Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/398

 3 66 fflSTORT OF GREECE. Numerous and flourishing colonies were founded in Sicily, the south of Italy, the coasts of Epirus and of the Euxine Sea : the Phokaeans explored the whole of the Adriatic, established Mas- salia, and penetrated even as far as the south of Iberia, with which they carried on a lucrative commerce. 1 The geographical ideas of the Greeks were thus both expanded and rectified : the first preparation of a map, by Anaximander the disciple of Thales, is an epoch in the history of science. We may note the ridicule bestowed by Herodotus both upon the supposed people called Hyperboreans and upon the idea of a circumfluous ocean-stream, as demonstrating the progress of the age in this department of inquiry. 2 And even earlier than Herodotus, Xanthus had no- ticed the occurrence of fossil marine productions in the interior of Asia Minor, which led him to reflections on the changes of the earth's surface with respect to land and water. 3 If then we look down the three centuries and a half which elapsed between the commencement of the Olympic aera and the age of Herodotus and Thucydides, we shall discern a striking advance in the Greeks, ethical, social and intellectual. Posi- tive history and chronology has not only been created, but in the case of Thucydides, the qualities necessary to the historiographer, in their application to recent events, have been developed with a degree of perfection never since surpassed. Men's minds have assumed a gentler as well as a juster cast ; and acts come to be criticized with reference to their bearing on the internal happi- ness of a well-regulated community, as well as upon the stand- 1 Herodot i. 163. 2 Herodot. iv. 36. ye/ltJ 6e opeuv 1% irepiodove ypuipavraf iro/lAovf fjSri, tal oiideva voov e%ovTa<; ef^yjyaa/zevov ol 'QKEOVOV re peovra yputyovai irEpi% rrjv y^v, koiiaav Kvntorepea wf and ropvov, etc., a remark probably directed igainst Hekataeus. Respecting the map of Anaximander, Strabo, i. p. 7 ; Diogen. LaCrt. ii. ; Agathemer ap. Geograph. Minor, i. 1. irpuroc erokfiijaE TTJV olmvfisvTjv .V mvaKi ypuijjai. Aristagoras of Miletus, who visited Sparta to solicit aid for the revolted rtnians against Darius, brought with him a brazen tablet or map, by means jf which he exhibited the relative position of places in the Persian cmpiro 'Herodot. v. 49). Xanthus ap. Stoabo. i. p. 50; xii. p. 579. Compare Creuzer, Fragments kanuii, p. 162.