The Classical Tradition and the Americas: Volume 1/Part1 European Images of the Americas and the Classical Tradition [Reprint 2011 ed.] 9783110870244, 9783110115727

Table of contents :
America and the Classical Tradition: Preface and Introduction
Volume I.1: I. Scholarly and Literary Images of the New World from the Time of Columbus to the Present
1. General Subjects
Classical Models of World Geography and Their Transformation following the Discovery of America
New World and “novos orbos”: Seneca in the Renaissance Debate over Ancient Knowledge of the Americas
The Adjustment of Ptolemaic Atlases to Feature the New World
Classical Ethnography and Its Influence on the European Perception of the Peoples of the New World
The Euhemerist and the European Perception and Description of the American Indians
Myths and Legends in the Old World and European Expansionism on the American Continent
The Other World and the ‘Antipodes’. The Myth of Unknown Countries between Antiquity and the Renaissance
The Amazon Myth and Latin America
«El Dorado» and the Myth of the Golden Fleece
Classical Antiquity, America, and the Myth of the Noble Savage
Adveniat tandem Typhis qui detegat orbes. COLUMBUS in Neo-Latin Epic Poetry (15th–18th Centuries)
The American Indians and the Ancients of Europe: The Idea of Comparison and the Construction of Historical Time in the 18th Century

Citation preview

T H E CLASSICAL T R A D I T I O N AND T H E AMERICAS VOLUME 1.1

THE CLASSICAL TRADITION AND T H E AMERICAS (CTA)

E D I T E D BY

WOLFGANG

HAASE

AND

MEYER

REINHOLD

W G DE

WALTER DE G R U Y T E R • BERLIN • NEW YORK 1994

T H E CLASSICAL T R A D I T I O N AND T H E AMERICAS VOLUME I: EUROPEAN IMAGES OF T H E AMERICAS AND THE CLASSICAL T R A D I T I O N PART 1

EDITED BY

WOLFGANG

HAASE

AND

MEYER

REINHOLD

W G DE

WALTER DE G R U Y T E R · BERLIN · NEW YORK 1994

This work has been prepared and edited with the generous support of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation (Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung) in Königswinter (Bonn) and Washington, D. C. and of the Robert Bosch Foundation (Robert Bosch-Stiftung) in Stuttgart.

© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Data

The Classical tradition and the Americas / edited by Wolfgang Haase and Meyer Reinhold, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. Contents: v. 1. European images of the Americas and the classical tradition (2 pts.) ISBN 3-11-011572-7 (alk. paper) 1. America - Civilization - Classical influences. 2. America — — Foreign public opinion, European. 3. Public opinion — Europe — - History. 4. Civilization, Classcial - Study and teaching — America. 5. America — Relations - Europe. 6. Europe —Relations —America. I. Haase, Wolfgang. II. Reinhold, Meyer, 1909- . E20.C57 1994 973 - dc20 93-35000 CIP

Die Deutsche Bibliothek

— Cataloging-in-Publication

Data

The classical tradition and the Americas : (CTA) / ed. by Wolfgang Haase and Meyer Reinhold. — Berlin ; New York : de Gruyter. NE: Haase, Wolfgang [Hrsg.]; CTA Vol. 1. European images of the Americas and the classical tradition. Part 1. - 1993 ISBN 3-11-011572-7

© Copyright 1993 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. N o part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Typesetting and Printing: Arthur Collignon, Berlin. Binding: Lüderitz 8t Bauer, Berlin. Printed in Germany.

America and the Classical Tradition: Preface and Introduction by

WOLFGANG H A A S E

(Boston, Mass. - Tübingen)

The present work is characterized by a fundamental duality of perspective. This duality is reflected in the structure of its title, The Classical Tradition and the Americas, and in the concepts contained therein. For that reason, it can best be described with reference to its title. "Classical" here refers to Greek and Roman antiquity in Europe and the lands around the Mediterranean, and this in a twofold sense, both particular and general, either with reference to a selection of normative phenomena drawn from that antiquity, or as descriptive of antiquity in its totality. The "tradition" of the classical in its twofold sense is the relationship, continuing throughout the centuries, between each respective "present" and antiquity, a relationship determined at all times both by the conditions of each "present" and by the circumstances of the past, and assuming greatly different forms according to time and place. Its content may extend to all phenomena of antiquity and of the present, whether these be language and literature, the visual arts, architecture, philosophy, science, mythology, political institutions, social and individual values, etc. etc. 1 . In each of its temporal and regional 1

In principle, "classical tradition" is understood here in the sense of the well-known and influential book by GILBERT HIGHET, The Classical Tradition. Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949). This overview, the scope of which is limited to literature, may be considered as having been progressively augmented by the panorama unfolded in four other books, including one comprehensive work by a single author and three collected volumes: R. R. BOLGAR, The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries. From the Carolingian Age to the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954; repr. 1958), and the three volumes edited by R. R. BOLGAR and published by Cambridge University Press: Classical Influences on European Culture, A.D. 500—1500. Proceedings of an International Conference held at King's College, Cambridge, April 1969 (published 1971); Classical Influences on European Culture, A.D. 1500 — 1700. Proceedings of an International Conference held at King's College, Cambridge, April 1974 (published 1976); and Classical Influences on Western Thought, A.D. 1650 — 1870. Proceedings of an International Conference held at King's College, Cambridge, March 1977 (published 1979). To these should be added the sum of the work appearing in three outstanding collections, as superior in their scholarship as they are readable: The Legacy of Greece. A New Appraisal, ed. by MOSES I. FINLEY (Oxford:

VI

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HAASE

manifestations it is dependent both on the range of the materials transmitted from antiquity and on the needs, interests, and capacities of the present. It is therefore selective and subjective in its content and in its form; only in modern scholarship 2 as it has developed in the wake of Renaissance humanism and especially since the 19th century turn to historicism and positivism has it displayed a tendency to seek for historical " t r u t h " and objectivity: nevertheless, it has always and everywhere been shaped in a more or less simple or subtle way by decisions of active recipients throughout the course of tradition. Since in this sense tradition and reception are always intertwined, the sharpened awareness of method characteristic of the modern era has come to prefer the concept of "history of reception" to that of tradition for purposes of scholarly terminology. 3 Once the meanings are clear, as one may expect Clarendon Press and New York: Oxford University Press, 1 9 8 1 ) , and Perceptions of the ed. by K E N N E T H J . D O V E R (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1 9 9 2 ) ; as well as The Legacy of Rome. A New Appraisal, ed. by R I C H A R D JENKYNS (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). For the origins, history, and theory of historical classical scholarship, cf., as examples, the following works, each of which treats its subject in a fundamental fashion, though in a descending order of generality, while relating their special topic to the field as a whole: A U G U S T B U C K , Humanismus. Seine europäische Entwicklung in Dokumenten und Darstellungen, ser. Orbis Academicus (Freiburg and Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 1987);

Ancient Greeks,

2

Philologie und Hermeneutik

im 19. Jahrhundert.

Zur Geschichte und Methodologie

der

Geisteswissenschaften. Aus dem Förderungsbereich "Grundlagen der geisteswissenschaftlichen Forschung" der Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, ed. by HELLMUT FLASHAR, KARLFRIED G R Ü N D E R , and A X E L H O R S T M A N N (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1979); Philolo-

gie und Hermeneutik Förderungsbereich

etc. Ii/Philologie

etc., ed.

by

et hermeneutique

MAYOTTE

BOLLACK

and

au 19e siecle 11. Aus dem

HEINZ WISMANN

(Göttingen:

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983); L'Antichitä nell'Ottocento in Italia e Germania/Die Antike im 19. Jahrhundert in Italien und Deutschland, ed. by K A R L C H R I S T and A R N A L D O

MOMIGLIANO (Bologna: Societa editrice il Mulino, and Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1988): see KARL CHRIST, "Aspekte der Antike-Rezeption in der deutschen Altertumswissenschaft des 19. Jahrhunderts," 2 1 - 3 7 , esp. section II, 27 ff.: "Die Verwissenschaftlichung der Antike," AXEL HORSTMANN, "August Boeckh und die Antike-Rezeption im 19. Jahrhundert," 3 9 - 7 5 , and KARL CHRIST, "Ernst Curtius und J a c o b Burckhardt. Zur deutschen Rezeption der griechischen Geschichte im 19. Jahrhundert," 221—48; in addition, see A X E L H O R S T M A N N , Antike Theoria und moderne Wissenschaft. August

Boeckhs

Konzeption

der Philologie,

Philosophie und Geschichte der Wissenschaften.

Studien und Quellen 17 (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, etc.: Peter Lang, 1992), with rich current bibliography, pp. 3 4 1 - 6 1 ; JOACHIM WOHLLEBEN, "Germany 1 7 5 0 - 1 8 3 0 , "

in: Perceptions of the Ancient Greeks {op. cit., η. 1 above) 170 — 224, here 197 ff., and A N T H O N Y G R A F T O N , "Germany and the West 1 8 3 0 - 1 9 0 0 , " ibid. 225 - 245.

3

On this and related questions of definition and terminology, see, e. g., CHARLES MARTINRedeeming the Text. Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutic of Reception, ser. Roman Literature and its Contexts (Cambridge, New York, and Oakleigh: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Cf. also WILFRIED BARNER, "Wirkungsgeschichte und Tradition. Ein Beitrag zur Methodologie der Rezeptionsforschung," in: G U N T E R G R I M M (ed.), Literatur und DALE,

Leser. Theorien und Modelle zur Rezeption literarischer Werke (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1975), 85 - 100 [with notes pp. 379 ff.]; W A L T E R M A G A S S , Hermeneutik, Rheotrik und Semiotik.

AMERICA AND THE CLASSICAL TRADITION

VII

with an audience that has a serious interest in the fate of antiquity over the course of centuries, in its "fortuna," to borrow a conveniently evasive Italian usage, then "classical tradition" and "reception of antiquity" may be used almost interchangeably. Both these notions, necessarily related to each other, while emphasizing different angles of vision, give a more adequate description of what was often previously referred to, somewhat naively, as the "afterlife" of antiquity or its individual phenomena. Those also allow room for a thoughtful use of the concept of "influence" and are flexible enough to include all the dynamic qualities of the possible attitudes to the aspects of antiquity that have been transmitted and received, or made available for reception — from the most intense affirmation, as illustrated, for example, by a variety of so-called "renaissances," to the most decided rejection, something which, interestingly enough, has never yet happened in any total or historically definitive way. The classical tradition, thus understood, was until the time of the first European encounter with and successive "discoveries" of the Western hemisphere associated only with particular geographical regions extending outward from the Mediterranean and encompassing, over the ages that had elapsed since Greco-Roman antiquity, areas of different extent within Europe, Asia, and North Africa. To the new developments that the age of European expansion beyond the Atlantic brought to Europe and the Western hemisphere, the "classical tradition" made a complex contribution. In essence, that contribution was twofold. On the one hand, it turned European eyes from the familiar parts of the world, the "earth" in the sense of the Roman orbis terrarum, to open up for them the possibility of the discovery of new regions, thus hypothetically suggesting in advance the idea of a "new world;" then, when new realms were in fact opened to the Europeans, its customary system of categories played a crucial role in shaping the image of the "new" in the

Studien zur Rezeptionsgeschichte der Bibel, Diss. (Constance, 1985) pp. 131 ff.; Zum Problem der Rezeption in den Geisteswissenschaften, Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur (Mainz), Abhandlungen der geistes- und sozial wissenschaftlichen Klasse, 1986, no. 7 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GmbH, 1987), especially HERMANN LANGE, "Das Problem der Rezeption im Recht," 3 - 4 ; WILFRIED BARNER'S "Einleitung" to the volume Tradition, Norm, Innovation. Soziales und literarisches Traditionsverhalten in der Frühzeit der deutschen Aufklärung, ed. by WILFRIED BARNER (with the cooperation of ELISABETH MÜLLER-LUCKNER), Schriften des Historischen Kollegs. Kolloquien 15 (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1989) pp. I X - X X I V ; ANTHONY GRAFTON'S fine "Introduction" under the title "Notes from Underground on Cultural Transmission" to the volume The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe, eds. ANTHONY GRAFTON and ANN BLAIR (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990) 1 - 7 ; and recently H(ANS) R(OBERT) JAUSS, "Rezeption, Rezeptionsästhetik," Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie 8 (1992), cols. 9 9 6 - 1 0 0 4 , as well as D(IETMAR) SCHANBACHER, "Rezeption, juristische," ibid., cols. 1 0 0 4 - 1 0 0 8 . See also, on a more general and abstract level, GERALD L. BRUNS, Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), esp. ch. 10, pp. 1 9 5 - 2 1 2 : " W h a t is Tradition?"

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European imagination, and this over a long period of time. On the other hand, the Europeans who formed permanent settlements on the continents soon to be named "America" after a European, transferred that complex there as a fixed part of the culture they brought with them, and it played, and continues to play, a role in the cultural Europeanization of the "new" world in both major American continents that has been partly new, partly problematic, but is in any case worthy of scholarly knowledge and understanding; a role that to varying degrees has always, and especially since the end of the colonial period, also been "American." The classical tradition in the Americas therefore constitutes the subject of one, and by far the larger, of the two major parts of this work. The predominantly European perspective of the intellectual preparation for and comprehensive mental dealing with the encounter with the unknown lands and peoples is treated in the other, shorter part. Both together make up the panorama of The Classical Tradition and the Americas. Because of the temporal priority of Europe in the history of the "classical tradition," the shorter part is placed at the beginning; it consists of the present Volume I,

entitled European Images of the Americas and the Classical Tradition. The second part will consist of the remaining volumes: Volume II on The

Classical

Tradition in the Latin American Countries, Volumes III and IV on The Classical Tradition in Colonial America and the United States, Volume V on The Classical Tradition in Canada, and Volume VI on Classical Scholarship in the Americas.

The idea for this work arose in the mid-1980s, with a view to the year 1992 as one of historical reflection on America and especially on the relationship between America and Europe. From the beginning it was clear that this was not to be a massive contribution to a "celebration" of the five hundredth anniversary of the portentous events of 1492, then still commonly referred to, almost unthinkingly, as the "discovery of America," but which, as historians had long known, was in fact nothing but the landing of Columbus on a coast he had not sought, ignorant of what he had really found. On the other hand, it could not be the intent for a project focused on a partial aspect of the emergence of European culture in America simply to join the growing chorus of highly politicized negative criticism of the role of the European in the Americas. Despite full awareness of the fact that there is no such thing as pure objectivity, even in scholarly investigations, there will be no intention here to present, either in the whole work or in its parts, a preconceived positive or negative tendency. The only fundamental preconception, whether expressed or not, is that the subject of the classical tradition, related to America in the twofold perspective described above, is one that will repay investigation and description. The general cultural debate may take up this theme at a later time and may then find in this comprehensive scholarly investigation some points of reference for casting its own subject in a more objective light. The desire, for the present, to maintain a certain distance from

AMERICA AND THE CLASSICAL TRADITION

IX

current debates that are primarily political rather than scholarly in their motivation has, in the event, derived advantage from the fact that the unexpectedly long period of preparation has delayed the beginning of publication past the symbolic year of the "Quincentenary," into the immediately subsequent year 1993. There can be no doubt of the fact that the subject of this work is, in itself, worthy of scholarly investigation. In addition, there are a number of good reasons for thinking that this may be the right moment to make it the focus of attention. The importance of the subject is beyond question, simply in view of the acknowledged significance for both sides, America and Europe, of the encounter of Europe with the so-called New World and of the presence of originally European culture in the Western hemisphere — and this without regard to assessments of that significance as good or bad, or, more properly, good and bad. Likewise, there is fundamental agreement on the importance of elements of the classical tradition in the history of European culture in both hemispheres, a point to which we will return. As concerns the scholarly currency of the subject, it is determined by the overall actuality of the major fields of American history and culture and of the reception of antiquity. Interest in the Americas in general is clearly paramount, partly because of the size of the region and its present role, and partly because of expectations about its future role in what has become a genuinely global context. Clearly, interest in American history was increased to some degree by the work of recovering the historical record in connection with a series of anniversaries during the last three decades: these occasioned a look back over various phases of 150 years of independent statehood in Latin America, 200 years since the Declaration of Independence in the United States (1976), 200 years of the United States Constitution (1989), 200 years of the United States Bill of Rights (1991). Of these, the most recent and, from the point of view of both sides of the Atlantic, the most fundamental was the 1992 "Quincentenary." The currency of the subject of the reception of antiquity is rooted in the emergence, since the 1960s, of a general field of research, highly developed both in theory and method, of the history of tradition, reception, and influence, in the course of which the importance of the reception of antiquity has been newly appreciated and has been studied more extensively as well as intensively.4 This research has been pursued not only by increasing numbers of classical scholars, who have always been interested in the transmission of the phenomena of ancient culture and, to an extent, in the forms of their 4

On the reception of antiquity in this broader context, see, e.g., WILFRIED BARNER, "Neuphilologische Rezeptionsforschung und die Möglichkeiten der Klassischen Philologie," Poetica 9 ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 4 9 9 - 5 2 1 , and most recently M A R T I N D A L E , Redeeming the Text (η. 3 above).

WOLFGANG HAASE

χ

appropriation, use and transformation, but also by representatives of numerous other disciplines. Over time, the regular cooperation of many disciplines in the study of the reception of antiquity has come to reflect, in its breadth and diversity, something approaching the breadth and diversity of the historical subject itself. This can be graphically illustrated especially for the period since 1980 by the Bibliography of the Classical Tradition, appearing annually since 1985.5 The development from a diversity of projects, previously undertaken in isolation, to a relatively coherent field of study whose cultivators are striving for a certain unity of perspective and integration is clearly marked by the success of the initiative taken in the late 1980s to found an International Society for the Classical Tradition, which evoked a worldwide response.6 The Society, formally founded in 1990, by 1992 already numbered more than 500 members in 32 countries and all continents, primarily in Europe, the Americas and Australia, and thanks to the activity of its members is able to hold regular international meetings (to date: 1991 in North America [Boston, U.S.A.], and August 1992 in Europe [Tübingen, Germany]) and to support its own scholarly journal for the field, the International Journal of the Classical Tradition, which will begin publication in 1994. 7 The Society originated and presently has its center, together with the editorial offices of the "Bibliography" and the Journal, in the same Institute for the Classical Tradition, at Boston University, which (in cooperation with a branch office in Tübingen), is also issuing the present work, The Classical Tradition and the Americas. This work therefore appears in a situation that should be especially favorable to its reception, and its object is to make what is, from many points of view, a new contribution to the study of the classical tradition. With its overarching theme, the reception of antiquity in relationship to the Western hemisphere, it is devoted to a subject that has in no way been treated comprehensively or exhaustively to date, in all the important aspects of its historical manifestation, although because of its unique character it promises a variety of new insights. By way of introduction, we will sketch here some general features of this character, and then say a few words about the relevant state of research. These remarks apply first of all to the second and more extensive major part of the work, volumes II —VI on the classical tradition in the American continents themselves, and will be followed by corresponding

5

"Bibliography of the Classical Tradition" for the years 1 9 8 0 - 1 9 8 9 , compiled by MEYER REINHOLD, partly in cooperation with EMILY ALBU HANAWALT and others, published in the spring issues of each year of the journal Classical and Modern Literature, vol. 5 (1985) - vol. 12 (1992), in future (1994 ff.) as "Analytical Bibliography of the Classical Tradition (ABCT)," compiled under the direction of WOLFGANG HAASE and MEYER REINHOLD, to be published in the fall issues of the new International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT); see below.

6

S e e B E R N H A R D K Y T Z L E R , Gnomon

7

E d i t e d by M E Y E R REINHOLD a n d WOLFGANG HAASE ( N e w B r u n s w i c k , N . J . : T r a n s a c t i o n

Publishers, vol. Iff., 1994ff.).

6 3 ( 1 9 9 1 ) p. 5 7 5 .

AMERICA

AND

THE

CLASSICAL

TRADITION

XI

observations applicable to the first major part, the present volume I on European images of the Americas and the classical tradition. One peculiarity of the history of the reception of antiquity in the Americas is that its beginning was not only related to particular phases of European tradition, but was also connected with a radical physical transfer. 8 Aspects of continuity thus occur side by side with those of at least outward discontinuity. The content and forms of European classical tradition were at first transplanted, largely unchanged, into the completely new environment of the so-called New World. There they developed, on the one side in correspondence with the ongoing related European tradition, and on the other in constant confrontation with the fundamentally foreign; out of this there arose, over time, what were at least the beginnings and elements of specifically American traditions. The original foundations were laid by Europeans who settled on the other side of the Atlantic, bringing with them the classical curriculum of their schools and installing it as a fixed element in new educational institutions. This was the pattern, for example, in the Spanish provinces in Central and South America, beginning in the early 16th century under the direction of the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Augustinians, and later also the Jesuits. 9 . Already in 1538 the first university in the Western Hemisphere was founded in Santo Domingo. Classical education penetrated the British colonies of North America from the 17th century onward. 10 In New England, where the presence of well over 100 persons with Oxford or Cambridge degrees can be demonstrated by the year 1650 11 , institutions that exist even today became the centers of classical education: for example, the Boston Latin School, founded in 1635, and Harvard College, founded in 1636, followed by the other eight colonial colleges from William and Mary in 1693 to Dartmouth in 1769 12 . At similar institutions numerous people in both the Americas, to the extent

8

9

10

11

12

On the general subject of the uniqueness of the "absolute break brought about by the exceptionally long ocean crossing," with which no earlier transfer of culture can appropriately be compared, not even that associated with Alexander's advance into India or the expansion of the Roman Empire, see STEPHEN G R E E N B L A T T , Marvelous Possessions. The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 55. See JACQUES LAFAYE, "Literature and Intellectual Life in Colonial Spanish America," in: The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 2: Colonial Latin America, ed. by L E S L I E BETHELL (Cambridge, London, New York etc.: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 663 — 7 0 4 , esp. 6 7 3 ff. See L A W R E N C E A. C R E M I N , American Education. The Colonial Experience, 1607—1783 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). J . G A R D N E R B A R T L E T T , "University Alumni Founders of New England," Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachussetts 25 (1925): Transactions 1 9 2 2 - 1 9 2 4 , pp. 1 4 - 1 8 . See HERBERT W. BENARIO, "The Classics in Southern Higher Education," in: The Classical Tradition in the South (op. cit., n. 21 below), 15; cf. M E Y E R R E I N H O L D , "The Latin Tradition in America," Helios 14 (1987): 1 2 3 - 3 9 .

