THE EARLY MARITIME HISTORY OF THE GREEKS—THE EXPEDITION OF THE ARGONAUTS—THE VESSELS USED IN THE TROJAN WAR—SHIP-BUILDING IN THE TIME OF HOMER—THE POETIC GEOGRAPHY OF THE GREEKS—THE PALACE OF THE SUN—THE MARVELS OF A VOYAGE OUT OF SIGHT OF LAND—THE GEOGRAPHY OF HESIOD—OF ANAXIMANDER—OF THALES, HERODOTUS, SOCRATES, AND ERATOSTHENES—THE GREAT OCEAN IS NAMED THE ATLANTIC.

At what period the Greeks began to build vessels and to venture upon the waters washing their coasts and girding their numerous archipelagoes, is not known: it is certain, at any rate, that the commencement of navigation with them, as with all other nations, must be referred to a time much anterior to the ages of which we have any record. Long voyages are mentioned as having taken place at periods so early that they must be considered mythical. The first maritime adventure which lays any claim to authenticity, and the most celebrated in ancient times, is the expedition of the Argonauts to Colchis. Though this enterprise is by many learned authorities deemed fabulous, we shall nevertheless consider three points connected with it,—the probable era of the voyage, its supposed object, and the various routes by which the adventurers are said to have returned.

The date of the expedition, if it took place at all, may be safely fixed at the year 1250 b.c. A theory propounded by Sir Isaac Newton would connect it with the year 937; but this is regarded with less favor than the earlier date. Its alleged object was the Golden Fleece; but what this was can only be conjectured. It is hardly likely that the people of that age would have been tempted by the prospect of commercial advantages by opening a trade with the Euxine Sea. It is quite as unlikely that they would have undertaken so dangerous a voyage for the purpose of plunder, better opportunities for which existed much nearer home. The supposition that the Golden Fleece was a parchment containing the secret of transmuting the baser metals into gold, and the opinion that the Argonauts went in quest of skins and rich furs, hardly require discussion. There seems, indeed, no adequate motive but a desire to obtain the precious metals, which were believed to be furnished in abundance by the mines near the Black Sea. Why these mines were symbolized under the appellation of a golden fleece it is not easy to say, and no satisfactory reason has ever been suggested. The most probable is that the gold dust was supposed to be washed down the sides of the Caucasus Mountains by torrents, and caught by fleeces of wool placed among the rocks by the inhabitants.

Jason, the son of the King of Thessaly, being deprived of his inheritance, and having resolved to seek his fortune by some remote and hazardous expedition, was induced to go in quest of the Golden Fleece in Colchis. He enlisted fifty men, and employed a person named Argus to build him a ship, which from him was called Argo, the adventurers being named Argonauts. The Argo is described as a pentecontoros,—that is, a vessel with fifty oars. The number of the Argonauts is usually stated at fifty, though one authority asserts that they numbered one hundred. They started from Iolcos in Thessaly, and with a south wind sailed east by north. The narrative of the expedition is full of wonders. They landed at the island of Lemnos, where they found that the women had just murdered their husbands and fathers. The Argonauts supplied the place of the assassinated relatives, and Jason had two sons by one of the bereaved Lemnians. When the vessel arrived at the entrance to the Euxine,—the narrow strait now called the Bosphorus,—they built a temple, and implored the protection of the gods against the Symplegades, or Whirling Rocks, which guarded the passage. A seer named Phineas was consulted upon the probability of their sailing through unharmed. The rocks were imagined to float upon the waves, and, when any thing attempted to pass through, to seize and crush it. According to Homer,—

"No bird of air, no dove of swiftest wing,
That bears ambrosia to th' ethereal king,
Shuns the dire rocks: in vain she cuts the skies:
The dire rocks meet, and crush her as she flies."

