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varied much in different ages, but the spirit of exploration has been the same throughout.

A tideless sea such as the Mediterranean, with its many islands, was an ideal nursery for seamen, and two

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A BABYLONIAN MAP OF THE WORLD
From "
History of the Ancient World," Webster (Heath)

of the great seafaring nations of antiquity, the Greeks and the Phoenicians, are found on its shores. Crossing first the seventy miles that separated their chief city, Tyre, from Cyprus, the Phoenicians, steering by the Pole-star, were presently adventuring themselves in the open sea. They made their way past the Pillars of Hercules into the Atlantic and the Bay of Biscay, and

possibly in their search for that precious commodity, amber, penetrated into the Baltic. Their colonies dotted both shores of the Mediterranean; they visited the west coast of Africa, and traded with Cornwall and the Scilly Isles. They sailed the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, and their galleys were probably seen on the west coasts

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of India and Ceylon. The extent of their traffic by land and sea may be judged from an ancient writer's list of what was bought and sold in their markets:

Silver and iron, tin and lead, the persons of men, and vessels of brass, horses and horsemen and mules, ivory, ebony, emeralds, blue and purple, fine linen, coral and agate, wheat, honey, oil and balm, wine, and white wool, cassia, and calamus, rich apparel and precious clothes for chariots, lambs and rams and goats, spices, and gold.

Hard on the heels of the Phoenicians followed the Greeks, sometimes meeting them in arms and sometimes in the peaceful rivalry of trade, likewise planting colonies on both coasts of the Mediterranean, not venturing outside the Straits as the Phoenicians had done, but making many settlements in Western Asia Minor and on the shores of the Black Sea. And because the Greek mind cared more for knowledge than for the profits of trade there was born about 490 B.c. in one of these Greek colonies in Asia Minor a man, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, who was destined to be the father of history and geography too. He travelled not only wherever Greek settlements were to be found, but in the interior of the Persian Empire, visiting Susa, Ecbatana, and Babylon, and he made his way to Egypt, passing through that mart of the ancient world, the Phoenician mother-city, Tyre. What he saw with his own eyes, and what he could learn from other people in the lands he visited, he recounted in delightful fashion in his history of the Persian wars.

About the time that Alexander the Great was making his conquering and colonizing expeditions—i.e. between 334 and 323 B.C. -an adventurous Greek from another colony, Pytheas of Massilia, in Gaul, sailed to the western and northern parts of Europe, and wrote an account of the two voyages he made. In one of these, On the Ocean, he described how he visited Britain and travelled over the whole island as far as it was accessible, sailing thence to Thule, the end of the earth. Thule, since it was made in six days' sail from Britain, and since Pytheas discovered that day and night there were each six months long, would appear to be Iceland, and his report that there was neither earth nor air nor sea in those distant parts, but a kind of mixture of the

three, was probably due to his experience of the Iceland fogs.

Polybius, a Greek born about 204 B.C., who served under Scipio at the destruction of the Phoenician colony of Carthage, was, like Herodotus, an historian who followed the excellent practice of visiting the scenes described in his works. Strabo, the geographer who lived during the reign of the first Roman emperor; Augustus, began his work where the history of Polybius ended. He was not only a great traveller, but owing to the Roman conquests he was able to get information about countries almost unknown in the time of Polybius. The last great Greek geographer was Ptolemy of Alexandria (fl. about the middle of the second century A.D.), the author of the Almagest and the Ptolemaic system of the universe, who, as he had done in astronomy, collected the geographical knowledge of his age into à treatise which for a long time was looked upon as the final authority.

By the end of the century that saw Ptolemy's activities Rome had ceased to be the residence of the emperors. In the next Constantine enlarged as the capital of the Empire that Greek city of Byzantium on the Bosporus called by him New Rome, which has ever since been better known as Constantinople. In A.D. 323 Constantine proclaimed that Christianity was the religion of the Empire, and in 476 the Roman Empire of the West, which had long been breaking up under the attacks of the Teutonic tribes, came to an end, and those parts of it which fell into the hands of tribes such as the Angles and Saxons, who had not come into contact with the religion and civilization of Rome, relapsed into heathendom and had to be rechristianized, first, in the case of England, by Irish missions, and

later by missions sent by the Pope, the Bishop of

Rome.

Thus Christianity took the place of the Roman armies in spreading a knowledge of the earth, and nations on the outskirts of civilization, such as the Franks and Saxons, learned to know the great world by pilgrimages to the holy places of their religion. During the first hundred years after the conversion of England Englishmen made their way as far as Rome, Constantinople, Egypt, and Palestine.

Thus in 721 a certain Willibald, bent on making the pilgrimage to Palestine, started on the ordinary route by Southampton and Rouen over the Alps to Naples, where he took ship, and touching at Samos and Cyprus reached Syria. At Emessa he and his whole party were flung into prison as spies. On his release through the intercession of a Spaniard who possessed some influence there Willibald went to Damascus and stated his case to the caliph, from whom he received a safe-conduct for all the holy places of Palestine, his religion having previously been his passport in countries united by their faith against the Moslem. For the next five years he travelled up and down the land, and saw all its marvels, including two columns in the Church of the Ascension on Mount Olivet, for "that man," he says, "who can creep between the columns and the wall will be free from all his sins." After a return journey full of adventures he led a mission to the heathen of Germany and brought back reports of the land to his own people.

Such pilgrimages and missions as those of Willibald were real explorations, but the share of Englishmen in medieval discovery was small compared, for instance, with that of the Vikings of Norway, who ranged from Greenland to Novgorod. Of two Norse captains in the

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