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that they did not bring their intellectual equipment with them from Europe or acquire it during extended stays abroad, received instruction and education that conditioned them to be part of the classically-constituted European tradition, with or without American variants. In the milieu of the Romance cultures of the Catholic southern continent, unlike the English and Protestant parts of the northern, considerable numbers of the descendants of the original inhabitants of the Americas were included in this process. It is scarcely necessary to make special mention of the fact that the receivers and agents of the classical tradition, to the extent that it found its home in the Americas, in those parts of their encounter with Greco-Roman antiquity that extended beyond the mere acquisition of the languages (with a heavy preponderance of Latin), like earlier and contemporary Europeans absorbed an image of antiquity that was highly selective and was molded by traditional and contemporary prejudices, interests and needs. This rendering of the classical tradition contemporary and functional is especially impressive when we observe the role played by classical education and the content of the classical tradition in both the Americas in the age of revolutions and wars of independence and in the early national developments, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In the political debates and struggles, both men like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson with their fellow revolutionaries in the North, and Simon Bolivar in the South adduced personalities, institutions, values and theories drawn from Greek and Roman antiquity as both positive and negative examples 13 . In the contemporary and subsequent broader cultural debates, while some rejected classical education and continued participation in the classical tradition as the expression of an undesirable dependence on the former European colonial powers, others, by a new turn to the ancient roots of pre- and supranational European culture, discovered elements that were seen as potentially contributing to the development of uniquely American national cultures, providing modes of associating these with the mainstream of western civilization, while distancing them from the modern European nation-states, especially from their respective former masters. As striking cases of this one may regard the emergence and flourishing in the United States since the turn of the 18th century of neoclassical architecture in the so-called Hellenic revival movement and of classical motifs in interior decoration 14 . From this age of fundamental

13

14

See respectively MEYER REINHOLD, "Classical Influences and Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought," and "The Classics and the Quest for Virtue in EighteenthCentury America," in: IDEM, Classica Americana (see n. 21 below), 94—115 and 142 — 73; and ANTHONY PAGDEN, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination. Studies in European and Spanish-American Social and Political Thought 1513 — 1830 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), 133 — 35 (ch. 6: "The End of Empire: Simon Bolivar and the Liberal Republic"). Both works provide additional bibliography. See R O G E R G. K E N N E D Y , Greek Revival America (New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1989); cf. IDEM, Orders from France. The Americans and the French in a Revolutionary World, 1780-1820 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989); passim·, and IDEM, Rediscovering America, A National Trust for Historic Preservation Book (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,

AMERICA

AND

THE

CLASSICAL

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XIII

decisions, classical education, for example, emerged in a stronger position in the United States than in the countries of Latin America, in which it had partly, in the second half of the 18th century already, suffered grave setbacks from the politically motivated expulsion of the Jesuits 1 5 . In the United States, that position was strenghened by a document of educational policy dating from 1828, the so-called Yale Report, and would endure with relative stability until the period between the two world wars of the twentieth century 16 . The classical tradition, as a part of culture in general, continues to exist until the present time in both Americas, its influence shifting upward and downward; in the 19th and 20th centuries such shifts have been critically influenced by the intellectual debates with universal modernization, especially mechanization and industrialization, and most recently with experiences that seemed to indicate the approaching end of modernism as it was understood heretofore 17 . Finally, since the second half of the 19th century the study of classical antiquity as a historical discipline has been added, in both Americas, to classical education and the general reception of ancient culture as a third mode of relationship to antiquity. This has developed, especially in the United States, from a dependence on European masters to the acquisition of an international standing of its own, although confirmed in continued dialogue with European scholarship. Through exoteric openness and interdisciplinary cooperation, and through the collaboration of its representatives in college and university teaching, it has also contributed to classical education and has achieved, directly or indirectly, a certain limited degree of cultural influence 18 . Much

1990), 2 2 4 - 5 3 (ch. 14: "A Field Guide to the Southern Greek Revival"); and JOHN E. ZIOLKOWSKI, Classical Influence on the Public Architecture of Washington and Paris. A Comparison of Two Capital Cities, American University Studies, Series X X : Fine Arts, 4 (New York, Bern, Frankfurt am Main etc.: Peter Lang, 1988), with special and general bibliography pp. 231 - 40. Further: WENDY A. COOPER, Classical Taste in America 1800 1840 (New York, London, and Paris: The Baltimore Museum of Fine Art/Abbeville Press Publishers, 1993), published in conjunction with an exhibition, Classical Taste in America 1800 — 1840, organized and circulated by the Baltimore Museum, to be shown in Baltimore, M D , Charlotte, N C , and Houston, T X consecutively between June 1993 and July 1994). 15

16 17

18

Cf. CONSTANCIO EGUIA RUIZ, Espana y sus misiones en los patses del Plata (Madrid, 1953) 584 — 96; excerpts in English may be found in The Expulsion of the Jesuits from Latin America, ed. MARKUS MÖRNER (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), 1 7 5 - 8 0 . See GEORGE A. KENNEDY, "Classics in America since the Yale Report" (p. X V below). Cf. KARL GALINSKY, Classical and Modern Interactions. Postmodern Architecture, Multiculturalism, Decline, and other Issues (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), passim. Exemplary in that respect, although fortunately not unique, is the group of scholars and scholar-writers associated with the journal Arion. A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, based first (in the 1960s) at the University of Texas in Austin, most recently (since the 1970s and again since the late 1980s) at Boston University. Suffice it to mention the n a m e s

o f t h r e e o f t h e i n i t i a t o r s : WILLIAM A .

ARROWSMITH

(|1992),

DONALD

S.

CARNE-ROSS, and JOHN P. SULLIVAN (University of California at Santa Barbara; t l 9 9 3 ) . Currently under the editorship of HERBERT GOLDER, Arion will publish, as a tribute to

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WOLFGANG HAASE

like European classical scholarship, its counterpart in America has rather recently also undertaken the study of the classical tradition as a separate broad sphere of inquiry, in partnership with or parallel to other disciplines that sometimes have priority from a methodological point of view as well as some degree of preponderance. Finally, in the course of historical-critical selfreflection it has now, like the European before it, even turned to the study of its own history. Our treatment of the classical tradition and its broader context in the Americas therefore closes with a description of this new field of interest and with an evaluation of the current state of classical scholarship in the Americas. Concerning the state of research, this general introduction is not the place in which to discuss many individual, detailed studies. To this point, initiatives toward a comprehensive investigation of the reception of antiquity in the Americas exist only for the United States. That the plan for the present work also stands within the tradition of those contributions is an additional reason why we should at least mention them here. It begins with the work of RICHARD G U M M E R E , who from the 1930s to the 1960s published in various places a series of essays on the encounter of educated people in the British colonies with the Greco-Roman heritage, and then followed them in 1963 with a book on The American Colonial Mind and the Classical Tradition, as a kind of summary of this work. GUMMERE rightly began his 1963 volume with the statement: "This book is concerned with a topic that has never been treated as a whole." 1 9 His intention, and his achievement, was primarily to collect the evidence and traces of knowledge and use of ancient literature and history by notable individuals and groups in colonial society. Some years after this preliminary summary by an individual, which is beset with many understandable and excusable weaknesses, an institution joined with a group of scholars from the fields of classical scholarship, American cultural history, and early modern history to bring together persons concerned with themes of the classical tradition in America and to inaugurate an exchange of information and, primarily, a methodological discussion. For this purpose the Center for Coordination of Ancient and Modern Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1970 began the planning and preparation that led to a conference in the fall of 1975 on "Classical Traditions in Early America," the results of which were published in 1976 under the same title, in the form of a collected volume of groundbreaking essays edited by JAMES W. EADIE 2 0 . In this collection, less value was placed on merely establishWILLIAM ARROWSMITH, t h e classical writings o f JOHN JAY CHAPMAN a n d a c o n s i d e r a t i o n 19

20

of the amateur's role in the American classical tradition. RICHARD M. GUMMERE, The American Colonial Mind and the Classical Tradition. Essays in Comparative Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963; repr. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985). Classical Traditions in Early America, ed. by JOHN W. EADIE (Ann Arbor: Center for Coordination of Ancient and Modern Studies, The University of Michigan, 1976).

AMERICA AND THE CLASSICAL TRADITION

XV

ing the presence of the classical heritage, and more on a historical understanding of the purposes for which it was applied. Two other collections, more limited in scope, which were influenced by the same desire, appeared at the same time and shortly afterward and were already at the level of this new stage of reflection: the one, entitled The Usefulnees of Classical Learning in the Eighteenth Century, published in 1976, and the other, under the title The Classical Tradition in the South, published in 1977, both edited by SUSAN F O R D W I L T S H I R E . 2 1 The first collection appeared under the sponsorship of the American Philological Association, the second under that of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. The American Philological Association, the professional association of classical scholars in North America, began in the 1970s to adopt as its own interest the subject of the reception of antiquity on this continent, that is, in the United States and Canada. At the initiative of G E O R G E A. KENNEDY, who himself published a number of volumes of fundamental studies of the worldwide classical tradition in the field of rhetoric, and who participated in the Michigan conference with an exemplary study of "Classical Influences on The Federalist" (i. e., Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay), a standing committee on the Classical Tradition in North America was established and a panel organized by this committee became a regular part of the annual meetings of the American Philological Association. Against this background, a further step was taken on the road to a synthesis of knowledge in this field. M E Y E R RHEINHOLD, who, beginning with a 1968 study on "Opponents of Classical Learning in America during the Revolutionary Period," 22 had presented a series of essays treating important parts of the American classical tradition in light of the advanced state of awareness of the problems involved, and who contributed the introductory critical "Survey of the Scholarship on Classical Traditions in Early America" to the Michigan conference, 23 published in 1975, under the sponsorship of the American Philological Association, an anthology of texts entitled The Classick Pages: Classical Reading of Eighteenth Century Americans, with an introduction on "The Cult of Antiquity in America," followed in 1984 by the volume

21

22 23

The Usefulness of Classical Learning in the Eighteenth Century. Papers Presented at the 107th Annual Meeting of the American Philological Association, ed. by SUSAN FORD WILTSHIRE, with an introduction by Louis B. WRIGHT (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), and The Classical Tradition in the South, Special Issue of Southern Humanities Review (Auburn, Alabama: Auburn University Press, 1977): 33 — 40. Study of the classical tradition with reference to America (and in general) has also greatly profited from efforts connected with the most recent national bicentennial of the United States (see p. I X above) through SUSAN FORD WILTSHIRE'S book Greece, Rome and the Bill of Rights, Oklahoma Series in Classical Culture 15 (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992). Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 112 (1968): 2 2 1 - 3 4 . Classical Traditions in Early America (n. 20 above), 1 —48.

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Classica Americana. The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States.24 This volume, a collection of essays that had seen the light over a decade and a half and were here revised as well as augmented by and correlated with a number of additional chapters, treats the most important overall aspects and a number of central or particularly characteristic individual features of the classical tradition in the United States. It begins with chapters on the colonial and the revolutionary periods but then traces the principal lines of development through the early national period and even beyond the end of the Civil War and well into the second half of the 19th century. It should be permissible to indicate here that this work was greeted by scholarly criticism, both among American and foreign experts in the classics and those devoted to American studies, as the basic and most comprehensive introduction to this field of scholarship to date, and as a guide to future research. To M E Y E R REINHOLD'S book, Classica Americana, which according to the intention of its author constituted, as a whole, a standing invitation to others to continue this work, G E O R G E KENNEDY added a substantial chapter of his own under the modest title, "Afterword," consisting of an essay on "Classics in America since the Yale Report" (pp. 325 —351). It is a model contribution to the history of classical education and classical scholarship in the United States, in connection with the progress of the American classical tradition and American cultural and intellectual history since the late 1820s. This context establishes a thematic bridge to Classical Scholarship in the Americas, the subject of the sixth and final volume of the present work. The history of classical scholarship is "a crucial part" of Rezeptionsgeschichte, as WILLIAM M. C A L D E R III, an American classical scholar with wide interest and practical experience in the study of the international history of his discipline, wrote in a pragmatic essay of 1981 on "Research Opportunities in the Modern History of Classical Scholarship." 25 P E T E R L E B R E C H T SCHMIDT, a leading

24

MEYER REINHOLD (ed. and with an introduction and notes), The Classick Pages. Classical Reading of Eighteenth-Century Americans (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975), and IDEM, Classica Americana. The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984). On the last work see, e. g., t h e r e v i e w s by JOHN FERGUSON, Classical BERTINI M A L G A R I N I , Elenchos

8 (1987):

Philology

181-88,

8 2 ( 1 9 8 7 ) : 8 5 - 8 9 , ALESSANDRA

a n d PAUL R A H E , William

and

Mary

Quarterly 43 (1986): 312 — 15. In addition there are, of course, studies of some specific areas of classical scholarship in America such as WILLIAM R. NETHERCUT, "American Scholarship on Vergil in the Twentieth Century," in: Vergil at 2000. Commemorative Essays on the Poet and His Influence, AMS Ars Poetica 3 (New York: AMS Press, 1986) 303-330. 25

WILLIAM M. CALDER III, "Research Opportunities in the Modern History of Classical Scholarship," Classical World 74 (1980/81): 2 4 1 - 5 1 , at 245 = IDEM, Studies in the Modern History of Classical Scholarship (Napoli: Jovene Editore, 1984), 3 —13, at 7; the statement is repeated with slightly less emphasis in CALDER'S "Introduction" to the work cited in n. 33 below, p. xv: "the history of classical scholarship is part of Rezeption.'" In general cf. the incorporation of at least 19th century classical scholarship in the

AMERICA AND T H E CLASSICAL

TRADITION

XVII

representative of the theory and practice of the general history and theoty of reception in the field of classical scholarship, voiced fundamental agreement with C A L D E R on this point in a 1985 article of compact theoretical reflection on "Reception Theory and Classical Scholarship," intended particularly for an American audience 26 . Given the relative novelty of the subject, it can scarcely be surprising that it is only in the last several decades that historical contributions worthy of mention have been made to the investigation of and reflection on American classical scholarship; these not only express the conviction but provide adequate confirmation that a comprehensive and detailed study would be worthwhile. Previously, detailed information and analyses were to be found almost exclusively in studies devoted to individual personalities and institutions on particular occasions, but in 1966 W I L L I A M C A L D E R presented the first sketch of a general overview, at that time with special attention to the interests of a European, specifically a German audience 27 . M E Y E R R E I N H O L D , in major essays on "The Silver Age of Classical Studies in America, 1 7 9 0 - 1 8 3 0 " (1977) and " Ά New Morning': Edward Everett's Contributions to Classical Learning" (1981), which appeared in slightly adapted form as two chapters in his book, Classica Americana (1984), produced a fundamental study of a central portion of what we might call the pre-history of the discipline, the story of the ultimately unsuccessful efforts in the early 19th century to introduce at Harvard the study of classical scholarship on the model of German "Altertumswissenschaft," both establishing the facts and explaining the structural conditions surrounding this episode. After that, W I L L I A M C A L D E R and others severally investigated important European influences on the development of American scholarship on Greek and Roman antiquity in later periods 28 . A new material basis for this whole subject

26

classical tradition in the volume on L'Antichitä nell'Ottocento in Italia e Germania/Die Antike im 19. Jahrhundert in Italien und Deutschland cited in η. 2 above. PETER LEBRECHT SCHMIDT, "Reception T h e o r y and Classical Scholarship: A Plea for Convergence," in: Hypatia. Essays in Classics, Comparative Literature, and Philosophy, Presented to Hazel E. Barnes on her Seventieth Birthday, ed. W I L L I A M M . C A L D E R III, U L R I C H Κ . GOLDSMITH, a n d PHYLLIS B . KENEVAN ( B o u l d e r , C o l o . : C o l o r a d o

27

28

Associated

University Press, 1985), 6 7 - 7 7 . WILLIAM M . CALDER III, "Die Geschichte der klassischen Philologie in den Vereinigten Staaten," Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien 11 (1966): 2 1 3 - 4 0 = IDEM, Studies (see η. 2 5 above), 15 — 42. N o w see the section "Stati Uniti d'America/United States" in La filologia greca e latina nel secolo XX. Atti del Congresso Internazionale, R o m a , Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 1 7 - 2 1 settembre 1984, vol. I, Biblioteca di studi antichi 5 6 * (Pisa: Giardini editori e stampatori, 1989), 2 3 5 - 3 1 4 , with articles by GEORG LUCK, " L a critica testuale greco-latina" (pp. 2 3 5 - 6 1 ) , DISKIN CLAY, " G r e e k Studies" (pp. 2 6 3 - 9 4 ) , and DAVID O. ROSS, Jr., "Latin Philology" (pp. 2 9 5 - 314). See, e . g . , E. CHRISTIAN KOPFF, "Wilamowitz and Classical Philology in the United States of America: An Interpretation," in: Wilamowitz nach 50 Jahren, ed. by WILLIAM Μ . C A L D E R I I I , H E L L M U T FLASHAR, a n d T H E O D O R LINDKEN ( D a r m s t a d t :

Wissenschaftliche

Buchgesellschaft, 1985), 5 5 8 - 80; ALESSANDRA BERTINI MALGARINI, "I classicisti tedeschi in America fra il 1933 e il 1942: Aspetti storici e metodologici," La Cultura 27 (1989):

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promises to be the result of works produced or guided by W A R D W . B R I G G S , Jr., either alone or in cooperation with others. Among these are editions of selected Letters ( 1 9 8 7 ) and the Selected Classical Papers ( 1 9 9 2 ) of B A S I L L A N N E A U G I L D E R S L E E V E , the real founder of classical scholarship, or at least of classical philology, in the United States, the second book with extensive biographical and intellectual historical introduction by the editor — indispensable preparatory efforts toward a biography of G I L D E R S L E E V E which B R I G G S has announced for a later date 29 . Now nearly ready for publication is a work that in the future will be the most important intermediary source for facts and dates on the biographical and bibliographical level, The Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists.30 This volume, edited by B R I G G S in consultation with W I L L I A M C A L D E R , M O R T I M E R C H A M B E R S , R O B E R T L . F O W L E R and M E Y E R R E I N H O L D , will appear under the auspices of the American Philological Association, which appropriately, in 1992, at last renamed its Committee on the Classical Tradition in North America; it is now called the Committee on the Classical Tradition and the History of Classical Scholarship and directed by W A R D B R I G G S . It is only quite recently that some attention has also been given to the history of the field in the countries of Latin America. An example of this new development is an article on Cuba by M A R I A E L I N A M I R A N D A , which very appropriately views its subject in the perspective of the classical tradition 31 . 155 — 66; EADEM, "Werner Jaeger in The United States: One Among Many Others," in: Werner Jaeger Reconsidered. Proceedings of the Second Oldfather Conference, held on the Campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, April 2 6 - 2 8 , 1990, ed. by WILLIAM M. C A L D E R III. Illinois Classical Studies, Supplement 3 = Illinois Studies in the History of Classical Scholarship 2 (Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1992), 107 - 23; cf. JUDITH P. H A L L E T T , "The Case of the Missing President: Werner Jaeger and the American Philological Association," ibid., 3 7 - 6 8 ; M O R T I M E R CHAMBERS, "The 'Most Eminent Living Historian, the One Final Authority': Meyer in America," in: Eduard Meyer. Leben und Leistung eines Universalhistorikers, ed. by WILLIAM M. C A L D E R III and A L E X A N D E R DEMANDT. Mnemosyne. Bibliotheca Classica Batava, Supplement 112 (Leiden, New York, Copenhagen, and Cologne: Ε. J. Brill, 1990), 9 7 - 1 3 1 ; cf. ERNST BADIAN, "Eduard Meyer's American Paralipomna," ibid., 1—40. 29 The Letters of Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, ed. by W A R D W . BRIGGS, Jr. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); The Selected Classical Papers of Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, ed. by W A R D W . BRIGGS, Jr. American Philological Association, American Classical Studies 30 (Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1992), with the editor's "Introduction" pp. ix — xxxi. See also Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve: An American Classicist, ed. by W A R D W . BRIGGS, Jr., and H E R B E R T W . BENARIO. AJP Monographs in Classical Philology 1 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). Cf. also n. 33 below. 30 N e w York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993 (forthcoming). Meanwhile cf. W A R D W . B R I G G S , Jr., "Prolegomena to the Study of Classical Scholarship in the United States," Classical Bulletin 68 (1992): 7 - 1 2 . 31 M A R I A E L E N A M I R A N D A , "Der Neuhumanismus und das Studium der klassischen Sprachen und Literaturen in Kuba in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts," Philologus 133 (1989): 1 4 7 - 5 0 .

AMERICA

AND

THE

CLASSICAL

TRADITION

XIX

The renaming of the APA Committee, with the elimination of its previous limitation "in North America," is also an expression of the intention to view the classical tradition in North America not in isolation, but in connection with the classical tradition as a whole throughout the world, though always with attention to national and regional aspects. The relationship of the particular to the general background, which, in addition to its coordination with the context also brings with it a certain relativizing, is clearly apparent in the work of the leaders in American research on the classical tradition and its adjacent fields: for example, in that of G E O R G E KENNEDY, to which we have already referred (see p. X V f. above), or that of M E Y E R R E I N H O L D , when he published his essay on "The Classics and Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought" first in the Cambridge conference proceedings edited by R . R . BOLGAR on the general theme of Classical Influences on Western Thought A.D. 1650— 187032 and when from the outset he associated the work of the Institute for the Classical Tradition at Boston University, which he founded ten years ago and which remains to date the only institute of its kind, to the entire spectrum of the classical tradition (see p. X f . above). The same is true for W A R D B R I G G S and WILLIAM C A L D E R , as they published, in the field of history of scholarship, the general work Classical Scholarship. A Biographical Encyclopedia, even before the cooperative bio-bibliographical volume on North American Classicists·, in the choice of subjects for the former work the Americans and those who were working in America (here restricted to the United States) only assumed their appropriate place among a majority of scholars from other parts of the world 33 . In the same way, a global perspective is to be normative for this work on The Classical Tradition and the Americas as well, in spite of the fact that the subject of its direct concern is the classical tradition primarily with reference to the two American continents. This is to be accomplished in the present volume, as already mentioned (p. VIII above), in the form of themes addressed from a European perspective, on a certain kind of European views of the Americas. In Europe for a long period both relatively superficial images as well as more penetrating attempts at understanding and interpretation of what in fact appeared to be a new world and seemed so very strange were shaped by ideas drawn from the images, both strange and familiar, of Greek and Roman antiquity, the classical tradition in the sense described at the beginning of this prefatory essay (see above, pp. V —VII). Such ideas, partly formed from general categories and partly made up of concrete features, were transferred onto the "Other" of the "New World," that was thus, through a process of comparison, identification,

32 33

Op. cit. (η. 1 above) pp. 2 2 3 - 2 4 3 . Classical Scholarship. A Biographical Encyclopedia, ed. by WARD W. BRIGGS and WILLIAM M . CALDER III (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1990). In this volume see pp. 93 — 118: BRIGGS on "Basil L. Gildersleeve" and pp. 211 — 26: CALDER on "Werner Jaeger" (esp. p. 221 ff. on Jaeger in the US).

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WOLFGANG

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or a specific type of description either assimilated or dissimilated, but in any case was defined in relation to what had long been relatively familiar. It should scarcely be necessary to emphasize that the concentration on the classical point of view, while placing it in the foreground, does not exclude other viewpoints, including especially the biblical and the utilitarian, as historical parameters of perception and motives for action, but is intended only to augment and modify others. Within the framework of the history of the reception of antiquity, we are here concerned with another instance that demands comprehension and categorization. There is, of course, a certain degree of research on this as well, but only beginnings of a comprehensive treatment. In this case also, all the important works are relatively recent. We will mention here only the most important of these. At the beginning we again find a collected work, in two massive volumes containing no fewer than 44 essays under the title First Images of America. The Impact of the New World on the Old, following an international conference held at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1976, under the auspices of the Renaissance Society of America, as a contribution to the bicentennial year of the Declaration of Independence of the United States. The volumes were edited by the late FREDI CHIAPPELLI 3 4 . At the end of the publications to date are two books, one essentially the work of a single author, the other a collection, both undertaken with a view to the "Quincentenary." They are ANTHONY G R A F TON'S book, New Worlds, Ancient Texts. The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery, published in 1992 35 , and the collection of twelve essays edited by J E R R Y M. WILLIAMS and R O B E R T E . LEWIS entitled Early Images of the Americas. Transfer and Interpretation, appearing in 1993 36 . Between these, in 1982, a groundbreaking book in the field was published by ANTHONY PAGDEN, entitled The Fall of Natural Man. The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology,3,7 and in 1987, there appeared a slender collection in German, almost entirely the result of German research (with the 34

First Images of America.

The Impact of the New

CHIAPPELLI, c o - e d i t o r s M I C H A E L J . B . E L L E N &

World on the Old, ed. by FREDI

R O B E R T L . BENSON. 2 v o l s .

