The Encircling Ocean

The Greeks long imagined Ōkeanos, a vast Ocean flowing in a ring around the entire inhabited earth, an image inherited from Homer, who pictured it as a great river girdling the world. Herodotus pushed back, ridiculing mapmakers who drew the land as a tidy circle ringed by Ocean simply because the symmetry pleased them, and doubting anyone had actually seen its outer edge. Later thinkers like Aristotle reasoned about the sea as one connected body, and Strabo praised Homer as the founder of geography for grasping that the lands were surrounded by water. What began as poetic cosmology gradually became a testable claim about the shape of the world.