288 HEIDEL. 



noinena, such as earthquakes, and such strictly historical data as the 

 old Milesian saw fit to give.^°^ They would most naturally concern 

 the royal houses, not improbably linked up with Heracles, of the great 

 powers of Asia, the Lydians and the ]Medes. 



Such a book, however significant to one whose antiquarian or 

 broadly historical interest enabled him to detect in it the germs of 

 future great developments, was of course destined to be speedily 

 antiquated and thus ignored by the vulgar. The greatest wonder is 

 that it did not disappear without a trace, as Theophrastus believed, 

 probably with good reason, that many still earlier books had done; 

 for until institutional libraries began to be formed in the days of Plata 

 and Aristotle books, except such great favorites as the major poets, 

 must have had an extremely precarious existence. The schools of 

 philosophy took an interest in Anaximander's book in virtue of a part 

 of its contents and because it was the earliest of its kind that came to 

 their knowledge; geographers sought out, if not his authentic map, 

 at least such information regarding it as might be gleaned from later 

 writers in the same field; finally, at the very height of Alexandrian 

 criticism, Apollodorus, qualified as no other was by training and 

 interest to assess its worth, had the good fortune to retrieve it from 

 obscurity, and the grace to use it in a way to reveal its true scope and 

 character. The doxographic tradition, no doubt, called it a treatise On 

 Nature, which sufficiently characterized it in part; someone possessed 

 of a truer perspective, and regarding the whole book in the light of 

 its conclusion called it a Tuin- of the Earih, unless — as is indeed 

 possible — the distinctly geographical portion of the book had become 

 detached from the beginning and so led for a time a life divorced, in 

 which case the latter title may have been originally given to the 

 separate part. In any case, the fortunes of Anaximander's book 

 would seem to have been strikingly similar to the fortunes experienced 

 by the work of his successor, Hecataeus. 



MlDDLETOWN, CoNN., 



Jan. 1-i, 1921. 



106 Hecataeus also, it seems, gave his historical (as distinguished from 

 mythical and prehistoric) data in his MepLijyvai.s or r^s weploSos; this at least is 

 the opinion of Jacoby, and it is altogether probable, since the TtveaXoyiai served 

 to reconstruct the prehistoric period, and the Trjs irepio5os, though concerned 

 chiefly with describing the status quo, could not well, even if its author was 

 primarily interested in geography, avoid touching on historical occurrences 

 which affected the map. How intimately history and geography are bound 

 up with one another must be clear to any thoughtful person, especially at the 

 present moment. 



