Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/304

 28b HISTORY OF GREECE. at once desperate and unprofitable ; but doubtless many person treated it as a mere " Phenician lie, " ] (to use an expression pro Romer. vol. i, p. 61 ; Mannert, Geog. d. G. und Romer, vol. i, pp. 19-26. Gossellin (Recherchcs sur la Gc'ogr. des Anc. i, p. 149) and Mannert both reject the story as not worthy of belief: Hecren defends it (Ideen Ober den Verkehr der Alten Welt, i, 2, pp. 86-95). Agatharchides, in the second century B. c.. pronounces the eastern coast of Africa, southward of the Red sea, to be as yet unexamincd : he treats it as a matter of certainty, however, that the sea to the south-westward is con- tinuous with the Western ocean (Dc Rubro Mari, Geog. Minorcs, cd. Huds. v,i,p. 11). 1 Strabo, iii, p. 170. Sataspes (the unsuccessful Persian circumnavigator of Libya, mentioned just above) had violated the daughter of another Per- sian nobleman, Zopyrus son of Megabyzus, and Xerxes had given orders that he should be crucified for this act ; his mother begged him off by sug- gesting that he should be condemned to something " worse than death" the circumnavigation of Libya (Herod, iv, 43). Two things are to be remarked in respect to his voyage: 1. He took with him a ship and seamen from Egypt ; we are not told that they were Phenician : probably no other mari- ners than Phenicians were competent to such a voyage, and even if the crew of Sataspes had been Phenicians, he could not offer rewards for success equal to those at the disposal of Nekos. 2. He began his enterprise from the strait of Gibraltar instead of from the Red sea ; now it seems that the cur- rent between Madagascar and the eastern coast of Africa sets very strongly towards the cape of Good Hope, so that while it greatly assists the southerly voyage, on the other hand, it makes return by the same way very difficult. ("See Humboldt, Examen Critique de 1'Histoire de la Ge'ographie, t i, p. 343.) Strabo, however, affirms that all those who had tried to circumnavigate Africa, both from the Red sea and from the strait of Gibraltar, had been forced to return without success (i, p. 32), so that most people believed that there was a continuous isthmus which rendered it impracticable to go by sea from the one point to the other : he is himself, however, persuaded that the Atlantic is cvpfrovs on both sides of Africa, and therefore that circumnavigation is possible. He as well as Poseidonias (ii, pp. 98-100) disbelieved the tale of the Phenicians sent by Nekos. He must have derived his complete convic- tion, that Libya might be circumnavigated, from geographical theory, which led him to contract the dimensions of that continent southward, inasmuch as the thing in his belief never had been done, though often attempted. Mannert (Geog. d. G. und Rom. i, p. 24) erroneously says that Strabo and others founded their belief on the narrative of Herodotus. It is worth while remarking that Strabo cannot have read the story in He rodotus with much attention, since he mentions Darius as the king who sent the Phenicians round Africa, not Nekos ; nor does he take notice of the re markable statement of these navigators respecting the position of the san. There were doubtless many apocryphal narratives current in his time ro