EARLY VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY. 447 
antiquity. This far-wandering philosopher, who lived about 330 
years before Christ, had visited all the coasts of Europe, from 
the mouths of the Tanais or Don to the shores of Ultima Thule, 
which, according to Leopold von Buch, was not Iceland, nor 
Ferve, nor Orcadia, but the Norwegian coast. His narrative 
first made the Greeks acquainted with North-western Europe, 
and remained for a long time their only geographical guide to 
those hyperborean lands. 
While the horizon of the Greeks was thus considerably ex- 
panding towards the regions of the setting sun, the conquests of 
Alexander opened to them a new world in the distant Orient. 
Greek navigators now for the first time unfurled their sails on 
the Indian Ocean. The Macedonian, desirous not only of sub- 
duing Asia but of firmly attaching it to the nations of the 
Mediterranean by the bonds of mutual interest, and heping by 
this means to consolidate his vast conquests, sent a fleet under 
the command of Nearchus, from the mouths of the Indus to the 
head of the Persian Gulf, to establish if possible a new road for 
a regular commercial intercourse between India and Mesopo- 
tamia. The performance of this voyage was reckoned by the 
conqueror one of the most glorious events of his reign, but it 
may serve as a proof of the slowness of ancient navigation, that 
Nearchus took ten months to perform a journey which one of 
our steamers might easily accomplish in five days. 
After the disruption of the Macedonian empire, the circle of 
the Greek discoveries in the Indian Ocean was widened by the 
enterprising spirit of the Seleucid and Ptolemies. Seleucus 
Nicator is said to have penetrated to the mouths of the Ganges, 
and the fleets of the Egyptian kings sailed round the peninsula 
of Hindostan and discovered the coasts of Taprobane or Ceylon, 
the spicy odours of whose cinnamon-groves are said to be wafted 
far out to sea, so that — 
* for many a league, 
Pleased with the grateful scent, old Ocean smiles.” 
But now came the time when earth-ruling Rome called the 
whole civilised world her own, and her victorious eagles expanded 
their triumphant wings from the Red Sea to the coasts of the 
Northern Ocean. What discoveries might not have been ex- 
pected from such a power, if the Romans had possessed but one 