Phineas advised them to loose a dove, to mark its flight, and to judge from its fate of the destiny reserved for them. They did so, determined to push boldly on if the bird got through in safety. The pigeon escaped with the loss of some of its tail-feathers. The Argo dashed onward, and cleared the formidable rocks with the loss of a few of its stern ornaments. From this time forward, the legend adds, the Symplegades remained fixed, and were no longer a terror to navigators.

The Argonauts, after entering the Black Sea, sailed due east, to the mouth of the river Phasis, now the Rione. Æetes, the king, promised to give Jason the fleece upon certain conditions. These he was enabled to fulfil by the aid of Medea, a sorceress, and daughter of Æetes. They then fled together to Greece. The route followed by the Argonauts upon their return is differently given by the various poets who have told the story and the commentators who have illustrated it. By one they are represented as sailing up some river across the continent to the Baltic, and thence homeward along the coasts of France and Spain, and through the Straits of Gibraltar. It is needless to say that there is no river which flows between the Euxine and the Baltic. Other tracks laid down are equally preposterous in the eyes of modern geography. Herodotus adopts the tradition that they returned by the same way they went,—the only way, indeed, they could have returned,—by water. The reader, in view of the romantic embellishments with which this story is loaded, and of the strong doubts resting upon it as an historical event, must choose, from among the various theories, we have given, the one he deems the most satisfactory.

One generation after the date we have assigned to this expedition occurred the Trojan War. In the year 1194 b.c., all the Greek states, with Agamemnon at their head, united to revenge the insult offered to Menelaus, King of Sparta, by the Trojan prince Paris, who had carried off the king's wife Helen. During the interval the Greeks, if the Homeric account is to be believed, had made great advances in the arts of ship-building and navigation; for in a very short time eleven hundred and fifty ships were collected at Aulis, the general rendezvous. The Boeotians furnished fifty, and the other states contributed in proportion. Each of them contained one hundred and twenty warriors; they must therefore have been vessels of considerable magnitude. All the ships are described as having masts which could be taken down as occasion required. The sail could only be used when the wind was directly astern. The delicate art of sailing in the wind's eye, or of making to the north with a north wind, was not yet understood. The principal propelling power lay in the oars, which turned in leathern thongs as a key in its hole. Homer represents the ships to have been black, from the color of the pitch with which they were smeared. The sides near the prow were often painted red, whence vessels are sometimes called by the poets red-cheeked. On their arrival upon the Trojan coast, the Greeks drew their fleet up on the land and anchored them by means of large stones. They then surrounded them with fortifications, to protect them from the enemy.

Homer, who lived two centuries later,—1000 b.c.,—has left us a tolerably full account of the ship-building, navigation, and geography of his time. The following passage from the Odyssey, as rendered into English by Cowper, is regarded by antiquaries as important, showing, as it does, the point at which the art of ship-building had now arrived. Ulysses, having been wrecked upon an island, is enabled to build a ship by the aid of the nymph Calypso.

"She gave him, fitted to the grasp, an axe
Of iron, ponderous, double-edged, with haft
Of olive-wood inserted firm, and wrought
With curious art. Then, placing in his hand
A polish'd adze, she led herself the way
To her isle's utmost verge, where loftiest stood
The alder, poplar, and cloud-piercing fir,
Though sapless, sound, and fitted for his use
As buoyant most. To that once verdant grove
His steps the beauteous nymph Calypso led,
And sought her home again. Then slept not he,
But, swinging with both hands the axe, his task
Soon finish'd: trees full twenty to the ground
He cast, which dextrous with his adze he smoothed,
The knotted surface chipping by a line.
Meantime the lovely goddess to his aid
Sharp augers brought, with which he bored the beams,
Then placed them side by side, adapting each
To other, and the seams with wadding closed.
Broad as an artist skill'd in naval works
The bottom of a ship of burthen spreads,
Such breadth Ulysses to his raft assign'd.
He decked her over with long planks, upborne
On massy beams: he made the mast, to which
He added, suitable, the yard: he framed
Rudder and helm to regulate her course:
With wickerwork he border'd all the length
For safety, and much ballast stow'd within.
Meantime Calypso brought him, for a sail,
Fittest materials, which he also shaped,
And to it all due furniture annex'd
Of cordage strong, foot-ropes, and ropes aloft;
Then heaved her down with levers to the deep."

