Another persistent belief, held alike by poets, physicists, and geographers, originated in the Homeric mythology of the calm heights of Olympus, dwelling place of the gods. This was to the effect that the winds are limited to the lower part of the atmosphere,[81] a zone some ten or fifteen stades in thickness.[82] The highest mountains were thought to reach above into a realm of perpetual tranquillity where clouds and dew and frost were unknown and where the ashes of sacrifice would remain undisturbed for a year’s time.[83] This idea was transferred to the Middle Ages through the writings of Pomponius Mela, Solinus, and others. CLIMATOLOGY As to the climates, it has already been shown that many writers of antiquity divided the earth’s surface into zones: fiery, temperate, and frozen. Aristotle, Seneca, and Pliny do not seem to have had that more exact understanding of the distribution of climates which recognizes that two countries in the same latitude may, nevertheless, have different climatic conditions and products.[84] To them, all places on the same parallel were virtually the same from the climatic point of view. In this connection it must be pointed out that the parallel strips, or _climata_, into which Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, Ptolemy, Pliny, and Martianus Capella divided the _oikoumene_ were not climatic divisions in our modern sense—implying the prevalence of well-defined conditions of temperature and weather—but, rather, artificial astronomical divisions the boundaries of which were determined by arbitrary means.[85] Nevertheless, true climatic differences were well understood; Seneca describes vividly in more than one place in the _Quaestiones naturales_ the intense heat and dryness of southern regions[86] and the cold of the far North; Seneca and Pliny had acquired more detailed knowledge than Aristotle of the northern ice and snows.[87] Pliny made some interesting, if unsound, observations connecting the dark complexions of the Ethiopians with the scorching effects of the sun and foreshadowed a modern theory by asserting that the inhabitants of northern Europe are blonde (and savage) because of the coldness and inclemency of the climate in which they dwell.[88] A brief but striking passage from the _Octavius_ of Marcus Minutius Felix explains as follows the warming effect of the western ocean upon the climate of Britain: “God is mindful of our welfare not only universally but locally. Britain is deficient in sunshine, but this deficiency is made good by the warmth of the sea that flows around it.”[89]