(Berkeley,

Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1976). In the same year (1976) the article by MARTIN D. SNYDER, "The Hero in the Garden: Classical Contributions to the Early Image of America," appeared in Classical Traditions in Early America (n. 20 above), 1 3 9 - 1 7 4 . 35

36

37

ANTHONY GRAFTON ( w i t h A P R I L SHELFORD a n d N A N C Y SIRAISI), New

Worlds,

Ancient

Texts. The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, Mass., and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1992). Early Images of the Americas. Transfer and Invention, ed. by JERRY M. WILLIAMS and ROBERT E. LEWIS (Tucson and London: University of Arizona Press, 1993). ANTHONY PAGDEN, The Fall of Natural Man. The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, London, New York etc.: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

AMERICA

AND

THE

CLASSICAL

TRADITION

XXI

single exception of a prominent British guest, ANTHONY PAGDEN), under the title Humanismus und Neue Welt, and edited by WOLFGANG REINHARD, under the aegis of the Research Committee on Renaissance Humanism (Kommission für Humanismusforschung) of the German Research Association (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft)38. Numerous contributions to the first of these works refer at certain points or in extended passages to the influence of the classical tradition on images of America from the end of the 15th to the beginning of the 18th century, even though none of the essays is entirely or primarily devoted to this overall theme. In the preliminary essay on "Renaissance and Discovery," contributed by CHARLES TRINKHAUS in his capacity as President of the Renaissance Society of America, there is a brief but fundamentally significant reference to a structural parallel (on the level, as it were, of the theory of knowledge) between the 15th and 16th centuries as the age of the Renaissance in the sense of a rediscovery of Greek and Roman antiquity and as the Age of Discovery in the sense of the supposed first "discovery" of a "New World." Only a very few examples of individual articles from the two volumes can be mentioned. At the outset, in response to the question "Renaissance Europe and America: A Blunted Impact?" JOHN H . ELLIOTT calls attention to the importance of the classical tradition as a tradition that is fundamentally open and possessed of a store of alternative images of humanity and a supply of rationally grounded anthropologies, and the significance of the confrontation with the people of antiquity as they appear in that tradition in preparing Europeans of the Renaissance period to perceive and, under the right circumstances, to accept alternative ways of being human. H A R O L D JANTZ points out, in an article on "Images of America in the German Renaissance," that European engravers, in illustrating the great travel works of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, often modeled the naked original inhabitants of the Americas on the traditional visual representations of ancient gods and heroes; as a kind of reversal of the sequence of perception and association, he reports the anecdote of the American-born painter Benjamin West who, when he first saw a statue of an ancient god, the Apollo Belvedere, in Rome in 1760, was spontaneously reminded of a Mohawk Indian as he himself had seen them on the frontier. In an essay on "Changing Perception and Exploitation of New World Plants in Europe, 1 4 9 2 - 1 8 0 0 , " JONATHAN SAUER recalls how slowly the system of climatic zones stemming from the Hellenistic period was revised in the early modern era as a result of the encounter with the different realities of the Western Hemisphere, and how in the 17th century leading European botanists were still attempting to identify Canadian and Brazilian plants in the authoritative botanical books

38

Humanismus und Neue Welt, ed. by WOLFGANG REINHARD. Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Mitteilung 15 der Kommission für Humanismusforschung (Weinheim: Acta Humaniora, VCH Verlagsgesellschaft GmbH, 1987).

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of Theophrastus and Pliny 39 . — ANTHONY PAGDEN in his book offers a detailed investigation, in the context of the European encounter with the "New World," of the image of strange people as "barbarians" as handed down from antiquity to the Middle Ages and the early modern period; the scholastic theory of "natural slaves," in continuity with the ideas of Aristotle, in Spanish thought; and the debate, conducted in terms of Aristotelian anthropology, about the nature and destiny of the "Indians" according to natural law in the school and under the influence of Francisco de Vitoria; also Juan Gines de Sepülveda's defense of the Spaniards' "just war" (bellum iustum) against the "Indians" he depicted as having the characterstics of inferior babarians; and finally the subtle modification of the "classical" idea of the barbarian into different higher and lower cultural types by means of empirical and comparativehistorical observations, including the available information on the ancient cultures of Greeks, Romans and "barbarians," as conducted by Bartolome de Las Casas and Jose de Acosta (all this in the 16th century), concluding with a glance forward at the influence of these authorities on the beginnings of a comparative ethnology and anthropology, aiding knowledge of the New as well as the Old World, in the 17th and 18th centuries 40 . — The character of the German collective volume of 1987 is similar to and different from that of the American one of 1976 in so far as, in addition to the pervasive references to sources and concepts from antiquity in Renaissance humanism, it contains at least two major essays that as a whole adopt the direct perspective of the classical tradition: namely, H O R S T PIETSCHMANN'S chapter on the question, "Aristotelischer Humanismus und Inhumanität?" ["Aristotelian Humanism and Inhumanity?"] subtitled "Sepulveda und die amerikanischen Ureinwohner," ["Sepulveda and the Native Americans"] and B R U N O R E C H ' S chapter on "Bartolome de las Casas und die Antike" ["Bartolome de las Casas and Antiquity"]; further to be singled out in this context is K A R L KOHUT'S "Humanismus und Neue Welt im Werk von Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo" ["Humanism and the New World in the Work of Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo"], with its stress on the fundamental importance, in addition to Oviedo's empirical research, of Pliny's Natural History and Cicero's rhetorical notion of history

39

40

CHARLES TRINKHAUS, "Renaissance and Discovery," First Images of America 1: 2 — 9; JOHN H. ELLIOTT, "Renaissance Europe and America: A Blunted Impact?," ibid., 11—23; HAROLD JANTZ, "Images of America in the German Renaissance," ibid., 91 —102; and JONATHAN D. SAUER, "Changing Perception and Exploitation of New World Plants in Europe, 1 4 9 2 — 1 8 0 0 , " First Images of America 2: 813 — 3 2 (see n. 34 above). For more, see the excellent "Index of names and subjects" s. v. Classical tradition, ibid., 934. ANTHONY PAGDEN, op. cit. (n. 37 above). N o w see also IDEM, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination. Studies in European and Spanish-American Social and Political Theory 1513-1830 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), ch. 1, pp. 13 — 36: "Dispossessing the Barbarian: Rights and Property in Spanish America;" IDEM, "lus et Factum: Text and Experience in the Writings of Bartolome de Las Casas" (op. cit., n. 4 4 below); and IDEM, European Encounters with the New World, From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993).

A M E R I C A AND T H E CLASSICAL

TRADITION

XXIII

for that author 41 . — Soon afterward, W I L F R I E D N I P P E L , in his book, Griechen, Barbaren und 'Wilde.' Alte Geschichte und Sozialanthropologie [Greeks, Barbarians and 'Savages.' Ancient History and Social Anthropology], in a chapter entitled "Altertum und Neue Welt" ["Antiquity and the New World"], directed his attention especially to the reception of ancient ideas about barbarians and slaves, particularly Aristotle's theory of "natural slavery," and the reception of the Roman and early Christian doctrines about "just war" (bellum iustum) 41

HORST PIETSCHMANN, "Aristotelischer H u m a n i s m u s und Inhumanität? Sepiilveda und die amerikanischen Ureinwohner," pp. 143 — 66; BRUNO RECH, " B a r t o l o m e de Las C a s a s und die A n t i k e , " pp. 167 - 97; KARL KOHUT, " H u m a n i s m u s und N e u e Welt im Werk von G o n z a l o Fernandez de O v i e d o , " pp. 65 —88, all in Humanismus und Neue Welt (see η. 38 above). By BRUNO RECH see also " Z u m Nachleben der Antike im spanischen Überseeimperium. Der Einfluß antiker Schriftsteller auf die Historia General y N a t u r a l de las Indias des G o n z a l o Fernandez de Oviedo (1478 — 1 5 5 7 ) , " Spanische Forschungen der Görresgesellschaft 31 (1984): 181 —244, and " B a r t o l o m e de Las Casas und Aristote-

les," Jahrbuch

für Geschichte

von Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft

Lateinamerikas

22

(1985): 3 9 - 6 8 . T h e r e is another volume of G e r m a n scholarship, less rich with respect to our present thematic concern, but also containing some relevant sections: Oer europäische Beobachter

außereuropäischer

Kulturen. Zur Problematik

der Wirklichkeitswahrnehmung,

ed. by

HANS-JOACHIM KÖNIG, WOLFGANG REINHARD, REINHARD W E N D T , Z e i t s c h r i f t f ü r H i s t o r i -

sche Forschung, Beiheft 7 (Berlin: D u n c k e r & H u m b l o t , 1989), where see JÜRGEN OSTERHAMMEL, "Distanzerfahrung. Darstellungsweisen des Fremden im 18. J a h r h u n dert," pp. 9 — 4 2 , esp. 34 — 3 6 on " D i e Bürde der Bildung" about classical reminiscences in ethnographic-historical works by B a r t o l o m e de Las Casas, J o s e p h Frangois Lafitau, David H u m e and Sir William J o n e s ; cf. brief remarks in WOLFGANG NEUBER, " D i e frühen deutschen Reiseberichte aus der Neuen Welt. Fiktionalitätsverdacht und Beglaubigungsstrategien," pp. 4 3 — 6 4 , here 4 4 f . (on Gabriel Rollenhagen's appeal to ancient Greek and R o m a n as against medieval sources with reference to travel literature on America and unknown countries in general); HORST DIPPEL, " F a s z i n a t i o n und Wandel im europäischen Amerikabild. Vom Eldorado zum P a r a d i g m a , " pp. 84 — 96, here 84 f. (America and Atlantis), and HANS-JOACHIM KÖNIG, " B a r b a r oder S y m b o l der Freiheit? Unmündiger oder Staatsbürger? Indiobild und Indianerpolitik in H i s p a n o a m e r i k a , " pp. 9 7 - 1 1 8 , here 84 (on Aristotle and " n a t u r a l slaves"). Only very brief marginal references to ancient materials are found in t w o articles o f the

volume Amerika

1492 — 1992. Neue Welten — Neue Wirklichkeiten

[2], Geschichte

—

Gegenwart — Perspektiven, ed. by Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut Preußischer Kulturbesitz and M u s e u m für Völkerkunde, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin ("Konzeption und R e d a k t i o n : DIETRICH B R I E S E M E I S T E R , H E I N Z JOACHIM D O M N I C K " ( B r a u n s c h w e i g :

Georg

Westermann Verlag G m b H , 1992), namely in FRAUKE GEWECKE, "Von 'guten Wilden' und 'nacketen grimmigen manschenfresser leuthen' — das Bild des Amerikaners als F i k t i o n , " pp. 6 1 - 7 0 , here 61 f. (on ancient stereotyped images of foreign peoples) and in E R D M A N N G O R M S E N a n d H A N S H A U F E , " D i e S t a d t i n d e r K o l o n i s a t i o n

Amerikas,"

pp. 148 — 157, here 152 (on Vitruvius and city planning in colonial Spanish America). Recently an informative collection of relevant motifs has been presented by HANS-OTTO DILL in the section on "Biblische, antike und Renaissance-Topoi des Entdeckungsdiskurses" of his paper " T o p o i , Klischees und Stereotype des Diskurses der E n t d e c k u n g " in Renaissance-Hefte, ed. by Berliner Renaissance-Gesellschaft e . V . , 1.4 (1992): 6 — 25, esp. 8-15.

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in the 16th century Spanish controversies over colonialism, viewing Francisco de Vitoria, Sepulveda, Las Casas, and Jose de Acosta, the same about whom PAGDEN and partly PIETSCHMANN and R E C H had written (see above), as the intellectual protagonists; he also treats Pere Joseph-Francois Lafitau's systematic introduction of Greco-Roman antiquity, including its neighboring peoples, in conjunction with the American "Indians" by way of mutual illumination within a comparative-ethnographical description42. — ANTHONY GRAFTON'S book, published in connection with an exhibition of books and maps at the New York Public Library in the year of the "Quincentenary" as a scholarly companion work to the exhibition, repeatedly deals throughout with general aspects and concrete individual points regarding the role of the interpretation of ancient Greco-Roman authorities, while as a whole it treats the role of books in the tension between tradition and newness in the age of the "Discoveries" and their intellectual assessment. — This same theme is treated, at different lengths, in the essays of the 1993 collection on Early Images of the Americas, the subtitle of which emphasizes in passing the special nature of America's early ties to European tradition, as we have mentioned above (p. Xf.): namely that an element of discontinuity is introduced by the spatial transfer over enormous distance. This spatial transfer was accompanied by an intellectual one as well, consisting in the projection and application of familiar European categories to the newfound Other; this Other is thereby made more easily perceptible and understandable in the forms of affirmation or negation or an intermediate mode, but in the focus of European observation does not simply remain what it was by itself, but undergoes a shift in perspective and in a certain sense is newly "discovered." "Transfer" and "invention," the meanings of the latter overlapping with those of "discovery," are precisely those general ideas that are most suitable also to describe the conceptual framework of our first volume. Our specific aspect, the concentration on the classical tradition as a contribution to the shaping of an image with reference to the "New World," was also repeatedly affirmed in the book edited by WILLIAMS and L E W I S , assuming its place in the center and foreground of the article by OSWALD A. W. D I L K E and M A R G A R E T S. D I L K E on "Ptolemy's Geography and the New World," which discusses "how maps based on Ptolemy's coordinates compiled thirteen centuries earlier can affect the cartography of American exploration" (a theme that the same authors treat in our volume in a similar fashion). It also appears with some force in the article by MICHAEL PALENCIA-ROTH on "The Cannibal Law of 1503," who describes the importance of real, supposed, and alleged cannibalism or "caribism" in the European image of the "New People" of the "New World," from the very beginnings and with repressed effects almost to the present time, and in this connection points to the role of ancient Greek and Roman images of that

42

Griechen, Barbaren und 'Wilde'. Fischer Taschenbuch 4429 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1990), 30 — 55.

WILFRIED NIPPEL,

AMERICA AND THE CLASSICAL TRADITION

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which is strange and marginal from Homer until late antiquity. This same theme appears in the essay by SANTA A R I A S on "Empowerment Through the Writing of History: Bartolome de Las Casas's Representation of the Other(s)," which shows how Las Casas used information and interpretations drawn from ancient historians and ethnographers from Herodotus to Pliny the Elder and Tacitus, images from ancient myths like those of the Golden Age and poetic motifs like the description of the idyllic place (locus amoenus), and how he drew on Plato, Aristotle and Augustine for anthropological arguments in favor of a positive estimation of the "Indians." More marginally, the same theme appears in K A T H L E E N A. M Y E R S ' S essay on "The Representation of New World Phenomena. Visual Epistemology and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo's Illustrations," which discusses, among other topics, how Oviedo gave his work of 1535, the first official description and chronicle of Spanish America, a title and internal organization derived from the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, and how he also repeatedly alluded to Pliny for individual comparisons, even though he had a clear awareness of the problem involved in referring to "ancient authorities" {"auctoridades de los antiguos") alongside his own observations and experiences, and in general of the analogical reduction of the new to conform to the old, an awareness that he occasionally expressed. In their introduction to the collection, the editors, W I L L I A M S and L E W I S , mention the symbolically significant fact that the son of an Inca princess and a Spanish nobleman, Garcilaso de la Vega, called "El Inca," who mastered not only his mother's Quechua but also Spanish, Italian and Latin, in his Spanish Royal Commentaries of the Inca (Comentarios reales de los lncas), as an author familiar with European humanism, referred to the ancient Peruvian capital, Cuzco, as "another Rome" ("otra Roma"), the same analogy that in the ancient Roman empire had been applied to Byzantium/Constantinople being thus in characteristic fashion transferred to America by this American author 43 . These selective references and remarks may convey a certain impression of the way in which the role of the classical tradition in the formation of early European images of the "new world" has been treated in the recent 43

O S W A L D A. W. D I L K E & M A R G A R E T S. D I L K E , "Ptolemy's Geography and the New World," pp. 2 6 3 - 8 5 ; M I C H A E L P A L E N C I A - R O T H , "The Cannibal Law of 1 5 0 3 , " pp. 2 1 — 6 3 ; SANTA A R I A S , "Empowerment Through the Writing of History: Bartolome de Las Casas's Representation of the Other(s)," pp. 1 6 3 - 7 9 ; K A T H L E E N A. M Y E R S , "The Representation of New World Phenomena: Visual Epistemology and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo's Illustrations," pp. 1 8 3 - 2 1 3 ; and J E R R Y M . W I L L I A M S and R O B E R T E. L E W I S , "Introduction", pp. xix —xxxiii (at xxv), all in Early Images of the Americas (see n. 36 above). On Ptolemaic geography and the New World see also Ο. A. W. D I L K E , The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia 2 (New York, London, Toronto, etc: Simon & Schuster, 1992) 569 — 570 s.v. Ptolemy. On Garcilaso de la Vega "El Inca" see, for a combined Inca and classical-humanist background to his analogy between Cuzco and Rome: JUAN M A R I C H A L , "The New World from Within: The Inca Garcilaso," in First Images of America (see n. 3 4 above) 1 : 5 7 - 6 1 .

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scholarly publications that have given the m o s t attention to it. In addition t o these e x a m p l e s of relatively detailed and coherently integrated t r e a t m e n t , there are n u m e r o u s references in the relevant literature especially o f the last few years 4 4 . A survey of this material m a k e s it evident that a broadly-conceived

44

Anyone approaching the publications mentioned above and hereafter in this introduction with an interest, aroused by numerous observations, in the classical features associated with ancient Greece and Rome in broader or narrower relationship to America will find it striking that there is apparently no body of work, nor even a single publication representing what could be called the standard bibliography to which all or most of them might refer. The following bibliographical references, besides supplying an additional orientation to the existing scholarly literature, may also serve in a general way to document this deficiency. It is, for example, characteristic of this situation that in 1992 a classical scholar published a short article in which he reminded his fellow classicists of a passage in Seneca's Medea (375 — 379) on a possible transoceanic voyage to novi orbes and its reception by Columbus in his Libro de las profedas, or rather (as far as Columbus is concerned) drew it to their attention for the first time: DISKIN C L A Y , "Columbus' Senecan Prophecy," American Journal of Philology 113 (1992): 617 — 20. At almost the same time, another classical scholar, in an epilogue to a book on ancient geographical notions about the earth's limits, pointed to the importance of the same passage, together with other ancient witnesses that were received by Columbus and the humanists of the Age of Discovery, and also to the secondary testimony of the chroniclers Francisco Lopez de Gomara und Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo to Columbus's reception of this material: J A M E S R O M M , The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought. Geography, Exploration, Fiction (Princeton, N . J . : Princeton University Press, 1992), 2 1 5 - 2 2 ("Epilogue: After Columbus," esp. pp. 215 —16). This group of ancient witnesses had already been noted and discussed, with reference also to the Libro de las profecias for the Medea passage, by A L F R E D S T Ü C K E L B E R G E R , "Kolumbus und die antiken Wissenschaften," Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 69 (1987): 331—40 (see esp. pp. 337ff.). Now this instance of the reception of Seneca is treated in detail by J A M E S R O M M on pp. 77—116 below in this volume (CTA I 1 ) , although without reference to S T Ü C K E L B E R G E R or (for chronological reasons) to CLAY. For Columbus's knowledge and use of ancient sources in a characteristically mixed late medieval and Renaissance context, see now also V A L E R I E I. J . F L I N T , The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus (Princeton, N . J . : Princeton University Press, 1992), passim (on Seneca, Medea, loc. cit., pp. 80ff., 86). On the Seneca passage from the Medea cf. also PAULINE M O F F I T T W A T T S , The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia 2 (op. cit., n. 43 above) 652 sv. Spirituality of Columbus, and E A D E M , ibid. 749 sv. Writings: Book of Prophecies. Before 1976, the date of First Images of America (see n. 34 above), see the important remarks on the classical tradition in the Renaissance (16th century) as points of departure and reference for, and as obstacles and enhancements to a European coming-to-terms with the "New World" in J ( O H N ) H. E L L I O T , The Old World and the New 1492-1650. The Wiles Lectures given at the Queen's University Belfast 1969 (Cambridge, London, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 15 — 16, 23 — 26,39 — 52 and elsewhere in the book. Cf. also I D E M , Spain and its World 1500 — 1700. Selected Essays (New York and London: Yale University Press, 1989), esp. ch. II, pp. 2 7 - 4 1 : "The Mental World of Hernan Cortes," and ch. ILL, pp. 42 — 64: "The Discovery of America and the Discovery of Man."

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(Footnote 4 4 continued) On the theoretical and methodological problems, for authors of the Early Modern period and for present-day scholarly interpreters, of comparison between the Greco-Roman legacy and the Amerindian tradition in colonial situations see, e. g., WALTER D. MIGNOLO, "Colonial Situations, Geographical Discourses and Territorial Representations: Toward a Diatopical Understanding of Colonial Semiosis," Dispositio 1 4 / 3 6 - 3 8 (1989): 93 - 140 (in a volume of Dispositio. Revista Americana de Estudios Semioticos y Culturales/ American Journal of Semiotic and Cultural Studies, dedicated as a whole to the subject of "Colonial Discourse." Editors: Rolena Adorno and W A L T E R D. M I G N O L O . In that volume, see also passim and esp. Peter Hulme, "Subversive Archipelagos: Colonial Discourse and the Break-up of Continental Theory," pp. 1 —24). For individual topics, see, for example: P E T E R H U L M E , Colonial Encounters. Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), esp. pp. 20 ff. on the ancient origins of European "discourse of Oriental civilization" and "discourse of savagery", pp. 152 ff. on the Homeric myth of Odysseus and Polyphemus, as transmitted by Ovid, in the thought of English people in Virginia in the early 17th century, pp. 109 ff., pp. 228 ff. on the Virgilian legend of Dido and Aeneas and on Carthage as the enemy of Rome in the "colonial discourse" in English literature in the 17th and 18th centuries, etc. - W I L L I A M B R A N D O N , New Worlds for Old. Reports from the New World and their effect on the development of social thought in Europe, 1500 — 1800 (Athens, Ohio, and London: Ohio University Press, 1986), passim but esp. pp. 1 9 - 2 4 and ch. VI, " M y t h and Antimyth," in critical opposition to what the author considers an exaggerated acceptance of the influence of ancient myths such as those of the Golden Age, and of ancient theories like that of early human beings or so-called Noble Savage; he posits instead "that ideas of liberty and equality associated with the New World were abstracted less from long familiar Old World literature than derived from the New World itself via reports that were for the most part seriously recorded and largely factual." - M A R Y B . C A M P B E L L , The Witness and the Other World. Exotic European Travel Writing 400-1600 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), esp. "Part Two: T h e West" (pp. 165 - 254, passim). - MARGARITA ZAMORA, Language, Authority, and Indigenous History in the 'Comentarios reales de los incas'. Series Cambridge Iberian and Latin American Studies (Cambridge, New York, New Rochelle etc.: Cambridge University Press, 1988), on the humanistic background and thoroughly humanistic character of Garcilaso de la Vega's work with, i. a., a chapter on " T h e critical intention of historical comparisons," esp. with ancient R o m e , in that work. - JUAN GIL, Mitos y Utopias del discubrimiento, vol. 2 of 3 (El Pacifico, Madrid: Alianza Editorial, S . A . , 1989), esp. ch. Ill, pp. 6 9 - 8 2 : "El camino a la California," and ch. VI, pp. 148 — 67: "Los secretos de la California" on projections of the Amazon myth and the Alexander legend in connection with California. — Cf. also ANNA BOGNOLI, " G e ografia mitica e geografia moderna. Le Amazzoni nella scoperta delFAmerica," Columbeis 4 = Pubblicazioni dell'Istituto di Filologia Classica e Medievale (n. s.) 134 (Genova: D A R . FL CL. E T [ = Dipartimento di Archeologia, Filologia classica e loro tradizioni]): 7 - 2 2 . - STEPHANIE MERRIEM, " T h e Apprehension of the New in Nature and Culture: Fernandez de Oviedo's Sumario," in 1492 — 1992. Re/Discovering Colonial Writing, eds. RENE JARA a n d NICHOLAS SPADACCINI. H i s p a n i c Issues 4 ( M i n n e a p o l i s , M i n n . :

The

Prisma Institute, 1989), 165 — 99, on, among other things, Pliny's Natural History as Oviedo's "principal intertext" (pp. 174ff.). — TOM CONLEY, "Montaigne and the Indies: Cartographies of the New World in the Essais, 1580 — 8 8 , " ibid., pp. 225 — 62, on, among other points, Montaigne's explicit and implicit criticism of Spanish uses of Aristotelian arguments to support the use of force against the "Indians". — JOSE RABASA, "Utopian Ethnology in Las Casas's Apologetica," ibid., pp. 263 — 89, on the influence of T h o m a s

