The Western Hemisphere According to Macrobius.

The Western Hemisphere According to Macrobius

Macrobius’s work is a commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio. It includes an important woodcut map of the world illustrating Cicero’s interesting theories. This diagrammatic map shows two distinct regions of the earth. The inhabited Afro-Eurasian continent was balanced by an unknown, and relatively equal, landmass (Temperata Antipodunobis Incognita) on the other side of an impassable torrid zone (Perusta) and a great boiling sea (Alveus Oceani). This notion of antipodean balance and landmass equivalence continued to attract Renaissance minds to the otherwise outmoded geographical ideas of Macrobius. What is lesser known is that this “Antipodean” earth, so much described by some groups, especially the Pythagoreans,  was a direct Reference, in allegory, to Atlantis, or the land/continent located in the opposite of the World.

Macrobius was a 5th-century Roman Neoplatonic philosopher. His commentary on Cicero’s Somnium Sciponis was of great influence in the Middle Ages and gained popularity with the advent of printing.

First published in Brescia in 1483, numerous editions appeared throughout the 16th century. His commentary includes several chapters dealing with his own conception of the world and the universe. It also contains references to many facets of the scientific knowledge of his time, including references to physics, astronomy, and mathematics.

Allegedly, the primary purpose of the image was to illustrate the direction of ocean flows, the formation of seas, and the relationship of the known world to unknown but hypothesized regions. The image was not static: it was adapted in several different ways—at times simplified, at others made more complex. The evidence of pre-twelfth-century manuscripts suggests that it is possible to identify sub-groups within the corpus of Macrobius maps, but that it may not be possible to establish lines of descent from the original fifth-century map.