was the first to publish a geographical chart. Hecatæus left a work [on the same subject, which we can identify as his by means of his other writings.
12. Many have testified to the amount of knowledge which this subject requires, and Hipparchus, in his Strictures on Eratosthenes, well observes, “that no one can become really proficient in geography, either as a private individual or as a professor, without an acquaintance with astronomy, and a knowledge of eclipses. For instance, no one could tell whether Alexandria in Egypt were north or south of Babylon, nor yet the intervening distance, without observing the latitudes.[1] Again, the only means we possess of becoming acquainted with the longitudes of different places is afforded by the eclipses of the sun and moon.” Such are the very words of Hipparchus.
13. Every one who undertakes to give an accurate description of a place, should be particular to add its astronomical and geometrical relations, explaining carefully its extent, distance, degrees of latitude, and “climate.”[2] Even a builder before constructing a house, or an architect before laying out a city, would take these things into consideration; much more should he who examines the whole earth: for such things in a peculiar manner belong to him. In small distances a little deviation north or south does not signify, but when it is the whole circle of the earth, the north extends to the furthest confines of Scythia,[p 1] or Keltica,[p 2] and the south to the extremities of Ethiopia: there is a wide difference here. The case is the same should we inhabit India or Spain, one in the east, the other far west, and, as we are aware, the antipodes[3] to each other.
14. The [motions] of the sun and stars, and the centripetal
- ↑ The ancients “portioned out the globe by bands or zones parallel to the equator, which they named κλίματα. The extent of each zone was determined by the length of the solstitial day, and thus each diminished in extent according as it became more distant from the equator. The moderns have substituted a mode of reckoning the degrees by the elevation of the pole, which gives the latitudes with much greater accuracy.
- ↑ Literally, the heat, cold, and temperature of the atmosphere.
- ↑ Xylander and Casaubon remark that Strabo here makes an improper use of the term antipodes; the antipodes of Spain and India being in the southern hemisphere.
