Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY; CHAPTER I THE WORLD OF THE MYTHS ''-'. J The knowledge that the world we live in is a . sphere and but one of an endless number that are whirling through space with incredible speed, is not a knowledge that we have by nature or by experience; we must be persuaded of this scientific fact. For as we look around us and above us, we seem to stand at the very center of a circular plane, vaulted by the sky, across whose spacious arch the sun travels by day and the moon by night. This was the view held by the Greeks of early times. To them the world was , flat and round, a disk whose central point was in their own native land, in Central Greece, at Delphi, the holy place of all their race. Near and far were counted from Delphi; it was with the sacred permission of the oracle established there that those daring colonists set out who brought Greece to the shores of Asia Minor, to Africa, and Italy. Beyond those lands to which Greek enterprise Distant and civilization penetrated lay distant lands in- habited by strange .preojle and monsters, the tiny race of Pygmies;;.oe-eyed giants, and serpents. Far in the NaftjV-'iiVed a good and happy people, the Hy per.-'bo're ans, and to the South "the Fig. i. Omphalus, copy of a stone bound with fillets that was set up at Delphi to mark the center of the earth. blameless Ethiopians." These had no dealings with other men, but were specially loved by the gods, who paid them frequent visits and ate at their tables. Beyond all lands, and circling the disk of earth, ran the Stream of Ocean, a great and mysterious river without a farther shore. The account of the beginning of this world, The as the Greek poets tell it, is in one respect quite " world, unlike the account that is found in the first ...