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(Footnote 44 continued) More's Utopia on Las Casas and, i. a., pp. 280 ff. on Las Casas' use of Cicero to formulate arguments in favor of using the power of language instead of physical force with the Indians, his comparison of Inca founding heroes with Greek and especially Roman ones, and of Inca political thought with that of Plato and Aristotle. - KATHLEEN A. MYERS, "Imitation, Authority, and Revision in Fernandez de Oviedo's Historia General y Natural de las Indias," Romance Languages Annual 3 ( 1 9 9 1 [ 1 9 9 2 ] ) : 5 2 3 - 3 0 , on the levels of complex imitation practiced by Oviedo in the several revisions of his work: imitation/ depiction of nature and imitation/emulation of authoritative texts, especially Pliny's Natural History, and on his revision of his chapter on Amazon women. — PHILIP P. BOUCHER, Cannibal Encounters. Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492 — 1763 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), esp. ch. I, pp. 13 — 30, on "First Impressions: Europeans and Island Caribs in the Precolonial Era, 1492—1623." — ANTHONY PAGDEN, '7MS et factum·. Text and Experience in the Writings of Bartolome des Las Casas," in New World Encounters, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt. A Representation Book (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1993), 85 —100; originally published in Representations 3 3 (Winter, 1 9 9 1 ) : 1 4 7 — 6 2 : i.a., remarks on America as "the repository for a variety of classical exotica" such as Amazons and Hyperboreans, but also the Early Paradise; the loose Plinian structure imposed upon Oviedo's Historia·, Las Casas's derivation of methodical teachings from Diodorus, Herodotus, and Josephus: pp. 8 6 - 8 7 , 8 8 , 9 2 ff. -

SABINE MAC CORMACK, " D e m o n s ,

Imagination, and the Inca," New World Encounters, 1 0 1 — 2 6 ; originally in Representations 3 3 : 1 2 1 — 4 4 : pp. 1 1 8 , 1 2 0 on Las Casas's comparing certain religious phenomena among the Inca with the Delphic oracle and measuring the quality of Inca social organization in terms of Aristotle's Politics. — Louis M O N T R O S E , "The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery," New World Encounters, 177 — 217; originally in Representations 3 3 : 1 - 4 1 : on Amazons in Sir Walter Raleigh. - DAVID QUINT, "Voices of Resistance: The Epic Curse and Camöes's Adamastor," New World Encounters, 241 —72; originally in Representations 2 7 (Summer 1 9 8 9 ) : 1 1 1 - 4 1 : on related aspects of classical epic tradition from Homer, Vergil, and Lucan to the epic of New World conquest: Alonso de Ercilla's Araucana, Camöes's Lustadas (on the Portuguese in Africa and India), and Gaspar Perez de Villagra's epic Historia de la Nueva Mexico. — J E F F R E Y KNAPP, "Elizabethan Tobacco," New World Encounters, 2 7 3 - 3 1 2 ; originally in Representations 2 1 (Winter, 1 9 8 8 ) : 2 7 - 6 6 , with reference in passing on p. 2 7 8 to Sir Walter Raleigh as the "English Ulysses," and on p. 279 with remarks on a late 16th century comparison of English and ancient Greek and Roman colonization, but mainly p. 291 ff., about John Beaumont's para-Ovidian mock-panegyric poem, The Metamorphoses of Tobacco, of 1 6 0 2 . - GASPAR P E R E Z DE VILLAGRÄ, Historia de la Nueva Mexico, 1 6 1 0 . A Critical and Annotated Spanish/English Edition Translated and Edited by MIGUEL £NCINIAS, A L F R E D R O D R I G U E Z , a n d JOSEPH P. SANCHEZ. P a s o P o r A q u i . S e r i e s o n t h e

Nuevomexicano Literary Heritage (Albuquerque, N . M . : University of New Mexico Press, 1992): see the references to ancient models, sources, and literary-poetic analogies in the notes. — Finally, CAROLL SMITH-ROSENBERG, "Dis-Covering the Subject of the 'Great Constitutional Discussion,' 1 7 8 6 - 1 7 8 9 , " Journal of American History 7 9 ( 1 9 9 2 ) : 841—73: pp. 865 ff., esp. 870 ff., on the pictorial personifications of America as Columbia with classical garb and backdrop, accompanied by Minerva or Clio, in engravings made in the United States in connection with political journalism. - And THOMAS J. SCHLERETH, "Columbia, Columbus, and Columbianism," ibid., 937 — 68: at p. 941 ff. on Columbia, Minerva, and Hercules as personifications of America, applied or suggested, in literature and the visual arts from the late 17th to the early 19th centuries.

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overview in which the details may find their place within a general context, and in which overall lines of development as well as specific and individual characteristics may emerge, is highly desirable. This first volume of the present work is intended to make a major step in this direction. It contains 31 essays or monographs, contributed by 31 selected authors who are specialists on parts of the overall theme. These essays and monographs treat the most important areas or aspects, together with several less central themes offered by way of examples. The choice of themes was governed primarily by their importance, but was to a certain degree also dependent on the sub-fields for which experts in the material could be identified and persuaded to contribute. Since in any case an exhaustive treatment was impossible, and was probably not even desirable in this cumulative and cooperative form, which it seemed necessary to employ given the current state of research, it only remained to make sure that the chosen themes would be mutually complementary in material, perspectives and methods, so as to approach as nearly as possible to an ideal whole. Since the whole has no predetermined and inherently systematic structure, the essays in which this has been attempted are organized here, partly by association, in three principal groups. The first half-volume of Volume I contains a series of general essays; the second half-volume is made up, first of smaller sub-groups of essays relating to individual European countries in which images of America were produced that had been shaped by the reception of antiquity, and then of another set of more general papers on the transmission of such images in the visual arts. The scope of the individual topics in the second half-volume varies and the combinations may be thematic, regional or personal. Consequently, the arrangement was largely a matter of judgment, and there are multiple mutual relationships between the essays extending beyond their particular groupings. These relationships are emphasized by cross-references provided by the editors. At the beginning of the first, supra-national group of essays are two general treatments of ancient and medieval preconditions, in continuity with antiquity, for intellectual and physical strivings beyond the continents known to Europe before 1492; one of these (by W. G. L. R A N D L E S , pp. 5 — 76 below) deals with the tradition and development of the perception of the earth as a globe, up to the time of Columbus, as precondition for the possibility or probability of the existence of a western route to the Far East and of another, still to be discovered land mass in a Western hemisphere; the other (by J. R O M M , pp. 77— 116 below) mainly concerns the interpretation of a suggestive passage in one of Seneca's tragedies that mentions novi orbes in the period of Renaissance humanism and especially that of Columbus. 45 After these, an

45

R O M M (Bard College, Annendale-on-Hudson) is currently embarking on a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University (Providence, R. I.), to study the impact of the so-called

JAMES

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essay (by O . A. W. D I L K E and M . D I L K E , pp. 1 1 7 - 1 3 4 below) is dedicated to the incorporation of the new continent in geographical world maps, which still followed the overall image handed down from antiquity in Ptolemy's Geography. Another essay (by P. M A S O N , pp. 135 —172 below) investigates the effects of the reception of ancient Greek and Roman ethnography on European representations of the inhabitants of the "New World" in words and pictures. These are followed by several essays devoted to the adaptation of ancient myths or interpretations of myths, and the analogous creation of new myths in light of the "New World," one (by F. LESTRINGANT, pp. 1 7 3 - 1 8 8 below) on a specific revival of Euhemerist interpretation of myth in the 16th century; a general treatment of old and new myths and their function (by J.P. SANCHEZ, pp. 1 8 9 - 2 4 0 below); another (by G. MORETTI, pp. 2 4 1 - 2 8 4 below) on myth and theory about the Antipodes; one on the Amazon myth (by K. M A R C H and K. PASSMANN, pp. 2 8 5 - 3 3 8 below); one on the myth of the Golden Fleece and El Dorado (by J.-P. SANCHEZ, pp. 339 —378 below); and one on the myth and theory of the Noble Savage (by S. CRO, pp. 379 — 418 below). An essay of monographic character and length (by H . HOFMANN, pp. 420 — 656 below) offers a detailed treatment of neo-Latin epics featuring Columbus as hero, through three centuries and written by Italian, Spanish, English, Austrian, and German poets. Finally, the last essay (by A. M. IACONO, pp. 658 —681 below) deals with early developments of comparative history, ethnography, and anthropology in 18th century Europe, especially France and Italy, as exemplified in the juxtaposition of American "Indians" with ancient Greeks, Romans, and "barbarians." In the second half-volume groups are made up of essays on the countries of Italy, Spain and Portugal, France, England, the Low Countries and Germany. In the Italian group an essay (by S. CRO) on various thematic aspects of the confrontation between representatives of Italian humanism and the "New World" up to the 17th century is followed by one (by G. DEMERSON) presenting a detailed comparative analysis of two neo-Latin Columbus epics from Italian poets of the late 16th century. The Spanish and Portuguese group begins with a general essay (by K. KOHUT) on Spanish and Portuguese humanism in relationship to America; this is followed by an essay (by J . FERRERAS-SAVOYE) on a Spanish humanist, two articles (by F. D E L PINO and M . MUSTAPHA) on two Spanish humanist theologians of the 16th century, and one (by E. WEISSHAR) on three humanists or humanistic-theological authors of Spanish grammars of ancient American languages from the 16th and 17th centuries working on the "classical" model of Latin and Spanish grammars. In the group associated with France are a contribution (by F. LESTRINGANT) on the Amazon myth in

discovery of the Americas on Renaissance views of antiquity. He will be especially concerned with the debate over possible Greco-Roman knowledge of the Western Hemisphere carried on by 16th century humanists, and with the rereadings and rewritings of ancient geographic myths that resulted from this debate.

AMERICA AND T H E CLASSICAL TRADITION

XXXI

French travel literature of the humanist period, one (by P. CARILE) on classical elements in the form and content of a French heroic epic of the early 17th century on a battle with an ancient American people in Canada, and one (by J . A. S. EVANS) on an author, perhaps the central figure in early comparative historico-ethnographic literature, previously treated in this volume by A. M . IACONO (see above) in a different context and from a largely different point view; finally, there is an essay (by J . HEIDEKING) on the classical tradition in the early days of republicanism in the United States and its images among the French in the years of their own revolution and afterward. T h e two essays (by C. S T R O S E T Z K I and J . K L E I N ) on America in classically-tinted English eyes deal with the principal works of the English Utopian tradition, by T h o m a s More and from More to Francis Bacon. A single essay (by P. MASON) is devoted to historiographical and ethnographical witnesses in word and image originating in the Low Countries, with special attention to R o m a n historiographical and ethnographical influences. For Germany, an essay (by D. WUTTKE) investigates the reactions to the encounter between Europe and America in the ideas of German humanists influenced by the reception of antiquity in the first four decades after 1492, while another contribution (by A. MASSA) deals with reflections of antiquity in one of the major works of German prose fiction in the twentieth century; he is thereby the only author in this volume who goes beyond the limits of the early modern period (16th — 18th centuries). O f the three essays on art history, which close the first volume, one (by A. P E R R I G and S . T A M M E N ) treats the role of fantastic beings in ancient myth (and medieval legend) in European pictorial representations of the " N e w World" and its inhabitants; the second (by G. POCHAT) describes more general aspects of the depiction of the American "Indians" in ancient pictorial forms in 16th century Europe; the last (by S. POESCHEL), deals with elements of classical tradition in allegorical representation, personification, or other portrayals of America up to the 18th century. These brief descriptions, touching only the surface of the themes, indicate the variety and multiplicity of the fields and perspectives in which the classical tradition is woven into the European picture of the Americas, and what formative influence it exercised: the overall cosmological and geographical image of the world, cartography, ethnography, the history of religions, the critique of religions, myth, mythology, epic poetry in neo-Latin or in the national languages, various other literary genres, philosophy, historiography, political theory, political ideology, utopianism, empirical science, theory of science, various genres and functional applications of the visual arts, etc. etc. These and other, additional relationships, aspects, approaches or forms of appearance in connection with images of America are present in this volume, either in one or a number of different essays, individually, alongside one another, or in combination. This kind of variety of course raises the question of a unifying synthesis, and it arises not only in regard to the spectrum of this first volume, but of

XXXII

WOLFGANG HAASE

the work as a whole. Therefore we should say at this point, regarding the part as well as the whole: this is certainly not yet the synthesis that may, one day soon, present this partial field of the reception of antiquity in a complete and balanced manner. But it is still too early, inasmuch as this specific and partial task has emerged within the development of the study of the reception of antiquity. However, this common effort should make perceptible at least the major features of an ideal whole, and we hope it may reveal itself as an advanced stage on the way to a "definitive" treatment of the theme, or thematic complex. Following these final remarks on the subject itself, there remains for the editors only the personal obligation and pleasure of expressing our thanks. T h e first and most fundamental thanks go to Boston University, and in particular its president, JOHN R . SILBER, and its executive vice president and provost, JON WESTLING, who for many years with administrative wisdom and personal commitment to the vitality of the classics have in every way also promoted the work of the Institute for the Classical Tradition, among whose tasks at the present time the editorial acitivty on this work takes pride of place. T h e dean of the College of Liberal Arts and of the Graduate School of Boston University, DENNIS D. BERKEY, and the Chairman of its Department of Classical Studies since 1991, JEFFREY J . HENDERSON, have also contributed to the creation of supportive working conditions for the Institute. For external assistance we are indebted first of all for support of the project to the Friedrich Naumann Foundation (Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung) in Königswinter near Bonn and in Washington, D. C. Since 1988/89 this foundation has contributed decisively, with substantial sums, to make it possible for the demanding preparatory work to be completed, thus far for the first two volumes, in combination with scholarly colloquia of groups of contributors and advisers. Persons to be thanked include, at the Foundation, especially its general manager of many years, Dr. FRITZ FLISZAR, in the German central office, and successive directors of the American branch in W a s h i n g t o n , D . C . , D r . JÜRGEN W I C K E R T ( n o w i n K ö n i g s w i n t e r ) , a n d BERND

SCHEITERLEIN. An equally indispensable major contribution was made, via the University of Tübingen, by the Robert Bosch Foundation (Robert BoschStiftung) in Stuttgart, with additional assistance provided by the firm of Robert Bosch, also in Stuttgart. Personal thanks are due to the former comanager of the Bosch Foundation, Dr. HANS GLÜCKER, and to Professor HANS L. MERKLE at the Bosch Company. As representative for all the colleagues who have aided the project in so many ways, by advice and action, and out of regard for the cooperative spirit of the institutions they represent, we extend our thanks here to Professor DIETRICH BRIESEMEISTER of the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin, and Professor ROGER SHATTUCK of the University Professors Program at Boston University.

AMERICA A N D T H E CLASSICAL T R A D I T I O N

XXXIII

Finally, grateful mention is due to the longtime, now departing director of the section for Humanities at the house of Walter de Gruyter in Berlin, Professor H E I N Z W E N Z E L , who received this publication project from the outset with a degree of energy and circumspection to match his patience. B o s t o n - T ü b i n g e n , June 1993 for the Co-editors: WOLFGANG HAASE a n d M E Y E R REINHOLD

Institute for the Classical Tradition Boston University

W. H .

Contents (Boston, Mass. — Tübingen) America and the Classical Tradition: Preface and Introduction V-XXXIII

WOLFGANG HAASE

EUROPEAN IMAGES OF THE AMERICAS AND THE CLASSICAL TRADITION Volume 1.1: I. Scholarly and Literary Images of the New World from the Time of Columbus to the Present 1. General Subjects W. G. L. (Bordeaux) Classical Models of World Geography and Their Transformation following the Discovery of America

5 — 76

(Annendale-on-Hudson, N Y ) New World and "novos orbos"·. Seneca in the Renaissance Debate over Ancient Knowledge of the Americas

77 — 116

M. (Leeds) - O. A. W. D I L K E (Leeds) The Adjustment of Ptolemaic Atlases to Feature the New World

117-134

P. (Leiden) Classical Ethnography and Its Influence on the European Perception of the Peoples of the New World

135 — 172

F. (Lille) The Euhemerist and the European Perception and Description of the American Indians

173 — 188

J.-P. (Rennes) Myths and Legends in the Old World and European Expansionism on the American Continent

189 — 240

RANDLES,

ROMM, J .

DILKE,

MASON,

LESTRINGANT,

SANCHEZ,

XXXVI

CONTENTS

(Trento) The Other World and the 'Antipodes'. The Myth of Unknown Countries between Antiquity and the Renaissance

241 — 284

K. (Orono, Maine) - PASSMAN, K. (Orono, Maine) The Amazon Myth and Latin America

285 — 338

J.-P. (Rennes) « El Dorado » and the Myth of the Golden Fleece

339 - 378

MORETTI, G .

MARCH,

SANCHEZ,

CRO, S. (Hamilton, Ontario) Classical Antiquity, America, and the Myth of the Noble Savage

379-418

(Tübingen) Adveniat tandem Typhis qui detegat orbes. COLUMBUS in Neo-Latin Epic Poetry (15th-18th Centuries)

420-656

(Pisa) The American Indians and the Ancients of Europe: The Idea of Comparison and the Construction of Historical Time in the 18th Century

658-681

HOFMANN, H .

IACONO, A . M .

Volume 1.2: I. Scholarly and Literary Images of the New World from the Time of Columbus to the Present (continued) 2. Subjects arranged by Countries Italy CRO, S. (Hamilton, Ontario) Italian Humanism and the New World: The Presuppositions and Impact of Discovery (Clermont-Ferrand) The First Two Columbian Epics: De navigatione Christophori Columbi by LORENZO GAMBARA (1581) and Columbeidos libri priores duo by GIULIO C E S A R E STELLA (1585), and the Classical Tradition

DEMERSON, G .

CONTENTS

XXXVII

Spain and Portugal (Eichstätt) Spanish and Portuguese Humanism and America in the 16th Century

KOHUT, K .

J. (Nanterre) The Problematic of Humanist Dialogue and the Myth of the Noble Savage: The Coloquios de la Verdad of P E D R O DE

FERRERAS-SAVOYE,

QUIROGA ( c a . 1 5 6 0 f f . )

F. (Madrid) Renaissance Humanism and the Origins of Ethnology: J O S E DE ACOSTA, Paradigm of Jesuit Anthropological Humanism

DEL PINO,

(Nice) Aristotle and the Government of the Indians:

MUSTAPHA, M .

ACOSTA

versus

LAS CASAS

(Tübingen) The Classical Tradition of Grammar in 16th Century New Spain: N E B R I J A , DE O L M O S , and MOLINA

WEIBHAR, Ε .

France (Lille) The Myth of the American Amazons in the French Travel Literature of the Renaissance Period

LESTRINGANT, F.

P. (Ferrara) Classical Tradition and Ethnograpic Exoticism in La Defaite des Sauvages Armouchiquois by M A R C LESCARBOT; a Poem between Two Worlds and Two Cultures

CARILE,

J. A. S. (Vancouver, B. C.) Joseph-Francois Lafitau: A Classicist among the Iroquois

EVANS,

J. (Köln) The Classical Tradition and American Republicanism in French Revolutionary Thought

HEIDEKING,

England (Düsseldorf) " M O R E ' S Utopia: A Reaction to the Discussion about the New World"

STROSETZKI, C .

J. (Siegen) Images of the New World and European Utopias in the Early Modern Period after THOMAS M O R E to FRANCIS BACON

KLEIN,

XXXVIII

CONTENTS

Netherlands P. (Leiden) Morphology and History. Images of the Barbarian in Roman Ethnography and Dutch Brazil

MASON,

Germany WUTTKE, D. (Bamberg)

German Humanist Perspectives on the History of Discovery, 1493-1534 A. (Cordoba, Argentina) Classical Elements in Alfred Döblin's Vision of South America in the "Amazonas" Trilogy

MASSA,

II. Images of the New World in European Art of the Early Modern Period (16th - 18th Centuries) A. - TAMMEN, S. (Trier) Giants, Amazons, Blemmyes and Other Ancient Monsters in the New World

PERRIG,

G. (Graz) The Classical Tradition and the Visual Depiction of the American Indian in the sixteenth Century

POCHAT,

S. (Stuttgart) The Construction of the Allegory of America — Creation of a New Theme

POESCHEL,

(Tübingen) Adveniat tandem Typhis qui detegat orbes. COLUMBUS in Neo-Latin Poetry (15th - 18th Centuries) [CTA I 1, pp. 4 2 0 656]: Indices

HOFMANN, H .

I. SCHOLARLY AND LITERARY IMAGES OF T H E NEW WORLD FROM THE TIME OF COLUMBUS T O T H E PRESENT

1. GENERAL SUBJECTS

Classical Models of World Geography and Their Transformation Following the Discovery of America by W. G . L . RANDLES*

Contents I. Introduction

6

II. Early Antiquity. Homer, Pythagoras and Aristotle

7

III. The Cratesian theory

10

IV. The term orbis

12

V. Pomponius Mela and Isidore of Seville VI. Ptolemy: The Almagest

15

and the Geography

16

VII. Christian Antiquity: Lactantius and St Augustine

18

VIII. The Middle Ages (12th century): William of Conches, Manegold of Lautenbach, and Geoffroy of St Victor

20

IX. The Middle Ages (13th century): Abelard, Sacrobosco, Michael Scot, and Robert Grosseteste

22

X. The Middle Ages (13th century): Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Campanus de Novara, and Thomas Bradwardine

26

XI. The Middle Ages (14th century): John Buridan and Albert of Saxony: Aristotle interpreted with the aid of Archimedes

31

X I I . T h e R e n a i s s a n c e (15th century): Ptolemy, GIOVANNI FONT ANA, AENEAS SYLVIUS PICCOLOMINI, P i e r r e d ' A i l l y , GASPARINO B O R R O , ANTONIO DE N E B R I J A , JACOB P E R E Z DE VALENCIA, a n d J E R O M E M Ü N Z E R

35

XIII. CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS' "India" project in the context of the clash between the pseudo-Aristotelian physicists and the Ptolemaic geographers * Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris Universite de Bordeaux.

43

Maison des Pays Iberiques,

Grateful thanks are expressed to Professor LEON BOURDON of the Sorbonne who, with great patience, helped me over many years with his vast competence in elucidating the meaning of many of the Latin texts here quoted. I take however full responsibility for the English translations.

6

W . G . L . RANDLES XIV.

The Portuguese voyage of 1501, its description allegedly by and its impact on European culture

A M E R I G O VESPUCCI

XV. The transformation of the meaning of the term orbis terrarum the Discoveries

49 in the light of 53

XVI. The revival of the Cratesian theory as a model to yield understanding of the nature of the American continent and to guide future explorers

56

XVII. The revival of the Ptolemaic theory of the oceans enclosed in basins as a model for the continuous nature of the coastline of the American continent

61

XVIII. The final collapse of the pseudo-Aristotelian doctrine of the t w o spheres of the water and of the earth with non-coinciding centres and the emergence of the concept of the terraqueous globe

64

XIX. Conclusion

74

List of Illustrations

76

I.

Introduction

In the late fifteenth century, on the eve of COLUMBUS' first voyage, four rival and greatly differing conceptions of the shape and ordering of the landmasses and their relation to the seas were alive and current in Europe, all of them inherited through the classical tradition. The first goes back to Homer: The inhabited earth is represented as a single flat disc (the oikoumene surrounded by the Ocean). The second is that of a spherical earth in which the relation of water to land was based on Aristotle's doctrine of the concentric ordering of the elements. The third, of four small oikoumenes placed symmetrically on a spherical globe otherwise covered by water, can be traced to Crates of Mallos, a Greek who flourished c. 150 B. C. The fourth, in which the oceans are separate lakes lying in hollows in a spherical earth, appears in Ptolemy's Geography, the text of which had only become known in Europe in the early fifteenth century, when a manuscript of it was brought to Florence from Constantinople in 1406. These rival theories had, during the preparation of the great ocean voyages of discovery, varying and contrary influences on those who organized them. The outcome and the experience of the voyages were to reorder and transform the theories to produce the geographical image of the globe in the modern period. In order to understand the context in which these geographical theories appeared and how they claimed greater or lesser attention among scholars in successive periods, we must go back and retrace the history of their emergence from the earliest knowledge we have of them among the Greeks.

