THE CALCUTTA REVIEW. NO. CXLIII. ART. I THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE GREEKS AND ROMANS. MR. Μ' panied by twenty illustrative maps, has placed within the reach of every one the wonderful story of the slow and gradual progress of human knowledge of the earth on which they lived, acquired by the Greeks and Romans from the time of Homer to that of the Emperor Antonine. The last was the high water mark of geographical knowledge for many centuries, until Europe woke up from the sleep of the Dark Ages, and it is humiliating to think how even now vast regions are imperfectly known, or not known at all, both in Asia and in Africa. Bunbury's narrative is in a high degree fascinating: many portions read like a romance on the other hand, it is the result of many years of study, an accurate comparison of all existing records, and an equally accurate knowledge of geographical facts, as they are to exist. It may indeed be called the Manual of Comparative or Historical Geography, as derived from the classical authors, and the basis of our own modern knowledge. known now Mr. Recent discoveries have revealed to us that there were other systems of geography unknown to the Greeks, and, if known, despised, by the Romans. A large volume of Antient Egyptian Geography has lately been published by Brugsch Bey: the great Assyrian and Babylonian Empires must have had a good knowledge of the countries, east and west and north, which had fallen under their sway: unfortunately neither Herodotus nor Ctesias had access to their documents. That the chief physical features of India were well-known to Sanskrit authors, is evidenced by numerous incidental allusions in many of their works, even as far back as the Veda, which allude to the rivers of the Panjab and to the ocean. Megasthenes might have brought back further notices than he appears to have gathered at the Court of Palibothra. Lastly, Chinese annals disclose a new world of geography, and kingdoms, religions, languages, and customs, of which the Greeks never dreamt, and of which the Romans, even down to the time of Ptolemy, the last and greatest geographer, had a most imperfect conception. We must not hoodwink ourselves, and rest upon the old legal maxim that things which do not appear, might as well not exist when we talk about the knowledge of the world by the antients, we mean only the Greeks and the Romans, who falsely asserted themselves to be the heirs of all the previous ages, and the recipients of all pre-existing knowledge. We know now how small a portion of the intellectual wealth of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China had reached them. The antient Arabians had no doubt a commercial geography of their own, for which they are not fully credited. And during the darkness of the Middle Ages of Europe the later Arabs again took up the task of discovery, and made important contributions to modern knowledge for which they get but scant credit. Our modern explorers in African, east and west, north and south, have revealed the fact that that continent has been traversed by caravans for centuries, and that the knowledge which we have now obtained, might have been attained much earlier, if we had only set about it in earnest. We can realise somewhat the position of the antient Romans and Greeks to the whole world by considering our own position at the present moment to the centre of Africa, of Borneo, of Papua, of the Peninsula of Korea, of the plateau of Tibet and forty years ago, of how many parts of nearer and further India, and of the Chinese Empire, little or nothing was known! How vague was the knowledge of Afghanistan, Kashmir and the Valley of the Indus! Great as has been the progress during that period of geographical discovery, how much still remains to be done? At any rate the Greeks came into the inheritance of whatever traditional or written knowledge the Phoenicians possessed, and we shall see further on that Eratosthenes of Alexandria had access to the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, which contained the not inconsiderable geographical notices of the Hebrew writers. Unfortunately both the Phoenician and Carthaginian annals have totally perished. As early as the days of Solomon these adventurous merchants had spanned the whole length of the Mediterranean and founded a colony at Tartessus, or Cadiz, beyond the pillars of Hercules. With the name of this great hero, whoever he was, is associated a still more distant discovery, that of the golden apples of the Hesperides, or the islands of the Canaries. Not the glightest allusion is made to this legend by Homer, nor yet to those distant eastern lands with which the Phoenicians must have had direct or indirect intercourse by way of barter, through the Arabians, as far back as the days of Solomon. The silence of Homer is therefore not conclusive against the Phoenician discoveries to the west, when he is totally silent with regard to their undoubted communications with the east. From Egypt, probably, the Greeks had heard of the Ethiopians, and of the Pygmies, whose existence has in these last days, in these very regions, been ascertained. Two articles of commerce, unknown as products of the country bordering on the Mediterranean, are mentioned by Homer, and must have been imported from the distant regions beyond the pillars of Hercules by the Phoenicians. These are tin and amber. That the former came from the islands of the Cassiterides there is a concurrence of testimony, and that these islands represented the county of Cornwall there can be no doubt. The latter is found exclusively on the northern shores of Germany, and most extensively on the shores of the Baltic Sea. We have to believe, that the Phoenicians had communication, directly, or through third parties, with the collectors of this valuable commodity, or that it was conveyed overland, as unquestionably it is frequently mentioned by Homer. As was to be expected, the earliest voyages and travels, that have come down to us, are down to us, are enshrined in poetry, and surrounded with a halo of fiction, though accepted as genuine history by the uncritical antients. The first of these legends, and anterior to Homer, is the voyage of the Argonauts. It was developed, and enlarged and localized by succeeding chroniclers, and it was fondly believed, even at the time of Augustus, that Colchis and the banks of the River Phasis were the scene of the events narrated but there is no authority for such details. From Mimnermus, the oldest authority, we learn no further than that Eetes lived on the banks of the