The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction
Abstract
For the Greeks and Romans, the Earth's furthest perimeter was a realm radically different from what they perceived as central and human. The alien qualities of these edges of the became the basis of a literary tradition that endured throughout antiquity and into the Renaissance, despite the growing challenges of emerging scientific perspectives. This survey reveals that the Greeks, and to a somewhat lesser extent the Romans, saw geography not as a branch of physical science but as an important literary genre. The tradition described by Romm emerged in Homer and Hestiod, whose imaginative geography defined the Earth by giving it boundaries - the river Ocean, the Pillars of Heracles, and other mythical forms of circumscription. Other Greek authors developed exotic literary landscapes by filling these limits with idealized human societies and bizarre or monstrous animal life, while the Romans adapted the concept of perimeters to goals of imperial conquest. As Hellenistic and Roman voyages of exploration failed to confirm the fancied landscapes, the tradition came to be seen as one in which invented narratives had masqueraded as truths. As a result, some of late antiquity's most daring innovations seized on geography as a theme for prose fiction, and the explorer's log became an important antecedent of the early modern novel.
Cite this
Richard J. A. Talbert, James S. Romm (1994). The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction. The American Journal of Philology. https://doi.org/10.2307/295308
@article{a1994the,
title = {The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction},
author = {Talbert, Richard J. A. and Romm, James S.},
year = {1994},
journal = {The American Journal of Philology},
doi = {10.2307/295308}
}Citations in this library
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