The River of Ocean — Primitive : 75 



and Cyprus and Egypt are shadowy. He has in mind a general but 

 distorted picture of the Mediterranean shores. The places are there 

 but their relations are askew. He knows of the Black Sea but not 

 what lies beyond it. He sees the whole world as a flat disk with the 

 Mediterranean at its center, the countries forming its shore. Travel 

 only a short distance from the shore and you become lost in the lands 

 of storm and mist and fabulous monsters. A step too far and you 

 may find yourself at the door of Hades. Sail beyond the known land- 

 marks and you are the sport of Neptune, who rules the "river of 

 ocean" that flows all about the outer world. 



For Homer, and for generations of Greeks that succeeded him, the 

 sea was always the Mediterranean. The shores of the Mediterranean 

 were all that was known of the world and in the west the sea termi- 

 nated at the Pillars of Hercules which we know today as the Straits 

 of Gibraltar. The river of ocean lay without and flowed all about the 

 disk-shaped world. The river of ocean represented the outermost lim- 

 its of knowledge — a realm of fable and fantasy; an area inhabited by 

 threatening Gods and unknown dangers. The river of ocean thus 

 represented a primitive idea that, in the same form or in a slightly 

 diflferent form, was shared by many people not only in the Mediter- 

 ranean basin but elsewhere. It not only continued as a popular idea 

 after the Greeks extended their geographic knowledge and began to 

 build up some scientific knowledge of the world, but it persisted and 

 moved outward as knowledge moved. It spread over Europe in the 

 Middle Ages and for centuries directly and indirectly influenced what 

 people thought about the Atlantic and what they were able to do 

 about it. It was the shape of the enemy that had to be met and over- 

 come, not once but repeatedly, by knowledge and science. 



One of the charms of Homer and indeed of the later Greeks is the 

 extent to which their thinking could encompass and combine primi- 

 tive superstition and worldly sophistication. Reading history we are 

 sometimes puzzled to find that superstition and knowledge live side 

 by side; we assume that where truth has been discovered, supersti- 

 tion will automatically be eliminated. We should be less naive, re- 

 membering that today, despite our efforts at universal education, 

 there is a wide gap between what we can know and what we prefer 

 to believe. 



The Greeks later controlled the Mediterranean and were succeeded 

 by the Romans. The Greek language became the medium through 

 which the histories of many people in and about the Mediterranean 

 were collected and recorded. Thus we are always apt to begin our 



