The First Map-Makers
CLASSICAL antiquity offers no more exciting field of study than its geography, the theory and practice of which are Professor Thomson's subject. It seems slightly absurd in the case of so learned a book, so rightly pedantic in its scholarship, so deliberately uneni)ellished in style, to use the hackneyed insincerity that it is impossible to put it down. Yet for myself at least, barring the inevitable interruptions of civilised life in this twentieth century of grace, that was the fact ; and it is difficult to say just why.
Professor Thomson's method of presentation is expert without being outstandingly gracefuL His treatment of evidence leaves nothing to chance ; witness the reference to a verse description of the earth by one Apollodorus, "of which almost nothing is known, as some apparent citations are probably not from it." His maps and illustrations are efficient and full of rare tit-bits of information, such as that Britannia is to be found with her trident on a coin before the end of the thirtventury A.D. But the inordinate delay of five years between composition and publication has the result of burden- ing the reader with some not easily assimilable after-thoughts by way of addenda ; for instance, we learn on p. 203 that the orb of mediaeval kingship perhaps descends from a terrestrial globe of the second century B.C., only to have to unlearn this fascinating idea on p. 406. Footnotes are exhaustive, without over-encumbering the text, though it is not certain that Professor Thomson has found the ideal way of evading the scholar's perpetual dilemma—that to be readable the text should be as bare as possible of reference to foot- notes, whereas to be technically valuable it must be dotted with a hideous rash of minute figures, raising almost every other word to some increasingly unlikely power. Professor Thomson's way of escape is to group a cluster of notes appertaining to a succession of sentences, or even paragraphs, under a single reference-number, at the rate of only two or three to a page. The general reader (for whom references are not intended) may thank him, but the specialist (for whom they are) may not.
Yet the book is a scholar's work for scholars, not for the general reader, and perhaps the fascination which it may have for the latter lies in a purely derivative feature. Classical geography shows us the ancients at their best and their worst. The Greeks' practical experience ranged from Pytheas' bold exploration of the British Isles down to the timidity which hugged coast-lines all day and beached all night. Their theoretical efforts ranged from Eratosthenes' brilliant calculation of the earth's circumference and the inspired deduction, first recorded by Aristotle, that the earth must be round because it threw a curved shadow on the moon in eclipse, to naive superstitions about the "necessary symmetry " of the Nile with the Danube, or the ineradicable conviction that the Balkans could be circumnavigated. Even to the best of them there was nothing dis- turbing about the indeterminacy of their units of linear measure- ment. The Romans, with characteristic gravitas, disregarded geo- graphy along with other sciences as an unsuitable occupation for Herrenvolk, so that at times the confines of scientific knowledge actually„shrank while the known surface of the earth was expanding. As a result they clumsily reversed the Greek delusion, which had complacently made Asia much too small in comparison with Europe, by making it relatively much too large, with devastating effect upon all exploration down to Columbus and beyond.
It is this continuity of strength and weakness, through so many centuries of heroic adventure and lame withdrawal, of inspired deduction and futile 'guessing, which makes the history of pre- scientific geography so fascinating a subject. The only matter for regret is that Professor Thomson has not availed himself of this continuity to carry his admirable history many centuries further ;
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