“But you see this same earth girded and surrounded as if by certain belts, from which you see that two, greatly opposite to each other and resting upon the poles themselves of heaven from either part, stiffen with frost, while you see that that middle and greatest one is scorched by the flame of the sun. Two are habitable, of which that southern one, men who stand on which plant their feet opposite to yours, has nothing to your race; but this other one adjacent to the north, which you inhabit, see in how slight part it touches you. For the entire earth which is inhabited by you, narrowed in the poles, broader in the sides, is a certain small island, surrounded by that sea which you in the lands call the Atlantic , the great, the Ocean, which, of such a great name, you see how small it is.
“From these cultivated and known lands themselves, could either your name or the name of anyone of us either pass this Caucasus, which you see, or swim across that Ganges ? Who in the remaining farthest parts of the rising or falling sun or of the north or the south will hear your name? Which regions having been cut off you indeed see in how narrow straits your glory wishes that it be extended. But the men themselves who speak of us, how long will they speak?
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