CLASSICAL GEOGRAPHY AND DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

II. Early Antiquity. Homer, Pythagoras and

7

Aristotle

For Homer (VHIth century B. C.) the earth was a plane circular surface entirely surrounded by the Ocean which flowed round it like a river. 1 Geminos (c. 70 B. C.) tells us that, "Homer and the poets of old, almost without exception, imagined the earth as a flat surface extending to the sky; the Ocean lay all around as a circle acting as the horizon ..." 2 The idea of the earth as a flat disc is found among the Ionians (Vlth — Vth century B. C.) and such was the conception held by Anaximander and Hecataeus (Vth century B. C.) 3 This early Greek representation of the inhabited earth, founded on the immediate evidence of the senses, was to persist long after the subsequent appearance of the notion of a spherical earth based on hypothetico-deductive reasoning from the observation of celestial phenomena. What we shall call the Homeric representation of the earth, referred to by the Greeks as the oikoumene, was taken up by the Romans who translated the Greek term by orbis terrarum.4 The division of the oikoumene or orbis terrarum, a single landmass, into three "parts" (not "continents"): Asia, Europe and Africa is attested among the Greeks by Dicaearchus (fl. c. 326-296 B.C.), Eratosthenes (c.275-194) 5 and Geminos (c.70 B. C.) 6 and among the Romans by Sallust (86 —35 B. C.) 7 and by Pomponius Mela (fl. 40 — 44 A. D.). 8 Hyginus (1st century A. D.) writes: 1

2

3

4

Τ. H. MARTIN, "Memoire sur la cosmographie grecque a l'epoque d'Homere et d'Hesiode", in: Memoires de l'Institut National de France, Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, Tome 28, Paris, 1874, pp. 212 — 235. D I C K S notes, that "... the earth (according to Homer) the shape of which is unspecified, is apparently surrounded by the Ocean river, although this is nowhere stated in so many words by Homer". Cf. D . R . D I C K S , Early Greek Astronomy, London, 1970, p. 29. The reference to Homer is Iliad, XVIII, 483 — 489, Loeb edition, Greek text and English translation by A. T. MURRAY, London, 1925, pp. 3 2 2 - 2 4 . Geminos, Introduction aux Phenomenes, text and French translation by G. AUJAC, Paris, 1975, Bk. XVI, 27 (p. 81). Cf. F. G I S I N G E R , art. "Oikumene" in: PAULY'S Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, Vol. XVII, Pt. 2 (1937), cols. 2 1 2 8 - 2 9 . J . V O G T , Orbis Romanus. Zur Terminologie des römischen Imperialismus, Philosophie und Geschichte, Vol. X X I I , Tübingen, 1 9 2 9 , p . 6 ( = I D E M , Vom Reichsgedanken der Römer, Leipzig, 1 9 4 2 , p. 1 7 1 — 7 2 = IDEM, Orbis. Ausgewählte Schriften zur Geschichte des Altertums, ed. by F. TAEGER and K . C H R I S T , Freiburg - Basel - Wien, 1 9 6 0 , p. 1 5 2 ) .

5

F. G I S I N G E R , art.

6

Geminos, op. cit., loc. cit. Sallust, Bellum Jugurthinum, ed. and translated by A L F R E D E R N O U T , Paris, 1958, chap. 17, p. 151. Pomponius Mela, De Chorographia libri tres, ed. G U N N A R R A N S T R A N D , Studia Graeca et Latina Gothoburgensia, Vol. XXVIII, Göteborg, 1971, Chap. I (p. 4).

7

8

cit.,

col. 2170.

8

W. G . L.

RANDLES

"... the whole region lying between the Arctic (circle) and the tropic (of Cancer) is divided into three parts: Europe, Asia and Africa". 9 The Christian Middle Ages were to perpetuate the early Greek concept of a flat inhabited earth (oikoumene/orbis terrarum; see § 4) while simultaneously accepting, within the context of astronomy, the notion of the earth as a sphere. Pythagoras (fl. 530 B. C.) was probably the first to postulate the sphericity of the earth. 10 Three criteria seem to have led him to this opinion: (a) the circular shadow of the earth during eclipses, (b) the hypothesis of a spherical heaven based on the observation of the movement of stars, (c) mathematico-aesthetical considerations grounded in the belief that the sphere was the most beautiful of the solid geometrical figures. It was probably the last criterion which carried the most weight. 11 Aristotle (384 — 322 B.C.) took over from the Pythagoreans their obsession with the perfect sphericity of the earth and he made it a key feature of his physics. He added a further principle which was that weight determined the earth's sphericity, all the latter's parts ordering themselves as closely as possible to the centre of the universe with which the centre of earth coincided. For Aristotle, the earth was only one of the four elements, the others being the spheres of the water, the air and the fire all arranged in concentric fashion 12 according to the order of their decreasing densities, around the universe's centre. For each element to be in its proper place undergoing no violence (and violence according to Aristotle cannot endure), not only must the centre of each sphere coincide with the centre of the universe, but the outer surface of the sphere of each element must also be tightly lodged 13 within the inner surface of the element coming immediately after it in accordance with the hierarchy of their respective densities. The application of this rigorous principle produced the result that the earth could not be said to be in its proper place unless surrounded and entirely covered by water. 14 The existence of dry land was thereby rendered impossible. 15 9

10

Hyginus, L'Astronomie, Latin text and French translation by A N D R E L E BCEUFFLE, Paris, 1983, p. 12. Cf. Sir T H O M A S H E A T H , Aristarchus of Samos, Oxford, 1913, p. 48. H E I D E L only finds this concept for the first time in Plato, but we prefer H E A T H ' S opinion. Cf. W. A. H E I D E L , The Frame of the Ancient Greek Maps. With a discussion of the sphericity of the earth, American Geographical Society Research Series N o 20, N e w York, 1937, pp. 8 1 - 8 4 .

11

S i r T H O M A S H E A T H , op

12

Aristotle, De Caelo {On the Heavens), Bk. II, Chap. 4, 287a English translation by W. K. C. GUTHRIE, Loeb edition, London, 1971; Physics, Bk.IV, Chap. 5, 212b, English translation by P. H. W I C K S T E E D and F. M . C O R N F O R D , Loeb edition, London, 1970; Meteorologica, Bk. II, Chap. 2, 354b, English translation by H. D. P. LEE, Loeb edition, London, 1978. The notion of a vacuum is unthinkable in Aristotle's system. Aristotle, De Caelo, Bk.IV, Chap.3, 310b. P I E R R E D U H E M , Le systeme du monde, Vol.9, Paris, 1958, pp. 8 8 - 9 1 .

13 14 15

cit.,

loc.

cit.

CLASSICAL

GEOGRAPHY

AND

DISCOVERY

OF

AMERICA

9

As DUHEM noted, none of Aristotle's Greek commentators attempted to resolve the contradiction between the Stagirite's implacable logic and observed experience. 16 It remained for the European Middle Ages to attack the problem, and then only in the 13th century. In one of his works, the Meteorologica, Aristotle expounded a theory of the relation between land and water entirely different from that of his concentric ordering of the elements. Following Parmenides (c. 515 —c. 450 B . C . ) , he divided the earth into zones: 17 two habitable temperate zones between the tropics and the Arctic circle, two uninhabitable frigid zones between the Arctic and Antarctic circles and the poles and an uninhabitable torrid zone lying between the two tropics. The habitable regions Aristotle described as "drum shaped". Of the southern one he said nothing, but of the northern one, corresponding to the oikoumene, he admitted that between India and the Pillars of Hercules (i. e. eastwards from the Far East to Gibraltar), the Ocean severed it, preventing it from forming a continuous belt around the globe. 18 In a passage in another work, On the Heavens, Aristotle suggested that this gap was very small and that the Atlantic Ocean was probably quite narrow: " . . . those who imagine that the region around the Pillars of Hercules joins on to the regions of India, [...] are not, it would seem, suggesting anything utterly incredible". 19 In the Middle Ages, with one exception, Roger Bacon (c. 1219 — 1292), the great majority of scholars who commented on Aristotle's works ignored the contradiction between the above passage and Aristotle's theory of the concentric ordering of the elements, preferring to direct all their efforts to interpreting the latter, in doing which they were led, as we shall see, to postulating an immensely wide Atlantic ocean. In spite of their preponderant position, especially in the universities, it was Bacon's insistence on a narrow Atlantic, copied by Pierre d'Ailly (1350 — 1420) in his Imago Mundi, that came to COLUMBUS' knowledge and provided him with the intellectual authority for pressing his project. Aristotle's Greek commentators were to misinterpret the Stagirite's doctrine of the transmutation of the elements and passed on to the Middle Ages a notion that came to be regarded as authentically Aristotelian. While Aristotle had stated that the volumes of the elements were inversely proportional to their densities, he had submitted as a hypothetical example that a given quantity of water could, for instance, produce as much as ten times that volume of air. Olympiodorus (6th century A. D.) went further than the other

16

IDEM, o p . c i t . , p . 9 1 .

17

On Parmenides cf. KARLHANS ABEL, art. "Zone" in: PAULY'S Realencyclopädie, ment Vol. XIV (1974), col. 1000. Aristotle, Meteorologica, Bk. II, Chap. 5, 362b. Aristotle, De Caelo, II, 14, 298a.

18 19

Supple-

W. G.L. RANDLES

10

commentators and, taking Aristotle's hypothetical case literally, wrote of a continuous proportionality of the volumes of the elements. "There is a rule", he wrote, "that the totality is to the totality as the parts are to another part. We see that a kotylos [Greek measure] of water is changed into ten kotyloi of air ..." 2 0 This erroneous doctrine, leading to the belief that the volume of the Ocean was ten times that of the earth was, as we shall see, to constitute a hindrance to projects of transatlantic navigation and was later, on the evidence of the Discoveries, to be proved groundless by COPERNICUS. III. The Cratesian

theory

The Greeks did however seek to resolve the contradiction between the Homeric representation of the inhabited earth as a flat disc and the Pythagorean one of a spherical earth, about the inhabited nature of whose surface the Pythagoreans had nothing to say. Crates of Mallos (fl. c. 150 B. C.) is usually credited with being the first to postulate the existence of four small landmasses situated symmetrically on a sphere over the greater part of which flowed two wide ocean rivers at right angles to one another. 21 G I S I N G E R claims that the Cratesian theory can be traced much farther back, to Eudoxus of Cnidus (c. 408 — 355 B. C.). 2 2 In the Roman period the Cratesian theory was taken up and made wellknown by Cicero in his Dream of Scipio23 and by the Neoplatonist Macrobius {Commentary on the Dream of Scipio) in the late IVth or early Vth century and by Martianus Capella (The Marriage of Philology and Mercury) before the middle of the Vth century A.D. 2 4 Cicero imagines Scipio in his dream hearing his grandfather speaking: "You see, Scipio, that the inhabited portions of the earth are widely separated and narrow, and that vast spaces lie between these inhabited spots (maculae) as we might call them; the earth's inhabitants are so cut 20

Olympiodorus, In Meteora Aristotelis, Venice, 1551, f. 5 (r.) = Ed. by G.STÜVE, Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, Vol. XII, Part 2, Berlin, 1900, p. 18, 5 — 7. Cf. also P. D U H E M , op.

21

22 23

24

cit.,

Vol. 9, pp. 91 -

96.

HANS JOACHIM METTE, Sphairopoiia. Untersuchungen zur Kosmologie des Krates von Pergamon, Munich, 1936, and GISINGER, art. cit., cols. 2 1 4 2 - 2 1 4 4 . F. GISINGER, art. cit., cols. 2 1 3 2 - 2 1 4 3 . English translation in: W. Η. STAHL (ed.), Macrobius' Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, New York, 1952, pp. 7 4 - 7 5 . Martianus Capella, The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, in: W. H. STAHL, Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, New York, 1977, Vol.11, § 6 0 3 , pp. 2 2 5 - 2 6 ; Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans, and notes by W. H. STAHL, New York, 1952, pp. 2 0 0 - 2 0 1 , and pp. 2 1 4 - 2 1 5 .

CLASSICAL GEOGRAPHY AND DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

11

Fig. 1. Diagram illustrating the Cratesian theory of the four land masses situated symmetrically on the surface of the globe. From E. L. S T E V E N S O N

off that there can be no communication among the different groups; moreover, some nations stand obliquely, some transversely to you, and some stand directly opposite you ...' , 2 5 Macrobius glossed Cicero's words with greater precision. The nations referred to by Cicero "... must," he wrote, "be divided as follows: those who are separated from us by the torrid zone, whom the Greek call antoikoi, the Anteoeci; next those who live on the underside of the southern hemisphere, the Antipodes, separated from the Anteoeci by the southern frigid zone; those who are separated from their Anteoeci, that is, the inhabitants of the underside of our zone, by their torrid zone; they are in turn separated from us by the north frigid zone." 26 The latter group, which Macrobius does not name, Martianus Capella calls the Antichthones. Cleomedes (2nd century A. D.) calls them the Perioeci, but his work was only known in the West in a Latin translation published in 1497.27 From then on the term was frequently used in the Renaissance, as we shall see. 25 26

27

Cicero, The Dream of Scipio, in: op. cit., p. 74. Macrobius, op. cit., p.206, ed. J . W I L L I S (Leipzig, Teubner, 1963), Comm., Bk.II, chap. 5,33. Cleomedes, De Contemplatione excelsorum orbium disputatio, Brescia, 1497. Cf. modern French translation by R I C H A R D G O U L E T , Cleomede, Theorie elementaire (De motu circulari corporum caelestium), Latin text and French translation, Paris, 1980, p. 95.

12

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Macrobius saw the four islands as divided by two streams of the Ocean, one flowing along the equator and the other over the poles. "Separating us from the people of the southern hemisphere, Ocean flows along the whole extent of the equator; again, as its streams branch out at the extremities of both regions, it forms two islands on the upper face of the earth and two on the underside."28 Martianus Capella described the Cratesian theory thus: "You must know that the earth is divided into two distinct parts or hemispheres: there is an upper hemisphere which we inhabit and which Oceanus encircles; and there is a lower hemisphere [...] Now in as much as the five zones encompass both parts, upper and lower, they actually form ten regions. The one inhabited by us extends northwards. Another, tending southward, is believed to be inhabited by men called antecians (antoikoi). Correspondingly, there are two habitable regions in the lower hemisphere. Those diametrically opposite us are called antipodes and those who are diametrically opposite our antecians are called antichthones". 29 Martianus Capella refers at the same time to the Greek theory of the five climatic zones into which the globe was divided. "The two zones that border upon the north and south poles have reason to be deserted, with enormous chill and cold, and severe snowfalls; the belt in the middle is scorched by fires and stifling heat, and burns all living things that draw near. The two belts between, tempered by the exhalations of life-giving breezes, are conducive to human and animal habitation." 30 The Cratesian theory, as a geographic model of the arrangement of land and water on the globe, enjoyed a wide currency in the early Middle Ages, especially in the 12th century. From the beginning of the 13th century it was progressively abandoned in the face of the rising enthusiasm for Aristotle, whose texts were beginning to enter the West for the first time. Eclipsed during the 13th and 14th centuries, the Cratesian theory was revived in the Renaissance in the 15th and, as we shall see, scholars turned to it as a model to transmit an understanding of how the newly discovered lands of the Discoveries were situated over the globe. IV. The term orbis Both Cicero and Macrobius call the four Cratesian islands "spots" {maculae). Only one of them corresponds to the inhabited portion of the earth known to the Romans as the orbis terrarum. 28 29 30

Macrobius, op. cit., pp. 214 — 215. Martianus Capella, op. cit., pp. 2 2 5 - 2 6 . IDEM, p. 2 2 5 .

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The Romans remained oddly ambiguous in their use of the term orbis, sometimes giving it the meaning of a two-dimensional flat disc and sometimes using it in an astronomical context with the meaning of a three-dimensional sphere. As J. VOGT has noted, in Latin no new word was coined by the Romans to designate the earth as a sphere. 31 The ambiguity in the meaning of the word orbis was to persist throughout the Middle Ages even into the Renaissance. A striking example of this ambiguity appears in a passage from Lucius Ampelius' Liber Memorialis written between the 2nd and 4th centuries A. D.: Orbis terrarum qui sub caelo est quattuor regionibus incolitur. Una pars eius est in qua nos habitamus; altera huic contraria, quam qui incolunt vocantur anticbthones; quarum inferiores duae ex contrario harum sitae, quas qui incolunt vocantur antipodes. Orbis terrarum quem nos colimus in tres partes dividitur, totidemque nomina: Asia, quae est inter Tanain et Nilum; Libya, quae est inter Nilum et Gaditanum sinum; Europa, quae est inter freturn et Tanain.32 ("The orbis terrarum beneath the heaven is made up of four regions. One of them is that in which we live; another is opposite it and its inhabitants are called antichthones, while the latter two, placed below and opposite the former, are inhabited by those who are called antipodes. The orbis terrarum which we inhabit is divided into three parts respectively named Asia situated between the Tanais [ = Don] and the Nile, Libya [ = Africa] between the Nile and the Gulf of Gades [ = Cadiz] and Europe lying between the straits [of Gades = Gibraltar] and the Tanais"). The term orbis terrarum here first designates the spherical earth on which lie the four Cratesian landmasses; then, in the very same paragraph, it is seen to refer to the oikoumene divided into three parts. Any doubt about the ambiguity is removed by observing the contradiction between a fourfold division and a threefold one. The Elder Pliny (23 — 79 A.D.) well illustrates in his Historia Naturalis the confusion over the term orbis. At one point he uses it to describe a spherical earth: Orbem certe dicimus terrae, globumque verticibus includi fatemur33 ("We speak with certainty of the orbis of the earth and we agree that the globe is contained within the poles"). At another point he writes of the earth in a Homeric context: Terrarum orbis universus in tres dividitur partes, Europam Asiam Africam34 ("The orbis terrarum is divided into three parts Europe, Asia and Africa"). 31 32

33

34

J. VOGT, Orbis Romanus, Tübingen, 1929, p. 7. Lucius Ampelius, Liber Memorialis, edited by ERWIN ASSMANN, Leipzig, Teubner, 1935, Chap. 6,1 (p. 9). Pliny, Historia Naturalis, Bk. II, Chap. 64, Latin text and English translation by H. RACKHAM, Loeb edition, Vol. I, London, 1972, p. 294. IDEM, Bk. ILL, Chap. 1, Loeb ed. p. 4.

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Other Roman authors sometimes hold to one meaning and sometimes to the other. While Seneca in his Quaestiones Naturales uses orbis in the sense of a sphere: ... quod nisi esset, non diceremus orbem terrarum pilam esse35 ("If it were not thus, we would not say that the orbis is a ball"), Cicero makes orbis the equivalent of an island: ... quasi magnam quandam insulam [...] quam nos orbem terrae vocamus ,.. 36 ("Almost a sort of large island [...] which we call the orbis terrae"). Macrobius tries to clarify the Cratesian nature of Cicero's words by saying that "... Cicero [...] did not say, 'The whole earth is a small island', but rather 'The whole portion that you inhabit is a small island'". 37 Orbis was sometimes used to designate islands or landmasses separated, or alleged to be separated, from the oikoumene by sea. Pliny wrote that the island of Taprobane [Ceylon/Sri Lanka] was believed to be an alterum orbem,38 and Pomponius Mela reported that Hipparchus had said that it was either a large island or the beginning of a second orbis (orbis alterius)39 Britain was considered to be an alterum orbem40 and Pliny spoke of Scandinavia as an alterum orbem terrarum.41 Ample precedent thus existed for later calling the American continent a Novus Orbis. Yet a further example of the ambiguity of the term orbis appears in a passage from Hyginus (1st century A.D.): Terra mundi media regione conlocata omnibus partibus aequali dissidens intervallo centrum obtinet sphaerae [...] Oceanus autem (e) regione circumductions sphaerae profusus prope totius orbis adluit fines41 ("The earth, placed in the middle of the universe, at an equal distance from all its parts, lies at its centre [...] The Ocean, spread out over the entire surface of the sphere, bathes the confines of nearly all the orbis".) The first sentence describes a spherical earth; in the second, orbis is obviously used in a Homeric context. 35

36

37 38

39 40

41 42

Seneca, translated by T H O M A S H . C O R C O R A N , Loeb edition, London, 1 9 7 1 , Bk. I V , Chap. 11,2. Cicero, De Natura Deorum, translated by H. RACKHAM, Loeb edition, London, 1972, Bk. II, 165 (p. 280). Macrobius, op. cit., p. 215. Pliny, Hist. Nat. Bk.VI, Chap. 24, Loeb ed. translated by H. RACKHAM, Vol.11, Cambridge, Mass. — London, 1947, p. 398. Pomponius Mela, op. cit., Chap. Ill (p. 59). Velleius Paterculus, Compendium of Roman History, Latin text and English translation by F R E D E R I C K W. SHIPLEY, Loeb edition, London, 1955, Bk. II, Chap. 46 (p. 150) and Lucius Annaeus Florus, Epitome of Roman History, Latin text and English translation by E D W A R D SEYMOUR F O R S T E R , Loeb edition, London, 1947, Bk. I, Chap. 46 (p. 204). Pliny, op. cit., Bk. IV, Chap. 196. Hyginus, L'Astronomie, Latin text and French translation by A N D R E L E BCEUFFLE, Paris, 1983, p. 12.

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V. Pomponius Mela and Isidore of Seville In the De Chorographia of Pomponius Mela (composed between 41 and 44 A.D.), largely a systematic geography of the known world, the Cratesian theory is relegated to a paragraph at the beginning, where it is roughly described (pi. I): "The earth (terra) is surrounded on all sides by the sea, which penetrates it from east to west and divides it into two parts or hemispheres in which five zones can be distinguished. While the middle one suffers torrid heat, the ones at the ends undergo extreme cold. The two others are uninhabitable and have the same seasons but at opposite times. Those who have their feet opposite us (antipodes) inhabit one hemisphere and we inhabit the other. But as the former are unknown to us because of the extreme heat in the zone which divides us from them, I shall say no more on the subject." 43 The rest of Pomponius Mela's work deals with the world as known to the Romans; the Cratesian theory had for him little interest. Isidore of Seville (c. 570 —636 A.D.) perpetuated into the Middle Ages, when he was widely read, the ambiguity of the Romans regarding the term orbis, and if anything he was to lend support to a Homeric interpretation of the term. Isidore shows the influence of both Hyginus and Pomponius Mela. In his De Kerum Natura (composed between 612 and 615 A.D.) Isidore repeated to the letter Hyginus' definition given above, 44 but in a passage in another of his works, the Etymologies, he writes quite unequivocally of a flat

orbis. "The orbis" he wrote, "is called thus because of its rotundity and because it resembles a wheel and that is why a little wheel is called an orbiculus. The all encompassing Ocean surrounds its confines on all sides. The orbis is divided into three parts; one of its parts is Asia, another is Europe and the third is called Africa." 45 Elsewhere, repeating the same cursory recognition of the Cratesian theory given by Pomponius Mela, Isidore writes that beyond the three parts of the orbis lies a fourth part across the Ocean to the south, which because of the heat of the sun is unknown to us and within whose limits are said to live the 43 44

45

Pomponius Mela, De Chorographia, cit., p p . 3 - 4 . Isidore of Seville, De Kerum Natura, ed. and French translation by JACQUES FONTAINE, Bordeaux, 1960, Chap. 48, p. 326. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum libri XX, Bk. XIV, Chap. 2, in: MIGNE, Pat. Lat., Tome L X X X I I , cols. 495 — 96 ( = Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi Etymologiarum Sive Originum Libri XX, ed. W . M . LINDSAY, Vol.11, London, 1911).

