IV.] MAP-MAKING. 65
describe these features on a level surface, and names appended
to explain what was designated by them.
The first mention that we meet with of the employment of
such a map is in Herodotus, where the historian is Arjsta oras
recounting the circumstances of the Ionian revolt and his Map at
Quarto 4nnR f*
against Persia. Aristagoras, tyrant of Miletus, he
tells us, who was the leader of that rising, visited Sparta in order
to persuade Cleomenes the king to lend his assistance to their
undertaking. In the course of the interview that followed, in
order to set forth the advantages to be gained by an expedition
against Persia, he described the wealth of the lands which lay
between the sea-coast of Asia Minor and that country: and that
he might explain this more clearly, he produced "a bronze
tablet whereupon the whole circuit of the Earth was engraved,
with all its seas and rivers1." On this he pointed out to the king
with his finger the position of the different peoples that lay on
the way, at the same time descanting on the riches which they
possessed. Cleomenes for the time postponed his reply, and at
'their next conference enquired how many days' journey it was
from the Ionian sea to Susa. In an incautious moment
Aristagoras answered that it was a journey of three months;
whereupon Cleomenes, discouraged by the magnitude of the
undertaking, at once dismissed him from Sparta. The map that
was exhibited on this occasion by the tyrant of Miletus was in all
probability an adaptation of that which had been designed by
his fellow-countryman Anaximander, and afterwards improved by
Hecataeus.
A point, the determination of which must have gone some
way towards regulating the shape and arrangement
of the early maps, was the position of the centre of
the Earth's surface. This was fixed at Delphi for
the Greeks by religious associations, in the same
way as at a later time Jerusalem became the central point of the
world in the minds of Dante and his contemporaries. The
popular belief on this subject gave rise to the fable which Pindar
relates, that two eagles which were let go by Zeus, the one from
the east, the other from the west, met at Delphi2. Apollo himself
1 Herod. 5.49. * Strabo, 9. 3. 6.
T. 5