Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/300

 284 HISTOEY OF GREECE. believes it. There seems good reason for sharing in his i iclief, though several able critics reject the tale as incredible. 'Ihe Phenicians were expert and daring masters of coast navigation, and in going round Africa they had no occasion ever to lose sight of land : we may presume that their vessels were amply stored, so that they could take their own time, and lie by in bad weather; we may also take for granted that the reward conse- quent upon success was considerable. For any other mariners then existing, indeed, the undertaking might have been too hard, but it was not so for them, and that was the reason why Nekos chose them. To such reasons, which show the story to present no intrinsic incredibility (that, indeed, is hardly alleged even by Mannert and others who disbelieve it), we may add one other, which goes far to prove it positively true. They stated that, in the course of their circuit, they had the sun on their right hand (i. e. to the northward); and this phenomenon, observable accord- ing to the season even when they were within the tropics, could not fail to force itself on their attention as constant, after they had reached the southern temperate zone. But Herodotus at once pronounces this part of the story to be incredible, and so it would probably appear to every Greek 1, Phenician, or Egyptian, not only of the age of Nekos, but even of the time of Herodotus, who heard it ; since none of them possessed either actual experi- ence of the phenomenon of a southern latitude, or a sufficiently correct theory of the relation between sun and earth, to under- stand the varying direction of the shadows ; and few men would consent to set aside the received ideas with reference to the solar motions, from pure confidence in the veracity of these Phenician narrators. Now that under such circumstances the latter should invent the tale, is highly improbable ; and if they were not in- Some critics have construed the words, in which Herodotus alludes to tho Carthaginians as his informants, as if what they told him was the story of the fruitless attempt made by Sataspes. But this is evidently not the meaning of the historian : he brings forward the opinion of the Carthaginians as con firmatory of the statement made by the Phenicians employed by Nekos. 1 Diodorus (iii. 40) talks correct language about the direction of the shadows southward of the tropic of Cancer (compare Pliny, H. N. vi, 29), - one mark of the extension of geographical and astronomical observationi daring the four intervening centuries between him and Herodotus.