Note 44 — APHORISMS—BOOK I ON THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE AND THE EMPIRE OF MAN

If we adopt the statement of Herodotus, who places the Homeric era 400 years back from his time, Homer lived about 900 years before Christ. On adding this number to the sixteen centuries of the Christian era which had elapsed up to Bacon’s time, we get the twenty-five centuries he mentions. The Homeric epoch is the furthest point in antiquity from which Bacon could reckon with any degree of certainty. Hesiod, if he were not contemporary, immediately preceded him.