lies to the west of Britain; the route is difficult going, in part because the sea is of a cold thickness and it is a land of the midnight sun. Pytheas discovered such conditions on his voyage, and it is possible that Plutarch used Pytheas’s account as evidence for his discussion of Ogygia. Pytheas claimed to have visited Thule, which the Stoic Seneca also briefly mentioned in his play Medea. Likewise Ferdinando Columbus, in his biography of his father Christopher, claimed that the young Columbus in the 1470s sailed to the North Atlantic and visited Thule.

Plutarch, in his Life of Sertorius, also reported the legend of the Isles of the Blessed. Sertorius, a Roman general who was in Spain around 80 BCE, met with mariners who claimed to have just returned from islands twelve hundred miles off the coast of Spain. Why they left such a wonderful place of abundant fruits and continuous mild breezes is a mystery, but they convinced Sertorius (and Plutarch) of their reality, and made the Roman long to sail there to live his life in perfect repose.

The Elder Pliny also provided detailed descriptions of these isles in a failed attempt to make fiction fact. The daughters of the setting sun, he wrote, inhabited the Hesperides. He also discussed uncritically the island of Atlantis. Plato wrote of Atlantis in the Timaeus. The Athenian lawgiver Solon on his travels heard from the Egyptians about Atlantis, a large island hosting an advanced civilization that was destroyed by a tidal wave. From Plato’s account it is not clear whether Atlantis, a vast island civilization that mysteriously vanished, was an actual place, the legends of which Plato had read, or merely the product of his (or another’s) fertile imagination.

Geography/Geodesy. (2004). In Science in the Ancient World: An Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Retrieved April 11, 2009, from http://www.credoreference.com.ezproxy.dom.edu/entry/7921308 

 Copyright © 1996 by Kenneth McLeish