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RANDLES

antipodes of fable, 46 in whose real existence, he adds, with due respect for the Church for he was a Christian, there is no reason to believe (nulla ratione credendum est).47 It is not until the 13th century that we see systematic attempts made to reduce the ambiguity inherited from the Romans on the subject of geography, the principal motivation being the clash between the speculations of antiquity and the authority of Biblical myth. VI. Ptolemy: The Almagest and the Geography A writer of great importance in Late Antiquity, whose work appears largely unrelated to that of his Roman contemporaries, is the Alexandrine Greek Claudius Ptolemy (c. 90 — 168 A. D.). Ptolemy's major works are two in number. His treatise on astronomy, which came to be known in the West by its Arabic name the Almagest, was brought to Europe in the 12th century and made known through Gerard of Cremona's Latin translation of 1175. 48 The other work, his Geography, only reached Europe in the Renaissance to be translated into Latin in Florence in 1406 by Manuel Chrysoloras and Jacopo d'Angiolo della Scarperia. 49 In his Geography, Ptolemy's representation of the relation of the landmasses to the seas was exactly the reverse of Aristotle's. Where Aristotle had insisted that the earth lay within the water, Ptolemy envisaged the oceans as lakes separated from one another, lying in hollows over the earth surface. Ptolemy looked at geography and the relation between land and sea strictly from an astronomer's point of view and he appeared totally indifferent to Aristotle's concern to integrate them into his theory of the concentric ordering of the elements in which the latter's densities were in inverse proportion to their volumes. Among the scholars of Late Antiquity, whether Greek or Roman, one finds no trace of any debate on how the conflicting approaches of these two authorities were received or interpreted. On the relation between land and sea, Ptolemy states in his Geography in clear and precise terms that "... the continuous surface of the earth and the seas forms one sphere". 50 Such an exact definition does not appear in the Almagest. There he first gives a proof of the sphericity of the earth deduced from astronomical phenomena and then, following it, a different one for the sphericity of the water. «

IDEM, B k . X I V , C h a p . 5 , c o l . 5 1 2 .

47

IDEM, B k . I X , C h a p . 2 , c o l . 3 4 1 .

48

Ptolemy, Almagest, translated and annotated by G . J . TOOMER, London, 1984, p . 3 . VESPASIANO DA BISTICCI, (1421 - 1 4 9 8 ) , Vite di Uomini illustri del secolo X V , 3rd edition, Vol. Ill, Bologna, 1893, pp. 9 - 1 0 . Ptolemy, Tratte de Geographie, Greek text and French translation by the Abbe HALMA, Paris, 1828, Bk.I, Chap. 2, p. 11.

49

50

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"That the earth, too, taken as a whole, is sensibly spherical can best be grasped from the following considerations. We can see again that the sun, moon and other stars do not rise and set simultaneously for everyone on earth, but do so earlier for those more to the east, later for those towards the west. For we find that the phenomena at eclipses, especially lunar eclipses, which take place at the same time [for all observers] are nevertheless not recorded as occurring at the same hour (that is at an equal distance from noon) by all observers. Rather, the hour recorded by the more easterly observers is always later than that recorded by the more westerly. We find that the differences in the hour are proportional to the distances between the places [of observation]. Hence one can reasonably conclude that the earth's surface is spherical, because its evenly curving surface (for so it is when considered as a whole) cuts off [the heavenly bodies] for each set of observers in turn in a regular fashion. [...] In fact, the farther we travel toward the north, the more of the southern stars disappear and the more of the northern stars appear. Hence it is clear that here too the curvature of the earth cuts off [the heavenly bodies] in a regular fashion in a northsouth direction, and proves the sphericity [of the earth] in all directions. There is the further consideration that if we sail towards mountains or elevated places from and to any direction whatever, they are observed to increase gradually in size as if rising up from the sea itself in which they had previously been submerged: this is due to the curvature of the surface of the water." 51 The apparent disjoining ("There is the further consideration ...") of the proof given in the Almagest for the sphericity of the earth from that of the water was sufficient to mask for Medieval scholars the conflict between Ptolemy's representation of the relation between these two elements and Aristotle's doctrine of their concentricity. Only in the Renaissance, when the clear definition given in the Geography became known, did the conflict reveal itself in all its acuity. In antiquity, the Greek geographer Strabo (64/3 B. C. — 21 A. D. or later) had, in his Geography, given the same definition of the relation between the earth and the seas as Ptolemy had: "Now let us take as hypothesis that the earth together with the sea is sphere-shaped and the surface of the earth is one and the same with that of the high seas." 5 2 But Strabo remained unknown to the Middle Ages and his Geography only rediscovered and brought to Italy in 1423 and published c. 1469. 53 51

Ptolemy, Almagest,

was

translated and annotated by G . J . TOOMER, London, 1984, p p . 4 0 —

41. 52

S t r a b o , Geography,

53

1969, Vol.1, p. 43. Cf. A. DILLER, The textual tradition of Strabo's and 132.

1 1 , 5 , 5 , t r a n s l a t i o n b y H O R A C E LEONARD J O N E S , L o e b e d i t i o n , L o n d o n ,

Geography,

Amsterdam, 1975, pp. 102

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A pale reflection of the definition given in Ptolemy's Geography was transmitted to the Middle Ages by the Arabic astronomer Alfraganus (alFarghani) (died after 861). His work was translated into Latin in 1135 by John of Spain and became well known in the Medieval period. In it he wrote: Convenerunt quoque sapientes quod terra cum universis partibus suis tam terrestribus quam marinis sit similis spere,54 ("The experts agree that the earth together with all its parts, those made up of the earth as well as those made up of the seas, is like a sphere"). There is nothing here of Ptolemy's rigorous definition that the earth and the seas form "one continuous surface". Although widely read throughout the Middle Ages, Alfraganus had, on this point, no braking influence on the growing deference for Aristotle as an authority after the 12th century.55 VII. Christian Antiquity: Lactantius

and St Augustine

In the early fourth century A. D. the Christian writer Lactantius took vigorous issue with the Aristotelian and pagan doctrine of a spherical earth, to the centre of which all heavy bodies were attracted. For Lactantius there could only be one absolute "up" or "down" and bodies on the "underside" of the earth would fall into the sky. Refusing to entertain the existence of men living on the opposite side of the globe, the antipodes, he wrote: "Is there anyone so senseless as to believe that there are men whose footsteps are higher than their heads? or that things that are with us in a recumbent position, with them hang in an inverted direction? that crops and trees grow downwards? that the rains, and snow and hail fall upwards to the earth? [...] But if you inquire from those who defend those marvellous fictions, why all things do not fall into that lower part of the heaven, they reply that such is the nature of things, that heavy bodies are borne to the middle as we see spokes in a wheel; [...] I am at a loss what to say respecting those who, when they have once erred, consistently persevere in their folly, and defend one vain thing by another ..." 5 6 54

55

56

Al-Farghani, Differentie scientie astrorum, edited by FRANCIS J. CARMODY, Berkeley, California, 1943, p. 6. Another Latin translation was made by Gerard of Cremona. Cf. the modern edition by ROMEO CAMPANI: Alfraganus, II libro dell'aggregazione delle stelle, Citta di Castello, 1910. The only writer in the early Medieval West to quote Alfragan seems to have been Alexander Neckam (1157—1217). Alexander Neckam, De Naturis rerum, edited by THOMAS WRIGHT, London, 1863, p. 159 {...cum tamen Alfraganus dicat unam esse sphaeram aquarum et terrae, " . . . since however Alfraganus says that there is but one sphere of earth and water"). Lactantius, Divine Institutes, Bk. ILL, Chap. 24, in W. FLETCHER, The Works of Lactantius, Edinburgh, 1871, pp. 1 9 6 - 7 . Cf. G. MORETTI, "The Other World and the 'Antipodes'.

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This Father of the Church has always been held up by modern writers as an absurd figure, the original "flat earther". It is true that in the Middle Ages he is scarcely mentioned, but in the Renaissance he was rediscovered, commented on and respected perhaps more for his Ciceronian style than for the originality of his thought. His Divine Institutes was printed fifteen times in the 15th century. 57 After the discovery of America, he was to become throughout Europe in the 16th century a constant target of ridicule. Unlike Lactantius, St Augustine (354 — 430), in his City of God, did not hold that the earth was flat, but he did refuse to accept the existence of antipodean men (pi. II). "But in regard to the story of the antipodes, that is, that there are men on the other side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets for us, who plant their footprints opposite ours, there is no logical ground for believing this. Its authors do not claim that they have learned it from any historical evidence, but offer it as a sort of logical hypothesis. Their theory is that the earth hangs suspended within the heavenly sphere, so that the lowest and middle points of the world are one and the same. From this they conjecture that the other half of the earth, which lies beneath our portion cannot lack human occupants. They fail to observe that even if the world is held to be global or rounded in shape, or if some process of reasoning should prove this to be the case, it would still not necessarily follow that land on the opposite side is not covered by masses of water. Furthermore, even if the land there be exposed [ = uncovered by water], we must not jump to the conclusion that it has human inhabitants. For there is absolutely no falsehood in Scripture, which gains credence for its account of past events by the fact that its prophecies are fulfilled. And the idea is too absurd to mention that some men might have sailed from our part of the earth to the other and have arrived there by crossing the boundless tracts of the ocean, so that the human race be established there also by descent from one first man." 5 8 Saint Augustine agrees with Aristotle that the earth is spherical and that bodies fall towards its centre ("the lowest and middle parts of the world are one and the same"). He seems however to entertain the possible existence of two rival models, one a version of the Cratesian theory in which the other landmasses would be uninhabited ("we should not jump to the conclusion The Myth of Unknown Countries between Antiquity and the Renaissance," below in this volume {CTA I 1), p. 2 5 2 - 5 3 ; J. ROMM, " N e w World and "novos orbes": Seneca in the Renaissance Debate over Ancient Knowledge of America, below, p. 108. 57

58

JOHANNES QUASTEN, Patrology,

Vol. II, U t r e c h t / A n t w e r p , 1 9 5 3 , p. 3 9 4 ( = IDEM,

Initiation

aux Peres de l'Eglise, translation by J. LAPORTE, Paris, 1958, pp. 4 6 4 - 6 5 ) . Saint Augustine, The City of God against the pagans, Latin text and English translation by EVA MATTHEWS SANFORD & WILLIAM M C A L L E N GREEN, L o e b e d i t i o n , L o n d o n , 1 9 6 5 ,

Bk. XVI, Chap. 9, pp. 4 9 - 5 1 .

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that it [the land on the opposite side] has human inhabitants") and an alternative model in which the parts of the globe opposite our oikoumene "might be covered by masses of water". Saint Augustine here appears to be alluding to a notion that, as we shall see, was to become common in the Middle Ages (and which can already be glimpsed in Manilius and Pliny) of the earth immersed in a sphere of water out of which, as an "island", emerges our oikoumene. His main concern is however to refute the possibility of inhabited Cratesian landmasses, which he does invoking the absence of historical evidence and insisting on the impossibility, because of "the boundless tracts of the ocean", for the descendants of Adam to have colonized them. The City of God, unlike the Divine Institutes, was well known in the Middle Ages, but this did not prevent certain followers of the Neoplatonists from accepting inhabited Cratesian landmasses.

VIII. The Middle Ages (12th century): William of Conches, Manegold of Lautenbach, and Geoffroy of St Victor In the early Middle Ages, while certain writers expounded the Cratesian theory in complete indifference to its incompatibility with Biblical tradition, others showed their Christian sensitivity to the point of openly attacking the Neoplatonists and Macrobius in particular. The question still turned, not on the existence of the four Cratesian landmasses, but on whether they were inhabited by members of the human race. If they were inhabited, not only would the unity of mankind be impossible to sustain, but furthermore how would Christ's Apostles have brought the Gospel to such men, since the doctrine of the divisio apostolorum held that they had brought it to the whole of mankind 59 , while communication between the landmasses was impossible because of the vastness of the Ocean? Thus was Greek speculation on the geography of the globe submitted to the constraints of Christian myth. Among those who remained indifferent to the problem were the French scholars, Lambert of St Omer (c. 1120)60 who simply repeated Macrobius, and William of Conches (1080 — 1145) who, after describing the five zones of Parmenides, wrote as follows: "Therefore the part of the habitable zone in which we are, is divided into two. [...] ... the Ocean rivers (refluxiones) which surround the shores of the earth as far as the horizon, divide it into two regions [one to the east and one to the west]. We inhabit the upper part and our antipodes the lower part. However none of us can go to them and none of them can 59

60

Cf. Hrabanus Maurus ( 7 7 6 - 8 5 6 ) , De Vita Beatae Mariae Magdalenae, in: M I G N E , Pat. Lat., Vol.CXII, col. 1491. Lambert of St Omer, Liber floridus, ed. by A.DEROLEZ, Gand, 1968, f. 224 (r.) (p. 447).

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come to us [...] Likewise, the other habitable region is divided into two parts. The upper part is inhabited by our antoikoi and the lower part by their antipodes. Thus in the two habitable regions there are four kinds of populations." 61 Apart from explaining how each of the populations had their days and nights and seasons at different times, William did not elaborate any further. "And since", he concluded, "we have spoken enough of the three inhabited regions and their inhabitants, let us begin by speaking of our own region." 62 Manegold of Lautenbach (c. 1045 — 1103/19) in his Opusculum contra Wolfelmum felt that he had sound reason to attack this complacent acceptance of Macrobius. "Supposing for a moment that there are four spaces inhabited by men who, from the nature of things, have absolutely no possibility of crossing from one space to another, tell me, I pray, how it can be true that the Holy Apostolic Church can declare as reasonable that our Saviour [...] came for the salvation of the whole of humankind, if three races of men of whom the above mentioned Macrobius tells us that, given the climate of the zones and the earth, they can live beyond this habitable part in which we live, be excluded from this salvation and have not been able to receive the news of such a great hope of obtaining it." 63 Geoffroy of St Victor (12th century), in his Microcosmus, was another to emphasize the clash between Biblical orthodoxy and pagan philosophy arising from the Cratesian theory. "... many Christian philosophers have strayed from the path of the true faith and under the influence of this opinion [Crates] have imagined that there are as many kinds of men as there are landmasses (arida) in the world. But who does not see how far this idea lies from the orthodoxy of the faith. For it follows that not all men descend from a single man [Adam] and that [eternal] life was not restored to the world through the merit of a sole individual [Christ]." 64 The twelfth century Renaissance was to see the recovery in the West of new sources of Greek culture, among them Aristotle and Ptolemy. The obvious intellectual superiority of the latter over the Neoplatonists tended to force the 61 62 63

64

William of Conches, De philosophia mundi, in: M I G N E , Pat. Lat. Tome CLXXII, col. 85. Idem, col. 86. Manegold, Opusculum contra Wolfelmum, in: M I G N E , Pat. Lat., Tome CLV, cols. 154 — 55. On Manegold also see G . M O R E T T I "The Other World and the 'Antipodes.' The Myth of Unknown Countries between Antiquity and the Renaissance," below in this volume [CTA 11), p. 2 6 5 - 6 . Geoffroy of St Victor, Microcosmus, ed. P. D E L H A Y E , Memoires et Travaux des Facultes Catholiques de Lille, fasc. LVI, Lille, 1951, pp. 67 — 68 (manuscript of the second half of the 13th century).

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Cratesian theory into the background and, by a curious paradox, the theological problem it had raised was, as we shall see, eliminated by the protagonists of Aristotelian thought themselves.

IX. The Middle Ages (13th century): Abelard, Sacrobosco, Michael Scot, and Robert Grosseteste Aristotle, as we have seen, had left his successors with the difficult problem of reconciling his theory of the concentric ordering of the elements with the very evident reality that the earth was not entirely covered by water. The earliest Medieval attempt to show how the earth as a sphere (as opposed to a flat oikoumene), was not covered by water may not be directly a response to Aristotle, but simply repeated from an intermediate classical author who had sought in rough terms to make the Stagirite seem more plausible. The twelfth century theologian Pierre Abelard (1079 — 1142) gives the following description of the earth and its relation to the seas: Quasi enim aliquis globus ita in aqua constituatur, ut una pars eius superemineat, ita ille globus terrae in aquis insedit, ut ex una parte eum mare contingeret ...65 ("Just as when a globe is plunged in water in such a way that a part of it emerges, so the globe of the earth lies (insedit) in the waters so that one part of it is in contact with the sea"). The source of Abelard may have been Manilius or Pliny or both, although it should be noted that neither of the latter uses the word globus: Manilius (1st century A. D.) writes: Ipsa natat tellus pelagi lustrata corona cingentis medium liquidis amplexibus orbem.66 ("The earth itself is afloat {natat) encircled by the crown of the ocean which clasps the orbis in its midst in an embrace of water"). 67 Pliny's definition is very similar: Pars nostra terrarum, de qua memoro, ambienti, ut dictum est, oceano velut innatans.68 65

66

67 6S

Pierre Abelard, Expositio in Hexamerort, in: M I G N E , Pat. Lat., Tome C L X X V I I I , col. 7 4 8 AB. (I am grateful to Madame D A N I E L L E L E C O Q for this reference.) Manilius, Astronomica, 4 , 595 — 96, Latin text and English translation by G . P. G O O L D , Loeb edition, London, 1974, p. 268. Author's translation. Pliny, Historia Naturalis, Bk. II, Chap. 112, Latin text and English translation by H. RACKHAM, Loeb ed. London, 1972, pp. 366 - 67.

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("Our own portion of the earth which is my subject, swims as it were in the ocean by which, as we have said, it is surrounded"). It should be emphasized that the words insedit used by Abelard, natat by Manilius and innatans used by Pliny can scarcely be construed to imply "floating" in any Archimedian sense. Archimedes' work on floating bodies, which was translated into Latin by William of Moerbeke in 1269, 6 9 does not seem to have had any influence on Medieval thinkers concerned with the problem of the spheres of the earth and the water. In the early 13th century there appeared a short treatise on physics and astronomy by an obscure Englishman, John of Holywood (or in Latin form, Johannes de Sacrobosco). His Sphaera (c. 1220), which became a handbook of cosmography in the universities, drew on Ptolemy for astronomy and on Aristotle for its physics. In it, Sacrobosco supplied an Aristotelian explanation to solve the problem of the earth being covered by water, as Aristotle had implied. "The machine of the universe is divided into two, the ethereal and the elementary region. The elementary region, existing subject to continual alteration, is divided into four. For there is earth, placed, as it were, in the middle of all, about which is water, about water air, about air fire, which is pure and not turbid there and reaches to the sphere of the moon as Aristotle says in his book of Meteorology [...] Three [of the elements] in turn surround the earth on all sides spherically (orbiculariter) except in so far as the dryness (siccitas) of the land stays (obsistit) the wetness (humori) of the water to protect the life of animate beings." 70 Sacrobosco is the first Medieval writer to use the very Aristotelian qualities of dryness and wetness to bring the Stagirite's doctrine into line with observed reality. This ploy of scholastic writers of using Aristotelian arguments to clarify problems in Aristotle's thought is not unusual, although it frequently led rather to a displacement of the problem than to its resolution. A contemporary of Sacrobosco, Michael Scot (1175? —1234?), 71 about whom we know very little, wrote a commentary on Sacrobosco's Sphaera (c. 1230). In it he shows that he had quite fully grasped Aristotle's theory of the elements and of their places and its clash with observed experience. 69

70

71

Cf. EDWARD GRANT (ed.), A Source Book in Medieval Science, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1974, p. 40. Johannes de Sacrobosco, Sphaera, in: LYNN THORNDIKE, The Sphere of Sacrobosco and its Commentators, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1949, p. 119. On Sacrobosco cf. the article by JOHN F. DALY S. J., in: Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Vol. XII (1975), pp. 6 0 - 6 3 . Michael Scot, Super auctore spere cum questionibus, in: LYNN THORNDIKE, op. cit., pp. 2 4 8 - 3 4 2 . Cf. also the article on Scot by LORENZO MINIO-PALUELLO in: Dictionary of Scientific

Biography,

Vol. I X , ( 1 9 7 4 ) , pp. 3 6 1 - 6 5 .

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"If it is agreed that the whole earth is not covered by water, but that parts of the earth remain uncovered by water, one therefore asks why the water is contained by the air and the air by the fire, since according to Aristotle an element is the place {locus) of another element, that is to say that the [outer] surface of [the sphere of] one element is the place {locus) of [the sphere of] another element, just as the [outer] surface of [the sphere of] the air is the place {locus) of [the inner surface of the sphere of] the fire." 7 2 To explain how the earth emerged from the water Michael Scot invoked, like Sacrobosco (but in different terms), the Aristotelian qualities of wetness and dryness. " N o dry body", he said, "is limited by a limit other than itself and it is limited only by itself. T h e earth is a dry body, therefore it is not limited by a limit other than itself such as water or air and thus it does not have a spherical shape [...] A liquid [on the other hand] is limited by a limit other than itself and therefore it has a spherical shape." 7 3 To explain what had brought about the existence of dry land, Michael Scot adduced a higher final cause, the perfection of the universe, having priority over the principle of the concentric ordering of the elements. Without it, warm blooded living creatures and plants would have no dry land on which they could survive. To provide for them, a certain part of the earth lay uncovered by the waters. 7 4 "[Aristotle]", declared Michael Scot, "says that [all] round the earth lies the water. [But] this [opinion] seems to be unfounded, since it rather appears that the earth lies above the water, like an island in the sea." 7 5 In saying that " . . . the earth lies above the water like an island", Michael Scot was careful to distinguish between the quite appreciable emergence of the whole earth out of the water and the minimal outcropping of mountains whose importance was insignificant in interrupting the exact sphericity of the earth's surface. 7 6 Pliny had long before declared that the elevation of mountains was insignificant in relation to the total size of the earth. 7 7 Although he had absorbed the principles of Aristotle's thought and undertaken a critique of it, in saying that "parts [not a part] of the earth remain uncovered by the water" and that instead of the earth being surrounded by water, "the earth lies above the water like an island", Michael Scot had still not broken with the Cratesian theory. Such a simultaneous adhesion to two

72 73 74 75 76 77

Michael Scot, in: op. cit., p. 296. Idem, pp. 2 9 5 - 9 6 . Idem, loc. cit. Michael Scot, in: op. cit., p. 274. Idem, p. 296. Pliny, Historia Naturalis, Bk. II, C h a p . 64.

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contradictory theories, is not uncommon among the scholastics. His implicit insinuation that the "earth island" was but one of several is confirmed by a passage where he examines the question of whether the zone situated between the tropic of Capricorn and the Antarctic circle is temperate and habitable. Arguing like Manegold and Geoffrey of St Victor from a Christian point of view, Michael Scot asks why, if it is temperate, our zone is habitable and the other not. "Nature in its natural function (Natura naturans) does nothing in vain and we are, as it were, the final purpose of all things. But since none of those [who live there] can come to us and none of us can go to them because of the torrid zone which lies between the two [temperate] zones, it follows that it is neither temperate nor habitable. If it were habitable and temperate, there would there be men who were mortal or immortal. If they were immortal they would not be composed of the four elements, and so they would not undergo generation and corruption, since they would not be composed of contraries, something which is not to be examined here. Thus if there were there men who are immortal, they would not be descended from Adam because all those who are descended from Adam are mortal because of the sin of our first parent. And if there were there men who are mortal, it would be contrary to the faith, since the reason why God became incarnate and suffered for us in our habitable zone would be the same for them as for us. But this is impossible because Christ would have been born twice and would have suffered twice, which is false. [...] It must be said that, in truth, this zone is not habitable by mortals and the reasons which prove this must be accepted because it would be contrary to the faith if there were there men who were mortal." 78 That Michael Scot still thought in terms of the Cratesian theory is further shown when he says that "We see that the Ocean or [ = and] Amphitrides [sic for Amphitrites] surrounds the whole earth". 79 Of the two "rivers" that encircle the earth in the Cratesian schema, one called Ocean flows along the equator; the other called Amphitrides flows at right angles to the first through the poles. A contemporary of Michael Scot, Robert Grosseteste (c. 1168 —1253), also wrote a Sphaera in which he expounded the Cratesian theory of the Ocean rivers: "Let there be a great circle going round the body of the earth from one pole to another and another great circle going round the body of the earth 78 79

Michael Scot, in: op. cit., p. 321. Idem, p. 274.

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along the equator. Corresponding to these two circles, two seas circle the earth. And the sea which circles the earth through the poles is called Amphitrides and the other sea is called Ocean. These two seas divide the earth into four parts of which only one is inhabited." 80 Robert Grosseteste says nothing about the four islands of the Cratesian theory, but, in a passage elsewhere in his work, he seems closer to Ptolemy's view of the relation between earth and water and indifferent to Aristotle's concentric ordering of the elements; yet his explanation of the existence of dry land has nothing to do with the definition in Ptolemy's Geography, or with Alfraganus' pale reflection of it. "Nevertheless for living beings who are accustomed to live on land to have a place to live and to obtain shelter, the water withdrew into the cavities of the earth whose dry surface [then] appeared. And the earth together with the waters contained in it are nothing more than the sphere of the earth." 81 The sources of Grosseteste's idea that "the water withdrew into the cavities of the earth" can be traced to the Greek writers of Late Antiquity, John Philoponus and Olympiodorus,82 but one cannot conclude that he had read them himself directly.