Ocean-stream in the farthest East, and Homer alludes to the voyage as even in his time world famous. In this critical age we know from our experience of the poems and novels of Walter Scott, how soon the most airy creations of the brain are localized, and entirely groundless details accepted as fact, by a too credulous generation. All that can be conceded is, that at a very remote period, long before the colonization of the shores of the Black Sea, some adventurous Greek navigator did penetrate through the Straits of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus into the Euxine. The geographical notions of Homer in his two great epics are next in date. There can be no doubt that Homer believed the earth to be a place of circular form, surrounded on all sides by the ocean, which was conceived of, not as a sea, but as a vast continuous stream, flowing round the earth: that the sun rose out of the Ocean-stream, and again sunk into the same at setting; the stars followed the same course, and bathed every day in the waters of the ocean, with one exception, the Great Bear, which alone had no share in the Baths of the ocean. To these phenomena may be added the very significant fact, that the Ethiopians, or burnt faced men, are described as living to the south of Egypt, on the borders of the Ocean-stream, at the extreme limits of the world, and that they were divided into two portious, the one towards the setting, the other towards the rising sun. From this statement may fairly be deduced the fact that Homer knew of the existence of the black races on the west, as well as the east, coast of Africa. Eratosthenes, the father of scientific geography, pointed out that Homer was well-acquainted with the regions near at hand, but ignorant of those afar off. This conclusion, apparently so obvious, was rejected with scorn by such writers as Strabo and Polybius in fact such a web of superstitious reverence had been woven round the great Greek Epics, that it was deemed heresy to question Homer's dicta as regards geography, history, and ethnology. This absence of critical judgment arrested the progress of true science for several centuries: it is, as if the geographers of Europe had felt themselves tied down by the occasional notices of places in the Old Testament, or the rising generation of Indians were unable to burst the shackles of Vedic, Puranic, and Sanskritic geography. Some certain conclusions can be drawn both from the notices and silence of Homer. He knew nothing of the division of the world into three continents. The union of syllables, which make up the important names of Europe and Africa had not been formed, and the term Asia is restricted to the meadows on the banks of the Cayster. On the other hand, his description of the relative position of the lofty island of Samothrace and the low island of Imbros, as seen from the plains of Troy, is that of an eye-witness of the scene. An incidental allusion to a voyage to Egypt, which Ulysses pretended to have made in the assumed character of a Cretan, though the narrative is a fiction, is obviously in accordance with ordinary experience. Menelaus mentions having visited Egypt, Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Libya, by which was probably meant the country round Cyrene. Homer abounds iu descriptions of the sea, from which a large part of his similes were taken, but he had no idea of any sea but the Mediterranean, though it is called by no such name. There is nothing to show that he knew ought of the Bosphorus, the Euxine, the Ister, the Eridanus, the Phasis, or the Nile. In due course every place mentioned in the Iliad, or visited by Ulysses, was localized, and it would have been deemed a sin to doubt the identification; but it is palpable that Homer was drawing upon his imagination, or weaving into his story the current legends of the day, with no idea of the use which future generations would make of his poetic flights. He had some vague knowledge of nomad tribes, "milkers of mares," living beyond the mountains of Thrace; but the ominous. word "Scythian" does not appear, either from the imperfection of knowledge of the poet, or, because, in the progression of races from the East to the West, that horde had not as yet appeared in the longitude of Greece and Asia Minor. His mention of Pygmies, who dwelt to the south of Egypt, by the shores of the Oceanstream, has received a singular confirmation within the last few years from the discovery of the race of Akka dwarfs to the west of the Albert Nyanza, who were probably at that time more widely diffused. On the other hand, strange to say, his know. ledge of the physical features of Ithaka, and its relative position to the adjacent islands, is vague, and not compatible with local knowledge. Not a whisper of the existence of the great monarchies of Mesopotamia had reached the ear of the Poet: not a ripple of Chaldean, or Assyrian, or Hamathite culture had disturbed the Homeric sea: and, as stated above, no trace is found of any of the legends of conquest in the far west, which had gathered round the name of Hercules; while, although Atlas is mentioned, the myth of his supporting the heavens on his shoulders had not been developed. Whatever may be the age assigned to Homer, he is justly considered as the beginning of Greek culture, and of the character above described is the geographical knowledge of which he was possessed. And it must be remembered that in such poems, with such freedom of descriptive power, and license of expression, the silence of the poet upon the subject of existing political, and remarkable physical phenomena implies an ignorance of them on his own part, and therefore of his hearers. One of the first prose writings in the Greek language is the geographical treatise of Hecatæus, which was probably published before the end of the sixth century before the Christian era. The work was named Periodus, or Description of the Earth. Unfortunately it has perished, and all that we knew of it is collected from fragments quoted in the works of later writers, which have been lately brought together and published by Muller in his Fragmenta Historicorum Græcorum. Allusion must here be made to the unhappy literary fate of this, and many other of the esteemed early writers: All that we know of them is from fragmentary quotations, or translations of quotations, made by honest, but unsympathetic, successors, for whose accuracy we have no guarantee, and who, as often as not, were hostile, carping and jealous: it is as if all our knowledge of the histories of Clarendon and Hume were preserved in quotations |