Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/88

 48 THE QUEST FOR INDIA BY SEA So little impression did the voyage make on the minds of sober men that Eratosthenes found no record of it in the Alexandrian library in the third century before Christ, nor Marinus of Tyre in the second A. D. Hanno's shorter expedition down the western coast of Africa (circ. 570 B. c.) had the good fortune to be in- scribed on a temple at Carthage, and passed thence into the geography of the Greek and Roman world. A cen- tury later (circ. 470 B.C.), according to Herodotus, a nephew of Darius undertook to circumnavigate Africa in commutation of a sentence of death by impale- ment, returned unsuccessful, and was executed by Xerxes. The legend of these expeditions, like those of the Insulae Fortunatae and Homer's blissful realms of ut- most earth, waxed faint in the centuries of eclipse which followed the overthrow of Roman civilization. Even to a friend of Ovid the Atlantic was a sea of darkness. Two schools of geographers had arisen, one affirming the Atlantic to be a great lake with no outlet into other seas, the other maintaining the possibility of circumnavigating Africa. An Alexandrian philosopher of the seventh century A. D. thus sums up the opinion of his time: " Certain men have supposed, following a foolish tradition, that the Atlantic is united on the south with the Indian Ocean. They pretend that sev- eral navigators have been carried by accident from the Atlantic Sea to that ocean, which is evidently false. For it would require that the ocean should extend quite across Libya, and even under the torrid zone. Now