X. The Middle Ages (13th century): Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Campanus de Novara, and Bradwardine

Thomas

Two writers of the 13th century, with very different minds, one a Dominican, Albertus Magnus (c. 1193 — 1280), the other a Franciscan, Roger Bacon (c. 1219 — 1292), showed that they were fully conversant with the issues discussed so far. Both have been claimed as appearing as "moderns", that is in advance of their time, but this judgement is illusory for their sources were largely the same ones as those of their predecessors and contemporaries. Albertus Magnus in his De Natura loci (c. 1250) asserts that the torrid zone is difficult, but not impossible, to cross, and that the southern hemisphere is not only inhabitable, but is inhabited.83 His only evidence was drawn from 80

81 82 83

Robert Grosseteste, De Sphaera, in: L.BAUER, Die Philosophischen Werke des Robert Grosseteste, in: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, Vol. IX, Münster, 1912, p. 24. Idem, p. 12. Cf. P.DUHEM, Le systeme du monde, Vol. IX, Paris, 1958, pp. 9 6 - 9 7 . Albertus Magnus, De Natura loci, in: Opera omnia, Tome V, Pars II, Münster, 1980, pp. 12-14.

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Homer's remark that there are two sorts of Aethiopians: those who live under the summer tropic and those who live under the winter one, whose feet are opposite ours, 8 4 and from Lucan's description of the Arabs who came to R o m e and saw the sun's shadow fall in the opposite direction to that in which it fell where they came from. 8 5 Albertus is fully aware of Aristotle's theory of the elements. Almost all the philosophers and mathematicians are agreed, he wrote, that the earth is not everywhere inhabitable, because the sphere of the water is greater than the sphere of the earth. Since the water does not cover the earth in the northern hemisphere, it seems to them that it must cover it in the southern one. Against this view, Albertus quotes Albumasar and his followers, who claim, on astronomical grounds, that the southern hemisphere is exactly the same as ours. 8 6 If the water is said to occupy more space than the earth as an element, it is said to do so because it has less matter than earth and because it is less dense and not because it does so in fact {in effectu), but because it is said that the proportion of water to earth is such, ( s e d quod ita est proportione aquae ad terram). T h a t the water is greater [in quantity] than the earth in fact {in effectu), is not certain, for if this were so, the water would not be limited to the shorelines, but it would inundate the whole earth. Albertus finally concludes that the lower hemisphere is divided up just as ours is, with regions that are habitable and uninhabitable on account of cold and heat. 8 7 Roger Bacon's arguments in his Opus Majus (1264) in favour of an inhabitable southern hemisphere were similar to Albertus' but they were not the same ones. Bacon first quotes Ptolemy's De Dispositione Sphaerae&& that a sixth part of the earth is inhabitable and that the rest is covered by water; he then quotes Ptolemy's Almagest that only the quarter which we inhabit is inhabitable. Aristotle, however, he notes, declares that more than a quarter is inhabitable, for Aristotle says that there is only a short sea distance between the [western] limit of Spain and the beginning [i.e. eastern] limit of India. 8 9 Seneca, also, writes Bacon, asserts that this distance can be navigated in a few days with

84

8J

86

87 88

89

Homer, Odyssey, I, 2 2 - 2 4 , translation by A. T. MURRAY, Loeb edition, London, 1974 (Vol.1, pp. 4 - 5 ) . Lucan, The Civil War, III, 247 - 48, translation by J. D. DUFF, Loeb edition, London, 1969 (p. 132). On Albumasar, cf. RICHARD LEMAY, Abu Ma'shar and Latin Aristotelianism in the twelfth century, Beirut, 1962. Albertus Magnus, op. cit., pp. 2 0 - 2 1 . This work seems to have disappeared for it is not mentioned among Ptolemy's extant works. There is however a possibility that it might have been a re-worked introduction to the Almagest. Aristotle, De Caelo, Bk. II, Chap. 14.

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a favorable wind. 9 0 The prophet Esdras wrote that six parts of the earth were dry land and that the seventh was covered by water. 9 1 Bacon, besides quoting the example of the two races of Aethiopians cited by Albertus, also quoted Pliny's reports of a port in India called Pathalis where the shadow of the sun's rays fell to the south and his description of Ceylon where the sun's rays also fell to the south. 9 2 Bacon's conclusion therefore formed an argument claiming that more than a quarter of the earth was inhabited, yet he never committed himself to specifying how much. He did admit however that, although the region beyond the tropic of Capricorn had excellent qualities for being inhabitable, no one had ever reached us from there nor had anyone from among us ever gone there. 93 Nowhere in the Opus Majus does Bacon take up Aristotle's theory of the elements and the problem it posed for the Medieval scholastics. In the IVth Book of his Commentary on Aristotle's Physics, Bacon does however deal with the problem and asks what is the place of the earth (Queritur posted de loco terrae) and whether the water is the place of the earth or whether the place of the earth is the centre of the universe (queritur utrum aqua sit locus terrae vel centrum). In this question he was asking whether the place {locus) of the earth was the same as the centre of the universe or was the concave surface of the sphere of the water surrounding it. His answer was that the place (locus) of the earth was not the centre of the universe, as this centre was quite indivisible and the earth was wholly divisible. The place of the earth was the inner surface of the sphere of the water. 9 4 Bacon had quite clearly perceived Aristotle's demonstration that for the earth to be in its proper place, it must be entirely lodged and surrounded by the sphere of the water, but, as DUHEM noted, 9 5 he failed to explain the emergence of dry land, nor did he apparently see any contradiction on this point with what he had written in the Opus Majus. Apart from Pierre d'Ailly's copying two hundred years later of Bacon's words, the arguments of both Bacon and Albertus Magnus in favour of a greatly extended oikoumene and of an inhabited southern hemisphere were largely ignored by their successors and their attempts to construct a critical synthesis of Ptolemaic astronomy and Aristotelian physics were not taken up

90

91 92 93

94

95

Seneca, Naturales Quaestiones, Bk. I, Pref. 13, English translation by Τ. H. C O R C O R A N , Vol.1, Cambridge, Mass.—London, 1991, p. 10. Esdras, Bk. II, Chap. 6, v. 42. Pliny, Historia Naturalis, Bk. VI, Chap. 22. Roger Bacon, Opus Majus, ed. J O H N H E N R Y B R I D G E S , London, 1 8 9 7 , facsimile ed. Minerva, Frankfurt/Main, 1 9 6 4 , Vol.1, pp. 2 9 0 - 3 0 9 . Roger Bacon, Quaestiones super libros octo physicorum Aristotelis, in: Opera hactenus inedita, ed. F. M . D E L O R M E and R O B E R T STEELE, Oxford, 1935, fascicule XIII, pp. 215 216. P. D U H E M , Le Systeme du Monde, Paris, 1958, Vol. I X , p. 112.

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and built on. On the whole, the discourses of the physicists and the astronomers tended to be kept in separate channels, even when dealt with by a single writer. A good example of this is that of Campanus de Novara (1205 —1296) who, in his Tractatus de Sphaera, written after 1268, shows, unlike the two previous writers studied, no awareness of the incompatibility between the physics of Aristotle and the astronomy of Ptolemy. After giving in Chapter IUI of his Tractatus a short clear account of Aristotle's theory of the concentric ordering of the elements, which he declares is their final shape and order (and by "final" he may be suggesting some sort of eschatological perfection), Campanus then asks in Chapter V why the sphere of the water does not continuously envelop the earth. His explanation is that of Michael Scot, whom he had obviously read: a higher final cause providing living creatures with dry land to live on. He specifically relates this higher final cause to the action of Divine Providence, when, according to Genesis, the Creator pronounced the words: "Let the waters beneath the heavens be gathered together in one place and let the dry land appear". The earth, said Campanus, had risen up like an island, interrupting the sphere of the water and itself losing its exact spherical shape. Drawing on Aristotelian concepts of dryness and wetness to which both Sacrobosco and Michael Scot had had recourse, he adds that whereas the water, because of its wetness, cannot lose its spherical shape and can only be limited by a limit other than itself, the earth because of its dryness and compactness can limit itself by itself. Water cannot lose its spherical shape, but earth can. " T h e whole of the dry land", Campanus concluded, "is like a very large island elevated up in the air above the surface of the water". 9 6 In this mix of providentialism and of Aristotelian qualities, there appears no longer any mention of the Cratesian theory. Further on, in Chapter X I X , Campanus proceeds to give a careful repetition of Ptolemy's proofs demonstrating the sphericity of the earth and of the water, which the Alexandrine had given in the opening pages of the Almagest. In this repetition there is one important difference which separates Campanus from the Almagest. Campanus gives Ptolemy's proofs for the sphericity of the earth as being valid for the earth together with the water. The behaviour of celestial phenomena illustrating the sphericty of the earth in both an east-west direction and a northsouth direction is exactly identical for observers, says Campanus, whether they be on land or on sea or on islands or on board ship. 97 Such a definition, equivalent to that of Ptolemy in his Geography, which Campanus could not have known, is obviously incompatible with the definition already given in his Chapter V of "the earth as a large island elevated up in the air above the surface of the water". Campanus seemed not to be aware of the clash.

96 97

Campanus de Novara, Tractatus de Sphaera, Campanus de Novara, op. cit., f. 154 (v.).

Florence, 1518, f. 153 (r.).

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The first to see the mathematical incompatibility between the physicists and the astronomers, behind whom stood the figures of Aristotle and Ptolemy, was an English scholar Thomas Bradwardine (c. 1290 —1349) of Merton College Oxford. Bradwardine had noted, copied in Alfraganus' treatise, Ptolemy's assertion in the Almagest, that the distance between the earth and the moon was 33 V3 times the radius of the earth. This doctrine, for the Aristotelians, was equivalent to the radius of the four elements: earth, water, air and fire taken together, but certain Aristotelians (not Aristotle) had been, in the wake of his Greek commentators, claiming, as we have seen, that the volumes of the elements were in the proportion of 10:1. Their total volume, as contained by the inner surface of the sphere of the moon, would thus be 1 + 10 + 100 + 1000 = 1111. The application of Euclid's proposition 18 in Book XII of his Elements, that "Spheres are to one another in the triplicate [ = cube] ratio of their respective diameters" 98 showed that it was obvious that Ptolemy's distance of 331/3 earth radii separating the moon from the earth gives a volume of the space occupied by the elements beneath the moon of 33.33 times that of the volume of the earth (the ratio of the diameters being the same as that of the radii). This figure was vastly different from that proposed by the Aristotelians. Bradwardine in his Tractatus de proportionibus (1328)" proposed a solution to this problem. He retained the assertion of the commentators of Aristotle that the elements maintained a constant proportion in the relations to one another of their volumes, but he eschewed any attempt to advance any exact figure for it. He also retained the figure of the astronomers of the distance between the earth and the moon. Into this distance he attempted to fit the four elements spaced proportionally between each other. Expressed in modern mathematical terms this can be formulated as χ 3 + χ 2 + χ + 1 = Κ3, where Κ is the distance between the moon and the centre of the earth. Since Bradwardine did not have a mathematics capable of resolving this problem in algebraic terms, he proceeded by approximation, asserting that the proportions were greater than 32,768 : 1024 : 32 : 1 and smaller than 35,937 : 1089 : 33 : 1. In the Middle Ages he was acclaimed as a great mathematician. 100 Very few scholars in later centuries took up Bradwardine's demonstration; the greater number contented themselves with repeating in the context of physics, the ratio of 10:1 for the elements and, in the context of astronomy, the Ptolemaic figure of 33.3 earth radii for the distance between the earth and the moon, often giving the two figures in the same work without seeming to realize that they clashed. 98

99

100

Euclid, The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements, translation by Sir T H O M A S H E A T H , Dover Books, N e w York, 1956, pp. 4 3 4 - 4 3 6 . Thomas Bradwardine, Tractatus de proportionibus, edited and translated by H. L A M A R C R O S B Y , JR., Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1961, pp. 1 3 3 - 1 4 1 . P . D U H E M , Le Systeme du Monde, Vol. I X , Paris, 1958, pp. 1 6 4 - 5 .

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XI. The Middle Ages (14th century): John Buridan and Albert of Saxony: Aristotle interpreted with the aid of Archimedes The University of Paris produced in the 14th century a remarkable group of physicists, whose principal contribution was in seeking explanations in terms of natural philosophy, rather than in having recourse to Divine Providence, to clarify the difficulties in Aristotle's doctrine of the elements. The most original of these physicists was John Buridan (c. 1300— 1358). 1 0 1 Before expounding his own doctrine, he argued first against the Cratesian theory. "It remains now to speak of the places which are uninhabitable on account of the water. On this there are three important opinions. Some say that only one quarter, or nearly a quarter, is inhabitable and others say that there are inhabitable places in all the quarters of the earth. And of this latter opinion we must speak first. Those in favour of it say that both the earth and the water are concentric with the universe, that is to say that the centre of the universe is the same as the centre of both the former two. However they say that in each quarter of the earth there are many tracts of land uncovered by the waters because of the many humps (gibbositates) emerging almost like the elevations of mountains above the water. And they say that many other parts of the earth are covered by the water because of the depressions like valleys in between the said elevations. And they say that this is so in each of the quarters of the earth and the proof is that from one very large landmass uncovered by the water, we cross a very large and extended sea and we come to another very large landmass uncovered by the water and it is probable that this is the case all round the earth. But against this view there are two important objections. The first is that all the seas which can be crossed by men and all the habitable lands which can be found are contained in this quarter of the earth which we inhabit. And some have labored [in navigation] to reach by sea the other quarters and they have never been able to reach any habitable land. And that is why it is said that Hercules placed pillars at the limits of our quarter as a sign that beyond them there was no habitable land, nor sea that was navigable. The second objection, which should have been made in the first place, is even graver, because if the world is eternal, [in Aristotle's view] this opinion is incapable of explaining how the elevations of the earth have been

101

On Buridan cf. the article by E. A. MOODY, in: Dictionary (1970), pp. 6 0 3 - 6 0 8 .

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able, from the beginning of time, to escape destruction, since innumerable particles of earth have been continually carried down from them in rivers to the depths of the seas. N o w from infinite time back, these depths would have been filled up and the elevations of the earth eroded away, something which should not be mentioned to those who want to keep the world perpetually in a favorable condition for living creatures and plants, such as it now is." 1 0 2 Should we be surprised to see this university scholar rely on the myth of Hercules and his pillars to refute the Cratesian theory, when navigation beyond the straits of Gibraltar had for long been regularly practised by Mediterranean peoples and a Portuguese expedition led by the Genoese Lanzarotto Malocello had in 1336 reached the Canary islands probably shortly before Buridan wrote? 1 0 3 As will be continually evident further on, the information furnished by theoretically oriented scholars and practical mariners was frequently out of phase, and lack of communication between them, except in rare cases, was a constant feature in our context. Buridan's argument against the Cratesian theory, that in the course of time, soil erosion would have worn away the elevations of the land emerging out of the water, is basic to his own theory of the relation between water and earth. He next expounds the providentialist theory that, for living beings and plants to survive, God had originally placed the earth in the centre of the universe, but had made the centre of the water eccentric to the centre of the universe. Thus a part of the earth, almost a quarter in surface area, had emerged above the water. Against this theory, Buridan sees two objections, one that the eccentricity of the water is not compatible with the circular movement of celestial bodies, nor with the physical nature of the elements of water and earth, and secondly that the emergent elevations of the earth would over time be eroded away. He therefore proposes a third solution which seems to him most probable and which "perpetually saves all the phenomena." 1 0 4 Both the earth and the water, he declares, are concentric with the universe (and on this point he appears to contradict himself in relation to what he says later on), but how then will the elevations of the earth be preserved through time? For the survival of living beings and animals, a part of the earth, a quarter, lies uncovered by the water and emerges above it and it remains and will, he insists, remain "naturally uncovered" (sic!) in spite of the concentricity (!) and even if we overlook the mountains. "And such is this theory (imaginatio) that the earth, in the part that is not covered by the water, is altered by the air and the heat of the sun and a 102

103

104

Jean Buridan, Quaestiones super libris quattuor de caelo et mundo, Lib. II, Quaestio 7, edited by E. A. MOODY, Cambridge, Mass., 1942, pp. 1 5 7 - 8 . CHARLES VERLINDEN, "Lanzarotto Malocello et la decouverte portugaise des Canaries", in: Revue beige de philologie et d'histoire, Tome X X X V I (1958), pp. 1 1 7 3 - 1 2 0 9 . Jean Buridan, op. cit., p. 159.

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large quantity of air is mixed with it and thus this part of the earth becomes less dense and lighter and it has many pores full of air or subtle bodies. But the part of the earth which is covered by the water is not altered by the air and the sun and it remains denser and heavier. And thus if the earth were divided through the middle of its magnitude, one part would be much heavier than the other and that part in which the earth is uncovered by the water would be much lighter. And thus it appears that the centre of gravity of the earth is different from its centre of magnitude, for the centre of gravity is there where there is as much weight on one side as on the other and this is not in the middle of its magnitude, as has been said. Furthermore, if the earth, because of its heaviness tends towards the centre of the universe, it is because its centre of gravity coincides with the centre of the universe, and not with its centre of magnitude. It is because of this that the earth is elevated above the water on one side and on the other it is totally submerged." 105 Buridan's introduction into Aristotelian discourse of Archimedes' (c. 287 — 212 B. C.) concept of a centre of gravity of a body, as a means of overcoming the difficulty in accommodating Aristotle's doctrine of the elements with observed experience, was inspired from his reading of Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. 193 — 217 A.D.) as repeated by Simplicius (1st half of the 6th century A.D.) in the latter's commentary on Aristotle's De Caelo.106 But Buridan in his mechanical solution to the problem, 107 went beyond Alexander of Aphrodisias; his innovatory thought was followed by his contemporaries and successors into the 15th and early 16th century, when the maritime voyages of the Portuguese, revealing the great extent of land in the southern hemisphere, were then, as we shall see, to prove his theory untenable. By placing three quarters of the earth's surface under water, it eliminated until then the theological difficulties posed by the Cratesian model, as well as those raised by the existence of inhabited antipodes. Though Buridan did not explicitly relate the part of the earth emerging out of the water to the orbis terrarum of antiquity, this was in fact done by his contemporary Albert of Saxony (c. 1316 — 1390). In his commentary on Aristotle's De Caelo, Albert first refutes the Cratesian theory as Buridan had done, using as proof of its untenability the myth of Hercules and his pillars. 108 He then, after making the earth emerge out of the water by distinguishing its centre of gravity from its centre of magnitude, writes as follows: 105

Idem, loc.

10i

C f . P . D U H E M , Le

107

IDEM, p . 2 0 1 .

108

Albert of Saxony, Quaestiones Paris, 1518, f . c x i x ( r . ) - ( v . ) .

cit. Systeme

du

Monde,

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80-81.

in libros de caelo et mundo,

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"One must imagine a line running from east to west along the equator, and, parallel to it, a second line running along the Arctic circle. Between them one imagines a third line parallel to the other two. Furthermore one imagines that all that lies from the equator [southward] passing through the south pole and [back and round through] the north pole as far as the Arctic circle is covered by water and that what remains, which is no more than a quarter of the earth's [surface] and yet not entirely that, is uncovered by water. Further one imagines that, from the middle of the line placed over the [part of the] earth which is not covered by the water [= along the equator] a line is drawn perpendicularly toward the line which is parallel to it and placed along the Arctic circle. With these lines thus imagined, one sees clearly in a diagram how this part of the earth that is not covered by water is divided into four parts, of which two are oriented to the west and two to the east and between those which are oriented to the west, that which is closest to the equator is called Africa and that which is closest to the north is called Europe. Of the two others oriented to the east, that which is turned towards the equator is called Asia major and that which is turned toward the north is called Asia minor." 109 Thus did Albert equate the emerged part of the earth in Buridan's model with the orbis terrarum of antiquity, traditionally divided into three parts: Europe, Asia and Africa. There is here proof that physics and cartography were linked in the minds of Medieval scholars. The emerged part of the earth, shaped like an upturned saucer, can still be seen to correspond, to all intents and purposes, with the Homeric model of a flat earth. In another of his works, a commentary on Aristotle's Physics, Albert of Saxony modified Buridan's use of the concept of the centre of gravity of a body. Instead of making the centre of gravity of the earth alone coincide with the centre of magnitude of the water and with the centre of the universe, he conceived of the earth and the water as making up what he called an "aggregate" having a single centre of gravity (unam totalem gravitatem) which coincided with the centre of the universe and with the centre of the magnitude of the water. 110 The object of Albert's modification was perhaps to assure that both elements together had a common centre both of gravity and of joint magnitude in relation to celestial bodies. His innovation was preferred to Buridan's version by later scholars, and in particular by Pierre d'Ailly, as we shall see. Albert's innovation of treating the two Aristotelian elements as an "aggregate" and of giving them a single centre of gravity was scarcely compatible with the principles of the Stagirite's thought and only goes to show the freedom with which Medieval scholars interpreted and built on Aristotle's doctrine. 109 110

Albert of Saxony, op. cit., Lib. II Quaest. XXV, f. cxix (v.). Albert of Saxony, In octo libros physicorum, Lib. IV, Quaest. V, Paris, 1518, f. xlv (v.). Cf. also P. D U H E M , Le systeme du monde, Vol. IX, pp. 212 — 213.

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Neither of these two Parisian scholars appear in their works to make any allusion to the difficulties in accommodating the pseudo-Aristotelian tradition of a continuous proportionality in the volumes relating the elements to one another, with the planetary distances in the Ptolemaic tradition, such as Bradwardine had tried to find a solution for. Their concerns remained solely in the domain of non-mathematical physics.

XII. The Renaissance Ptolemy,

(15th

century):

GIOVANNI FONTANA, AENEAS SYLVIUS PICCOLOMINI,

Pierre d'Ailly,

GASPARINO B O R R O , ANTONIO DE N E B R I J A , JACOB P E R E Z DE VALENCIA, and

JEROME MÜNZER

The salient innovation of the Renaissance period was the introduction into Western Europe of Ptolemy's Geography. On the initiative of the Florentine patron of letters Palla Strozzi (1370 — 1462) a Greek manuscript of the Geography was obtained in Constantinople in 1400 and translated into Latin in Florence in 1406 by Manuel Chrysoloras (died 1415) and Jacopo d'Angiolo della Scarperia (died after 1410). Francesco di Lapacino and Domenico di Lionardo Boninsegni re-drew the maps and translated the Greek place-names into Latin ones (pi. III). 111 No work on geography was so to revolutionize the subject in the period of the Renaissance. Ptolemy's principal contribution was to mathematicize the subject, something which the Middle Ages had been unable to do. He proposed three different projections of the curved surface of the earth on a flat sheet of paper; the first known as the conical projection (in reality pseudo-conical) in which the meridians are straight lines and the parallels curved ones and the second later known as the homoeotheric projection in which both meridians and parallels are curved. The third, known simply as Ptolemy's "third projection", was never taken up by cartographers of the Renaissance since it was too complicated. 112 Ptolemy's projections involved the use of coordinates of latitude and longitude spaced at regular intervals so as to form a grid covering the whole of the globe. A necessary precondition for the reception of the postulate of this grid was agreement that the land and the sea form together one continuous curved surface and on this point the clash with the Aristotelians was inevitable. 111

112

V E S P A S I A N O DA B I S T I C C I (1421 - 1 4 9 8 ) , Vite di Uomini illustri del secolo XV, 3rd edition, Vol. Ill, Bologna, 1893, pp. 9 - 1 0 and pp. 2 1 6 - 2 1 7 and pp. 2 3 2 - 2 3 5 . On Ptolemy's projections cf. H A N S V. M Z I K & F. H O P F N E R , Des Klaudios Ptolemaios Einführung in die darstellende Erdkunde, übertragen und mit Erläuterungen versehen, in: Klotho, N o . 5, Vienna, 1938, pp. 1 - 1 0 9 ; Ο. N E U G E B A U E R , A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy, Part II, Springer Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg and N e w York, 1975, pp. 8 7 9 - 8 9 0 ; J O H A N N E S K E U N I N G , " T h e History of geographical map projections until 1 6 0 0 " , in: Imago Mundi, Vol.XII (1955), pp. 1 - 2 4 .