Besides the facts contained in this passage, it is worth remarking that Homer seems to regard ship-builders with no little consideration, inasmuch as he calls them "artists."

The Greeks, like the Hebrews, were ignorant of the real figure of the earth. It is in Homer that we find the first written trace of the widely prevalent idea that the earth is a flat surface begirt on every side by the ocean. This was a natural belief in a region almost insular, like Greece, where the visible horizon and an enveloping sea suggested the idea of a flat circle. Homer took the lead among the poetic geographers of Greece, and his authority gave to the subject a fanciful cast, the traces of which are not yet obliterated. Beneath the earth he placed the fabled regions of Elysium and Tartarus: above the whole rose the grand arch of the heavens, which were supposed to rest on the summits of the highest mountains. The sun, moon, and stars were believed to rise from the waves of the sea, and to sink again beneath them on their return from the skies.

Homer's distribution of the land was even more fantastic. Beyond the limits of Greece and the western coasts of Asia Minor his knowledge was uncertain and obscure. He had heard vaguely of Thebes, the mighty capital of Egypt, and in his verse sang of its hundred gates and of the countless hosts it sent forth to battle. The Ethiopians, who lived beyond, were deemed to be the most remote dwellers upon the habitable earth. Towards the centre of Africa were the stupendous ridges of the Atlas Mountains: Homer deified the highest peak, and made it a giant supporting upon his shoulders the outspreading canopy of the heavens. The narrow passage leading from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, and now known as the Straits of Gibraltar, was believed to have been discovered by Hercules, and the mountains on either side—Gibraltar and Ceuta—were, from him, called the Pillars of Hercules.

Colchos, upon the Black Sea, was believed to be an ocean-city; and here Greek fancy located the Palace of the Sun. It was here that the charioteer of the skies gave rest to his coursers during the night, and from whence in the morning he drove them forth again. Colchos, therefore, was Homer's eastern confine of the globe. On the north, Rhodope, or the Riphean Mountains, were supposed to enclose the hyperborean limits of the world. Beyond them dwelt a fabled race, seated in the recesses of their valleys and sheltered from the contests of the elements. They were represented as exempt from all ills, physical and moral, from sickness, the changes of the seasons, and even from death. A race directly the converse of the ideal hyperboreans were the Cimmerians, located at the mouth of the Sea of Azof, who are described by Homer as dwelling in perpetual darkness and never visited by the sun. He imagined the existence of numerous other nations, who long continued to hold a place in ancient geography. The Cyclops, who had but one eye, were placed in Sicily; the Arimaspians, similarly afflicted, inhabited the frontiers of India; the Pigmies, or Dwarfs, who fought pitched battles with the cranes, were supposed to dwell in Africa, in India, and, in fact, to occupy the whole southern border of the Earth.

In the time of Homer, all voyages in which the mariner lost sight of land were considered as fraught with the extremest peril. No navigator ever visited Africa or Sicily from choice, but only when driven there by tempest and typhoon, and then his woes usually terminated in shipwreck: a return was not merely a marvel, but a miracle. Homer made Sicily the principal scene of the lamentable adventures of Ulysses, and sufficient traces are furnished by the Odyssey of the distorted and exaggerated notions entertained in the poet's time of the character of places reached by a voyage at sea. The existence of monsters of frightful form and size, such as Polyphemus, who watched for the destruction of the mariner and even roasted and devoured his quivering limbs; of treacherous enchantresses, such as Circe, who lured but to ensnare; of amiable goddesses, like Calypso, who offered immortality in exchange for love,—was doubtless believed by Homer, though we must make some allowance for poetical license. At any rate, the invention of these fables is not to be attributed to Homer, who, at the most, gave a highly-colored repetition of the terrific reports brought back from those formidable coasts by the few who had been fortunate enough to return. It was thus that an ideal and poetic character was communicated to the science of geography by the fables with which Homer tinged his narrative. In the early ages of the world, science and poetry were twin sisters: every poet was a savant, and every savant was a poet.

