Whether or not there were other regions of the world on the other side of this equatorial zone or beyond the waters of the western ocean, and whether or not such regions were inhabited, were questions which piqued the curiosity of the Church Fathers. The possibility of antipodal regions—perhaps continents—must, in the logic of things, have been admitted by those who were ready to believe that the earth is a sphere; and even those who were not believers in the sphericity of the earth were prone to discuss the possibility of a fourth, or austral, continent, usually called by analogy the region of the antipodes, lying immediately south of the equatorial zone.[236] Bede adopted Crates’ theory of two oceans encircling the earth, east and west, and north and south, dividing its surface into four temperate habitable areas; and after the interest in Macrobius had become widespread in the ninth century this theory undoubtedly must have been generally familiar if not generally accepted. Whether or not the antipodes were actually inhabited was another matter. Lactantius, who thought that the world is flat, was a determined opponent of the possibility of inhabited antipodes for physical reasons. His arguments were obvious but seem puerile to us: “Is there any one so stupid,” he asked, “as to believe that there are men whose feet are higher than their heads?”[237] It puzzled him to explain how trees could grow upside down or rain fall upward. More serious were the religious objections to the possibility of inhabited regions in other parts of the earth, for this was as antagonistic to the words of the Bible as the Great Year theory and antagonistic in much the same way. The theory of the antipodes, as generally presented in association with the theory of a fiery equatorial zone, presupposed the existence of other races of men absolutely cut off from our race. How, then, inquired Augustine,[238] could such races be descended from Adam, who, the Bible tells us, was the forefather of all men? How could Christ have died for antipodeans? How could the Gospel have been preached in “the four corners of the earth” if half the earth is cut off from our quarter by tropical fires? How could the text of Romans x, 18, be true which says: “Yes, verily, their sound went forth over all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the whole world”? Isidore[239] and Bede[240] categorically denied the possibility of inhabitants of antipodal regions. Their authority, together with the strength of their arguments and the arguments of Augustine, were sufficient to arouse suspicions of the man who ventured to believe in this doctrine. Such a man must certainly be a heretic. A tenth-century interpreter of Boëthius wrote: “God forbid that anybody think we accept the stories of antipodes, which are in every way contradictory to Christian faith.”[241] In the middle of the eighth century the question reached a head in a controversy between St.