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Ptolemy's grid had its exact reflection in the heavens and through the adoption of a convention, or module, relating angular distance in degrees to units of terrestrial distance, it made it possible to calculate, from observations of the positions of celestial bodies, distances separating places on land or the positions of ships at sea. Ptolemy, in applying his method, was only able to do so partially, as many of his coordinates were obtained from the estimated distances of itineraries. Although the Medieval West knew of the concept of climates, which corresponded to an irregular succession of parallels of latitude, it was Ptolemy's Geography which first introduced into Europe the concept of regularly spaced parallels and of converging meridians also spaced at regular intervals (Ptolemaic maps space meridians at intervals of 5 degrees). It was this latter concept which was crucial in Europe's final understanding of the surface of the oikoumene as curved, 113 and which made it possible to show places in high latitudes as lying closer together than ones in lower latitudes when separated by the same number of degrees. Ptolemy's oikoumene, only slightly larger in extent than the Homeric one postulated by Albert of Saxony (it accorded a greater importance to the surface area of Asia) in no way covered the whole of the globe. Its east-west extent was of 180° and its north-south limits ran from 63° Ν to 165/n° S. Since Ptolemy saw the oceans as lying in separate basins, the rest of his globe, it was implied, was land surface and not sea. None of his maps show the whole globe in spherical form. T h e first to extend the Ptolemaic grid to cover the complete sphere were the humanists of the German Renaissance and this can be seen in a world map accompanying the so-called "German Ptolemy" c. 1490. 1 1 4 Ptolemy's Geography circulated in Europe in manuscript copies before being printed. His mathematical principles of cartography were first taken up in the monasteries of Southern Germany and attempts were made, from about 1427 on, to apply them to areas of central Europe. 1 1 5 Only later, in about 113

114

115

T h i s point is missed by JOSEF BABICZ and HERIBERT Μ . NOBIS, " D i e M a t h e m a t i s c h -

Geographischen und Kartographischen Ideen von Albertus Magnus und ihre Stelle in der Geschichte der Geographie", in: Die Kölner Universität im Mittelalter, Miscellanea Mediaevalia, Bd. 20, Berlin, New York, Walter de Gruyter, 1989, pp. 9 8 - 1 0 3 . The concept of converging meridians is also absent in the description given by Roger Bacon of his map (lost). DAVID WOODWARD in his paper presented to the Xllth International Congress of the History of Cartography, Paris, 1987 gives a reconstruction of Bacon's map (reproduced by BABICZ and NOBIS), showing regularly spaced convergent meridians, whereas in fact Bacon only speaks in his text of "arcs of great circles passing through the poles and through the longitudes of cities as given along the equator". The longitudes of the cities cited by Bacon are obviously not spaced at regular intervals and as such cannot constitute a grid, which is a pre-condition for any mathematical cartography. ERWIN ROSENTHAL, " T h e German Ptolemy and its world map", in: Bulletin of the New York Public Library, Vol.48, N o . 2 (1944), pp. 1 3 5 - 1 4 8 . Cf. DANA Β. DURAND, The Vienna Klosterneuburg Map Corpus in the fifteenth century, Leiden, 1952.

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1460 —61, is a copy of the maps (it is not certain if the text accompanied them) known to have reached the maritime circles of Portugal, 116 where its influence before the end of the 15th century is difficult to assess. The Geography was first printed at Vicenza in 1475, but without the maps, then at Bologna in 1477 with the maps. Other editions followed: Rome, 1478, Florence, 1482, Ulm, 1482 and 1486 and Rome, 1490. 1 1 7 For most of the 15th century, the incompatibility between the principles of Ptolemy's Geography and those of Aristotelian physics was scarcely noticed by the majority of scholars, who often expounded both side by side in their works. Giovanni Fontana (c. 1395 - c. 1455) writing about the middle of the century in a book only published in 1544 under the name of Pompilius Azalus, after repeating Buridan's theory of the surface of the earth emerging from the water on account of the earth's centre of gravity being lower than its centre of magnitude 118 then proceeded to show that he was quite sufficiently conversant with Ptolemy's grid of mathematical coordinates and of his principle of convergent meridians to note that a parallel passing over the Indian Ocean and the regions of India contained a greater number of miles in a degree than a parallel passing along the tropic of Cancer and a still greater number of miles than a parallel lying along the Arctic circle. The farther north a region of the habitable earth lay, the less was its east-west extent. 1 1 9 Such an understanding of Ptolemy's principles of geography was necessarily incompatible with Buridan's doctrine, but Fontana was not able to see this. who became Pope Pius II from 1458, wrote a work published in 1477 that was later read and attentively annotated by COLUMBUS, though it is uncertain whether he had read it before his first voyage. In this Historia rerum ubique gestarum, PICCOLOMINI expounded almost every model in geography that we have examined up till now, without appearing to see any logical incompatibility among them. He began first by noting the scholastics' interpretation of Aristotle that heavy AENEAS SYLVIUS PICCOLOMINI ( 1 4 0 5 - 1 4 6 4 ) ,

116

117

118

119

VIRGINIA RAU, "Bartolomeo di Iacopo di Ser Vanni, mercador-banqueiro florentino « estante » em Lisboa nos meados do seculo X V " , in: Do Tempo e da Historia, Vol. IV, Lisbon, 1971, p. 113. Cf. W. H . STAHL, "Ptolemy's Geography, a select bibliography", in: Bulletin of the New York Public Library, Vol.55, N o 9 (1955), pp. 4 1 9 - 4 3 2 ; 4 8 4 - 4 9 5 ; 5 5 4 - 5 6 4 ; 6 0 4 - 6 1 4 . On the transmission and adaptation of Ptolemy's Geography before and after 1 4 9 2 see now M . DILKE and O. A. W. DILKE, " T h e Adjustment of Ptolemaic Atlases t o feature the New W o r l d , " below in this volume (CTA I 1), pp. 1 1 7 - 1 3 4 . Pompilius Azalus [ = Giovanni Fontana], Liber de omnibus rebus naturalibus, Venice, 1544, f. 11 (v.). T h a t the work is by Giovanni Fontana is argued by ALEXANDER BIRKENMAJER, „Zur Lebensgeschichte und wissenschaftlichen Tätigkeit von Giovanni Fontana ( 1 3 9 5 ? - 1 4 5 5 ? ) " , in: Isis, V o l . X V I I (1932), pp. 3 4 - 5 3 and LYNN THORNDIKE, A History of Magic and Experimental Science during the first thirteen centuries of our era, Vol. IV, N e w York, 1934, Chap. 45, pp. 1 5 0 - 1 6 3 . [Giovanni Fontana], f. 94 (r.).

38

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RANDLES

bodies are attracted to the centre of the earth, the greater part of which lay submerged under water. 120 He then evoked the Cratesian theory: "There are some who believe that there are four tracts of dry land that the great Ocean, which surrounds them, separates from one another by means of two great rivers, one of which runs under the zodiac [ = along the equator?], while the other, running through the poles from right to left for those whose viewpoint lies in the east, joins the first beyond the pillars of Hercules. It is thus that four portions of the whole earth emerge like enormous islands so that benefiting from a temperate climate they provide habitats for mortal beings." 121 After mentioning the theory of the five zones, which he correctly attributes to Parmenides, P I C C O L O M I N I again repeats the scholastic modification of Aristotle's theory of the elements that "only a part of the earth remains emerged [out of the water] between the Arctic circle and the equator and that the Divine Will has decided this for the sake of men, an opinion worthy of approval by a Christian". "Some", he continues, "make the shape of the earth spherical [by this he no doubt meant the appearance of the spherical earth as an upturned saucer as it emerged out of the water], others make it oblong and with them Ptolemy agrees and this opinion appears to be the most likely. Homer tells us that the whole of the earth which we inhabit is bathed by the Ocean which makes it nothing less than an island, for from wherever mortals may go to reach the limits of the earth, they find the sea, which we call Ocean and in whichever direction they proceed, they find that it constitutes the limits of our oikoumene (nostrae habitabilis). In all the four cardinal points [of the oikoumene] Ptolemy surrounds the region inhabited by man by an unknown land, though in most places the former is limited by the Ocean". 1 2 2 At no point in his generous eclecticism, does P I C C O L O M I N I make a critical choice between the conflicting theories he reviews, not even to choosing between Homer and Ptolemy. Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly (1350 — 1420) wrote two major works on cosmography, one a series of "Quaestiones" on the Sphaera of Sacrobosco and the other his celebrated Imago Mundi, from which C O L U M B U S is alleged to have drawn inspiration for his voyages. In his Quaestiones on Sacrobosco, first published in 1498, d'Ailly repeated the modification of Buridan's model, which Albert of Saxony had expounded 120

AENEAS SYLVIUS PICCOLOMINI, s i g n . a . i. ( v . ) — s i g n . a . ii. ( r . ) .

121

I D E M , loc.

cit.

122

I D E M , loc.

cit.

Historia rerum ubique gestarwn,

Venice, 1 4 7 7 , C a p . I,

CLASSICAL

GEOGRAPHY

AND

DISCOVERY

OF

AMERICA

39

in his commentary on Aristotle's Physics. The earth has, within it, three distinct centres, the first its centre of magnitude, the second its centre of gravity and the third the centre of the universe. It is the centre of gravity of the aggregate formed by the sphere of the earth and the sphere of the water together, which coincides with the centre of the universe. 123 In his Imago Mundi, first printed in Louvain c. 1483, d'Ailly only makes a passing allusion to the problem of the spheres of the water and of the earth, merely giving a very succinct statement of the definition given in his Quaestiones. He accompanied it however with a diagram clearly showing the three centres within the earth mentioned in the latter work. 124 Further on in the Imago Mundi, d'Ailly tries to make an estimation of the "quantity of inhabitable earth". Quoting abundantly from Roger Bacon's Opus Majus, d'Ailly brings forward Aristotle's and Seneca's contention that the distance between Spain and India (across the Atlantic) was very small. The extent of water, it could thus be deduced, would not be so great as to cover three quarters of the earth. Quoting, after Bacon, the prophet Esdras that six parts of the earth were inhabited while a seventh lay covered by water, he concluded that the inhabitable earth, though reduced to less than a quarter of its size by Ptolemy and his disciples, extended, in fact, beyond such limits. Then, without realizing the contradiction, he proceeded without acknowledgement to quote from the Sphere of Nicole Oresme ( 1 3 2 0 / 2 5 — 1382). 125 The inhabitable earth, said d'Ailly, quoting Oresme, was not round like a circle as Aristotle (Oresme meant the Aristotelians) would have it, but had the form of a quarter of the surface of a sphere of which the two extreme limits (i. e. the north and the south) were somewhat shortened, that is those limits which were uninhabitable because of heat or cold. 126 According to Oresme's definition, the inhabitable earth would thus have an east — west extension of half the circumference of the earth, or 180 degrees. Yet d'Ailly appears not to realize that this definition is quite incompatible with the statements of the authorities he had quoted about there being a small distance between Spain and India, or with the definition of the relation between the spheres of the earth and the water he had himself given in his Quaestiones. The inconsistancy of his thought and his plagiarism are flagrant. In Venice in 1 4 9 0 a Servite monk, GASPARINO B O R R O (died 1 4 9 8 ) , a teacher of philosophy and theology, well known for his knowledge of astronomy and

123

124 125 126

Pierre d'Ailly, „Quaestiones", in: PEDRO CIRUELO, Uberritnum Sphere mundi comentum intersertis etiam questionibus domini Petri de Aliaco, Paris, 1498, sign. e. ii. (v.). Cf. also the French translation in P. DUHEM, Le systeme du monde, Vol. I X , Paris, 1958, pp. 2 3 2 33. Pierre d'Ailly, Imago Mundi, ed. E. BURON, Tome I, Paris, 1930, p. 135. Nicole Oresme, Sphere, ed. Paris, 1508, C h a p . x x x , sign. g. ii (v.). Pierre d'Ailly, op. cit., pp. 2 0 7 - 2 1 5 .

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mathematics, published a commentary on Sacrobosco's Sphaera.127 In it he discusses the problem of the existence of the antipodes, comparing the Cratesian view of Macrobius with the strict anti-Aristotelian Biblical orthodoxy of Lactantius. Surprisingly, BORRO declares that he prefers the opinion of Lactantius from a philosophical as well as from a theological point of view. His argument on philosophical grounds proves to be none other than Buridan's interpretation of Aristotle's doctrine of the elements in the light of Archimedes' principle of the centre of gravity of a body. "The centre of gravity of the universe is not the same as the centre of the earth because the earth has two centres; one is its centre of gravity which is the same as the centre of the universe and the other is its centre of magnitude which is not the same as the centre of the universe. The earth's two centres are different from each other because the earth does not have uniform weight and that is why a part of the earth is not covered by water and is closer to the heaven, while the other part is more distant from it so that the water flows toward the centre of the universe. But the centre of magnitude of the earth is different from the centre of the universe and on account of this only one part of the earth, that which is closest to the heaven, is not covered by the water. From the theological point of view it must be said that there are no Antipodes and the reason is that such men would have to be descended from Adam or from some other man. If they were descended from Adam, how would they have reached these regions which are inaccessible? And if they were descended from another man, either he would have been in a state of original sin or else he would not be. If he were not, then a state of innocence would be found there, which is something which cannot be entertained. And if he were in a state of original sin, how then would he have been cleansed from it? Not by Christ whom these beings never knew, nor by the Apostles. Therefore another law and another true faith would have been given them, which is all absurd." 1 2 8 thought recalls closely that of Michael Scot in the early 13th century; and his use of Buridan's theory to defend the doctrine of Lactantius, however paradoxical it may seem, is proof that until the great voyages of Discovery at the close of the 15th century, consolidated Renaissance geographical theory had advanced little beyond that of two centuries before. BORRO'S

Just at the turn of the 15th century, the justly celebrated Spanish grammarian ANTONIO DE NEBRIJA ( 1 4 4 4 - 1 5 2 2 ) wrote a little book on geography entitled 127

GASPARINO BORRO, Commentum electum et pretiosum super tractatum sphaerae mundi, Venice, n.p.n.d. (c. 1490). On BORRO and the date attributed to his work see the article by B. RECCHILONGO in: Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Vol.13 (Rome, 1971), pp. 22-23.

128

GASPARINO BORRO, op. cit., sign. c. iii. ( r . ) - ( v . ) .

CLASSICAL GEOGRAPHY AND DISCOVERY OF

In Cosmographiae

libros introductorium,

AMERICA

41

which was published at Salamanca

sometime between 1497 and 1505. On the first page of his first chapter he describes simultaneously in the same breath and without noticing that they clash, the two contradictory theories, that of the scholastics' interpretation of Aristotle's theory of the elements and Ptolemy's definition in his Geography of the relation between land and water. Showing that he is thoroughly familiar with the work of the Alexandrine, he first gives Ptolemy's definition. " T o begin with, we should consider that which is easily proved by the physicists and the mathematicians that the surface of the earth and the surface of the water together (simul) have a spherical shape and that they have in common the same centre as the centre of the universe." 1 2 8 3 Then in the same paragraph NEBRIJA expounds the Medieval doctrine of the relation between earth and water. " T h e surface of the earth is, over its greater part, covered by sea. And if we are certain that in the northern hemisphere which is known to us through land travel and sea voyages, half of it, that is a quarter of the whole surface is covered by water, the quarter which remains, in which lies the orbis terrarum known to us, emerges above the water like an 1 2 9 island." The first outright recognition of the clash between the physics of the Aristotelian scholastics and the mathematical geography of Ptolemy derived from astronomy, appears in the work of another Spaniard, JACOB P E R E Z DE VALENCIA (c. 1408 — 1490). In his Commentary on the Psalms published in Valencia in 1484, he wrote: "Some consider that all the seas are interconnected and that the Ocean is much larger than the whole of the earth and that it surrounds it on all sides and that the earth is like a light ball or like an apple in a basin full of water of which only the top appears above the water. And they say that God made it so from the beginning. For, since the whole earth was then covered with water, God separated the waters and this part of the earth [ = the oikoumene] remained uncovered as dry land for men to live on [...]. But this position is manifestly irrational [...] And thus it must be said that Ptolemy's position and his description concerning the arrangement of land and water is much more rational, more in conformity with Holy Scripture and closer to truth, as is obvious to the senses and as has been i28a ANTONIO DE NEBRIJA, In Cosmographiae libros introductorium, Salamanca, n.p.n.d. (between 1497 and 1504 according to FRANCISCO RICO, "El nuevo mundo de Nebrija y Colon", in: VICTOR GARCIA DE LA CONCHA, Nebrija y la introduccion del Renascimiento en Espana, Salamanca, 1983, pp. 157 — 185), sign, a.i(r). 129

IDEM, loc.

cit.

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Fig. 5. Engraving showing the sphere of the earth just emerging from the sphere of the water, both being surrounded by the air and the fire, in Johannes de Sacrobosco, Sphaera, Venice, 1485 and 1490

proven by the experience of a good number of people who have travelled and sailed across different parts of the world." 1 3 0 In this clear choice in favour of Ptolemy against the scholastics P E R E Z invokes the experience reported by travellers and navigators, but he does not elaborate or give examples. Another writer who made a clear choice in favour of Ptolemy, was a German of Nuremberg, JEROME M Ü N Z E R (or HIERONYMUS MONETARIUS), who wrote a letter dated 14 July 1493 to the King of Portugal encouraging him to pursue maritime exploration with the aim of reaching China by sailing across the Atlantic. Enjoining him not to believe in the scholastic view, he wrote: "And do not allow yourself to be influenced by Alfraganus and others without experience who say that only a quarter of the earth lies above the level of the sea and that three quarters of the earth is submerged beneath

130

131

JACOB PEREZ DE VALENCIA [Comentum noviter edditum [sic] ... in Psalmos], Valencia, 1484, sign, ii.ii (v.) —ii.iii (r.). There was a second edition published in Paris in 1518. JEROME MÜNZER, Letter to the King of Portugal, 14 July 1493. Truncated Latin text and Portuguese integral text together with Portuguese translation of the whole followed

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The reference to Alfraganus is aberrant, since the latter had no connection with the pseudo-Aristotelian doctrine. MÜNZER then shows that he prefers Ptolemy's view of the oceans as lakes lying in the hollows of the earth, to the scholastic view of the sphere of the earth to a great extent enveloped by water. "There is no doubt that the earth is not spread out under the water; on the contrary the sea is immersed [within the earth]." ("Nam seja duvida que a terra nam esta alagada sob ο mar, mas pelo contrario ο mar esta immerso."132 If PEREZ' views appeared early enough to influence the climate of opinion in which COLUMBUS prepared his first voyage, MÜNZER'S letter is dated after the Genoese's departure. Both however bear witness to the growing recognition of the clash between the two rival views and to the existence of writers who were prepared to take a stand. XIII. CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS' "India" project in the context of the clash between the pseudo-Aristotelian physicists and the Ptolemaic geographers The inspiration of COLUMBUS' project 133 was drawn, we believe, ultimately from two sources: the first, Aristotle's statement in the De Caelo that a small sea distance separated the coasts of Spain from those of Asia, 134 a statement that was repeated by Roger Bacon and after him by Pierre d'Ailly, and secondly Ptolemy's definition of land and water occupying the same continuous surface on the surface of the globe. 135 It is difficult to determine how and when COLUMBUS reached these two convictions, since the question remains the subject of a long-standing polemic. It has been asserted that the books of his private library which are known to us and which he abundantly annotated, either had little influence on him 136 by complete French translation in: H E N R Y VIGNAUD, Histoire critique entreprise de Christophe Colomb, Tome II, Paris, 1911, pp. 620 —625.

de la

grande

132

IDEM, loc.

133

Although H E N R I VIGNAUD (Le vrai Christophe Colomb et la legende, Paris, 1921) for years defended the theory that COLUMBUS never sought to reach Asia, but only to discover new lands in the Atlantic, a document discovered in the 1920's clearly indicates that the Catholic Kings understood the aim of his first voyage as being an attempt to reach Asia. Cf. "Carta Comendaticia" 17/4/1492, written by the Catholic Kings, in ANTONIO RUMEU DE A R M A S , Nueva luz sobre las capitulaciones de Santa Fi de 1492, consertadas entre los reyes catolicos y Cristobal Colon, Madrid, 1985, p. 94. Cf. supra p. 9. Cf. supra p. 16. G E O R G E E . N U N N , "The Imago Mundi and Columbus", in: American Historical Review, Vol. XL (1935), pp. 6 4 6 - 6 6 1 .

134 135 136

cit.

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or were only read by him after his first voyage. 137 It has been shown that the famous TOSCANELLI letter 138 in which the Florentine cosmographer, applying the principles of Marinus of Tyre's map projection, 139 had proposed that a voyage to Asia could be made in a shorter time than one round Africa, was only copied into one of COLUMBUS' books between 1 4 9 8 and 1 5 0 4 , thus long after his first voyage. 140 If COLUMBUS' own writings are of doubtful value in any reconstruction of his convictions regarding the make-up of the globe before his first voyage, there yet remain certain passages in the histories of BARTOLOME DE LAS CASAS and of his son FERNANDO COLUMBUS, both probably based, as regards our subject, on an unknown common source. 141 As is well known, COLUMBUS submitted his project of sailing to Asia across the Atlantic, first to the Portuguese King D. Joäo II and then, after its rejection, on two successive occasions to the Catholic Kings of Spain. In each case the project was examined by a board of cosmographers designated by royal authority. These cosmographers were all hostile to COLUMBUS and his project. The arguments of the Spanish cosmographers, as far as can be judged from the fragmentary nature of the descriptions that have reached us, were all based on the scholastic view of the relations between earth and water, and in particular, on the doctrine of the converted Jew, Paul de Burgos (c. 1350 — 1435), 142 whose thought was much influenced by his reading of Aristotle. Paul de Burgos' work appeared as "Additiones" (1429) to the Postillae on the Bible of Nicolas de Lyra ( 1 2 7 0 - 1 3 4 9 ) (first edition Rome in 1 4 6 1 - 7 2 ) . Because both texts were printed together, Paul de Burgos' "Additiones" were often attributed to Nicolas de Lyra. Instead of invoking Buridan's use of Archimedes' principle of the centre of gravity of a body to make the sphere of the earth emerge out of the water, Paul de Burgos relied simply on Divine intervention. On the first Day of the 137

138

139

140

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JUAN GIL, Mitos y Utopias del Descubrimiento I. Colon y su tiempo, M a d r i d , 1989, pp. 123 - 1 2 6 . Cf. N . SUMIEN, La correspondance du savant florentin Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, Paris, 1927 (original with French translation). HERMANN WAGNER, " D i e Rekonstruktion der Toscanelli-Karte v. J . 1474 und die PseudoFacsimilia des Behaim-Globus v. J . 1 4 9 2 " ( = Vorstudien zur Geschichte der Kartographie III), in: Nachrichten der K. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Phil.-Hist. Kl. (1894) pp. 2 3 8 - 2 4 2 . ILARIA L. CARACI, " L a cultura di C o l o m b o , " in: Atti del IV Convegno Internazionale di Studi Colombiani, G e n o a , 1987, Vol. II, pp. 2 2 6 — 28; EADEM, Colombo vero e falso, G e n o a , 1989, pp. 153 - 1 7 7 . O n the c o m p l e x problem of these t w o histories and their sources, cf. ILARIA CARACI, Colombo vero e falso, passim. O n Paul de Burgos, or by his other name Pablo de Santa M a r i a , cf. MANUEL MARTINEZ ANIBARRO Υ RIVES, Intento de un diccionario bibliografico de autores de la provincia de Burgos, M a d r i d , 1 8 8 9 - 9 0 , pp. 4 6 9 - 8 9 and LUCIANO SERRANO, Los conversos don Pablo de Santa Maria y don Alonso de Cartagena, M a d r i d , 1942.

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