As far as his ideas can be reduced to a system, the earth was a flat disk, around which flowed the river Ocean. The accompanying plan will enable the reader to form an adequate conception of the Homeric geography. The radius of the territories described by Homer with any degree of precision was hardly three hundred miles in length.

Hesiod, who lived a century after Homer, thus states the scientific attainments of his time:—"The space between the heavens and the earth is exactly the same as that between the earth and Tartarus beneath it. A brazen anvil, if tossed from heaven, would fall during nine days and nine nights, and would reach the earth upon the tenth day. Were it to continue its course towards the abode of darkness, it would be nine days and nine nights more in accomplishing the distance." It is worth while remarking that this statement is at variance with that of Homer, who makes Vulcan, when precipitated from heaven by Jupiter, land at Lemnos in a single day: he had travelled, therefore, nearly twenty times faster than one of his own anvils. Hesiod intended to convey, by this illustrations, an imposing idea of the loftiness of the heavens. In the eyes of modern astronomy, nothing can be more paltry. The time that an anvil thrown from Halcyon, the brightest star of the Pleiades, towards our globe, would require to reach it, may perhaps be imagined from the fact that the rays of light emitted by Halcyon travel five centuries before they strike the earth! It is thus that the positive revelations of modern science surpass in marvels the most daring inventions of ancient fable.

Anaximander, four hundred years after Homer, held that the earth, instead of being flat, was in the form of a cylinder, convex upon its upper surface. Its diameter was three times greater than its height; and its form was round, as if it had been shaped by a turner's lathe. The Oracle of Delphi was the centre of his system.

Somewhat later, Thales, one of the Seven Sages, declared his belief that the earth was spherical, and remained suspended in mid air without support of any kind. This frightful doctrine made few proselytes: it was not likely, indeed, that any one but a sage would adopt a theory which made him the inhabitant of a globe abandoned and isolated in the midst of space.

In the fifth century before Christ, Herodotus, the most celebrated traveller of antiquity, and consequently capable of forming rational ideas upon the subject of geography, rectified many errors which had crept into the popular belief, though Homer was still considered infallible by the masses of the people. "I know of no such river as the ocean," he says, ironically: "this denomination seems to be a pure invention of Homer and the old poets. I cannot help laughing when I hear of the river Ocean, and of the spherical form of the earth, as if it were the work of a turner." He displaced the centre of the inhabited surface, which the Greeks had at first made Mount Olympus and afterwards Delphi, making Rhodes the fortunate possessor of the privilege. Socrates, a century later, (400 b.c.,) asserted that the earth was in the form of a globe, sustained in the middle of the heavens by its own equilibrium.

About the year 230 b.c., Eratosthenes, a Greek of Cyrene, succeeded in reducing geography to a system, under the patronage of the Ptolemies of Egypt, which gave him access to the immense mass of materials gathered by Alexander and his successors and accumulated at the Alexandrian Library. The spherical form of the earth was now quite generally considered by scientific men to be the correct theory, though it could never be substantiated till some navigator, sailing to the east, should return by the west. Eratosthenes, proceeding upon this principle, made it his study to adjust to it all the known features of the globe. The great ocean of Homer and Herodotus, surrounding the world, still remained in his system. He compared, however, the magnitude of the regions known in his time with what he conceived to be the whole circumference, and became convinced that only a third part of the space was filled up. He conjectured that the remaining space might consist of one great ocean, which he called the Atlantic, from Mount Atlas, which was fancifully believed to support the globe. He supposed, too, that lands and islands might be discovered in it by sailing towards the west.

We shall now proceed to give such a description of the vessels used by the Greeks after the time of Homer, as the confused and incomplete data which have reached us will enable us to furnish.