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H. rejects without discussion the story of Abaris (cf. 32 n.), who was made by Pindar (Harpoc. s. v. Abaris) a contemporary of Croesus. Later writers (e.g. Porphyry v. Pythag. 29) made the ‘arrow’ serve him like a witch's broomstick, on which he sailed through the air over rivers and seas. εἰ δέ εἰσι. H. sums up his argument against the Hyperboreans with a reductio ad absurdum; symmetry would require us to believe in ‘Hypernotians’ also; but this is neither asserted (nor possible on account of extreme heat?). Therefore there are no Hyperboreans. Eratosthenes (Strabo 61-2) not unnaturally called H.'s argument ‘absurd’ It is curious to see H. appealing to the very symmetry which three lines later he denounces. The reference to Hecataeus is clear (cf. c. 32 n.); Aristotle (Meteor. ii. 5, 362 b 12) repeats H. almost verbally here, but gives a different reason for rejecting ‘the round world’.
γράψαντας, ‘drawing’ (cf. γραφήν inf.). H. has in his mind some early map (Berger, E. G. p. 36, argues that it is that of Anaximander; cf. v. 49. 1), in which the world was a perfect circle, with a circumambient ocean for its rim, ‘as if drawn with a pair of compasses.’ Such had been the conception of Hecataeus (cf. ii. 21 n.), who brought the Argonauts from the Phasis via the ocean stream and the Nile back to the Mediterranean (F. H. G. i. 13, fr. 187). οὐδένα . . . ἐξηγησάμενον, ‘explaining it (the shape of the world) sensibly,’ vid. sup. Hecataeus' fault was double: (a) his worldmap was purely a priori; (b) he made no effort to co-ordinate his mass of geographical details in a rational scheme. There is another protest against symmetry in ὡς ἀπὸ τόρνου; Europe is far larger than Asia (including Libya) to H. (iv. 42. 1), but the map-makers made them balance equally.
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