J. M. Gesner (Dissertat. de Navigationibus extra Columnas Herculis, sects. 6 and 7) has a good defence of the story told by Herodotus. Major Rennell also adopts the same view, and shows by many arguments how much easier the circumnavigation was from the East than from the West (Geograph. System of Herodotus, p. 680); compare Ukert, Geograph. der Griechen und Römer. vol. i, p. 61; Mannert, Geog. d. G. und Römer, vol. i, pp. 19-26. Gossellin (Recherches sur la Géogr. des Anc. i, p. 149) and Mannert both reject the story as not worthy of belief: Heeren defends it (Ideen über den Verkehr der Alten Welt, i, 2, pp. 86-95). Agatharchides, in the second century B. C., pronounces the eastern coast of Africa, southward of the Red sea, to be as yet unexamined: he treats it as a matter of certainty, however, that the sea to the south-westward is continuous with the Western ocean (De Rubro Mari, Geog. Minores, ed. Huds. v, i, p. 11). Now we learn from hence that the enterprise, even by those who believed the narrative of Nekôs’s captains, was regarded as at once desperate and unprofitable; but doubtless many persons treated it as a mere “Phenician lie,”[547] (to use an expression proverbial in ancient times). The circumnavigation of Libya is said to have been one of the projects conceived by Alexander the Great,[548] and we may readily believe that if he had lived longer, it would have been confided to Nearchus, or some other officer of the like competence: nor can there be any reason why it should not have succeeded, especially since it would have been undertaken from the eastward, to the great profit of geographical knowledge among the ancients, but with little advantage to their commerce. There is then adequate reason for admitting that these Phenicians rounded the cape of Good Hope from the East about 600 B. C., more than two thousand years earlier than Vasco de Gama did the same thing from the West: though the discovery was in the first instance of no avail, either for commerce or for geographical science.