In point of fact, there were several discoveries of America before 1492. And a serious error is committed, if one thinks that it was Christopher Columbus who first labelled the natives of America as “Indians” (in Spanish: Indios). For the latter had already been so named by the Romans in 62 BC. Furthermore, Columbus was not the first to claim that one may arrive in India by sailing westerly from Iberia (=Spain). Aristotle (364-322 BC), the great philosopher, had written that it would be feasible to do so because “it is the sea that separates the Indian subcontinent from the Iberian Peninsula”. However, the one who clearly knew that we could arrive in India by sailing from Spain to the West was Strabo(58 BC-25[?] AD), the famous geographer of the Graeco-Roman world, who actually knew that our planet Earth is spherical. Nonetheless, it was Plato who, centuries before Strabo, had bequeathed us a picture of the earth which re-minds one of a photograph taken from a satellite. Moreover, according to Heraclitus (1st century AD), who was a renowned commentator of Homer, the ancients were aware that the earth's surface was divided into five climate zones.he crucial question, therefore, arises: was America known by the ancient Greeks and Romans? The answer can only be affirmative: yes, they knew of her existence. For as early as the High Antiquity there was talk of an “awful country” located in the “far west”; a country bordered by the “infertile and dark sea”; of “dark, moist and cold lands” that “one had to toil a whole year to cross” (from one end to the other). These places were agitated by “continuous storms”, “monstrous cyclones” (i.e. hurricanes) that "scared even the gods”…
- Citation du texte
- Dimitris Michalopoulos (Auteur), 2026, The Atlantic Ocean, America and the Ancient Greeks, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/1711721
