Note 263 — Chapter I

Plato makes Socrates say that he took up the works of Anaxagoras, hoping to learn whether the earth was round or flat (Phaedo, 46, Stallb. i. 176). In Plutarch’s dialogue “On the face appearing in the orb of the moon,” one of the characters is lavish in his ridicule of the sphericity of the earth and of the theory of antipodes. See also Lucretius, De rerum nat., i. 1052, etc., v. 650; Virgil, Georgics, i. 247; Tacitus, Germania, 45.