Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. III — G. R. S. Mead (1906)

2 A passage which Proclus, op. cit., 213A (ed. Sch., p. 152) further explains by means of the "harmonic canon" or ruler.

3 Jowett (B.), Dialogues of Plato (3rd ed., Oxford, 1892), iii. 403.

4 Cf. text 36c : " The motion of the same he carried round by the side to the right, and the motion of the diverse diagonally to the left,"— that is the side of the rectangular figure supposed to be other words, the first describing the path of the equator, the second, the path of the ecliptic."

We should thus, just as the Egyptians, according to Porphyry, symbolized it, represent the conception by the figure of a circle with two diameters suggesting respectively the equator and the ecliptic.

But what is the rectangular figure to which Jowett refers, but which he does not further describe? The circles are spheres; and, therefore, the rectangular figure must be a solid figure inscribed in the sphere " of the same." If we now set the circle revolving parallel to the longer sides of the figure, this " parallelogram " will trace out a cylinder, while the seven spheres of the "other," the "souls" of the "planets," moving parallel to one of the diagonals of our figure, and in an opposite direction to the sphere of the " same," will, by their mutual difference of rates of motion, cause their "bodies" (the souls surrounding the bodies) to trace out spiral orbits.

All this in itself, I confess, seems very far-fetched, and I should have thrown my notes on the subject into the waste-paper basket, but for the following consideration :

Basil of Caesarea, in his ffexcemeron, or Homilies on inscribed in the circle of the " same," and diagonally, across the rectangular figure from corner to corner ; and 38D, 39A : " Now, when all the stars which were necessary to the creation of time [i.e. the spheres of the sun, moon, and five planets] had attained a motion suitable to them, and had become living creatures, having bodies fastened by vital chains, and learned their appointed task, moving in the motion of the diverse, which is diagonal, and passes through, and is governed by the motion of the same, they revolved, some in a larger and some in a lesser orbit. . . . The motion of the same made them turn all in a spiral." With these instruments of "time," surrounded by the sphere of the same, compare the idea of time flowing down on the worlds, from the JSon, in the story of Cleombrotus.

the Six Days of Creation, declared it " a matter of no interest to us whether the earth is a sphere or a cylinder or a disk, or concave in the middle like a fan." l

The cylinder-idea, then, was a favourite theory with regard to the earth-shape in the time of Basil, that is the fourth century.

This cylinder-idea, however, I am inclined to think was very ancient. In the domain of Greek speculation we first meet with it in what little is known of the system of Anaximander of Miletus, the successor of Thales.

Anaximander is reported to have believed that " the earth is a heavenly body, controlled by no other power, and keeping its position because it is the same distance from all things; the form of it is curved, cylindrical, like a stone column ; it has two faces ; one of these is the ground beneath our feet, and the other is opposite to it."2

And again: "That the earth is a cylinder in form, and that its depth is one-third of its breadth."3

Now I have never been able to persuade myself that the earliest philosophers of Greece "invented" the ideas ascribed to them. They stood on the borderland of mythology and mysticism, and, in every probability, took their ideas from ancient traditions.

1 So quoted in Andrew Dickson White's History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (New York, 1898), i. 92. Dr White, unfortunately, does not give the exact reference. The " fan " is, of course, the winnowing fan, a broad basket into which the corn mixed with chaff was received after threshing, and was then thrown up into the wind, so as to disperse the chaff and leave the grain.

2 Alexander of Aphrodisias, Comment, on Aristotle in Meteor., 91 r (vol. i., 268 I d) ; Diels, Doxographi Grceci (Berlin, 1879), p. 478. Cf. Aetius, De Placitis Reliquice, iii. 10 (Diels, 579).

3 Plutarch, Strom., 2 (Diels, 579). See Fairbanks (A.), The First Philosophers of Greece (London, 1898), pp. 13, 14.