According to the ideas of the Homeric and Hesiodic ages, it would seem that the world was a hollow globe, divided into two equal portions by the flat disk of the earth. The external shell of this globe is called by the poets brazen and iron, probably only to express its solidity. The superior hemisphere was named Heaven, the inferior one Tartarus. The length of the diameter of the hollow sphere is given thus by Hesiod. It would take, he says, nine days for an anvil to fall from heaven to earth; and an equal space of time would be occupied by its fall from earth to Tartarus. The luminaries which gave light to gods and men shed their radiance through all the interior of the upper hemisphere; while that of the inferior one was filled with eternal gloom and darkness, and its still air was unmoved by any wind. The earth filled the centre of the universe in the form of a round flat disk, or rather cylinder, around which the river (the ocean) flowed. Hellas was probably regarded as the centre of the earth; but the poets are silent on this point. They are equally so as to the exact central point, but probably viewed as such Olympus, the abode of the gods. In after times Delphi became practically the _navel of the earth_. The sea divided the terrestial disk into two portions, which we may suppose were regarded as equal. These divisions do not seem to have had any distinctive names in the time of Homer. The northern one was afterwards named Europe; the southern, at first called Asia, alone, was in process of time divided into Asia and Libya, the former comprising all the country between the Phasis and the Nile, the latter all between this river and the western ocean. In the sea, the Greeks appear to have known, to the west of their own country, southern Italy, Sicily and Spain, though their ideas respecting these countries were probably vague and uncertain. The imagination of the poets, or the tales of voyagers, had placed in the more remote parts of it several islands, such as the Ogygian, the isle of Calypsó; the Æan, that of Kirké; the Æolion, that of Æolos; Scheria, the abode of the Phæakians--islands in all probability as ideal and as fabulous as the isles of Panchaia, Lilliput, or Brobdignag, though both ancients and moderns have endeavored to assign their exact positions. Along its southern coast lay, it would appear, the countries of the Lotus-eaters, the Cyclops, the Giants and the Læstrigonians. These isles and coasts of the western part of the sea were the scenes of most of the wonders of early Grecian fable. There, and on the isles of the ocean, the passage to which was supposed to be closed to the island of Kirké, dwelt the Sirens, the Hesperides, the Græcæ, the Gorgons and the other beings of fable, whose varied deeds make up the ever interesting narratives of the ancient mythology.