Antipodes
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Antipodes (from Greek anti- "opposed" and pous "foot") means "diametrically opposed", and more specifically refers to the opposite side of the Earth, the region of the antipodal point, and those to those living there. In Britain in particular, "The Antipodes" is often used to refer to Australia and New Zealand.
The Greek word is attested in Plato's Timaeus (dialogue) (63a), already referring to a spherical Earth, explaining the relativity of the terms "above" and "below" (Translation by W.R.M. Lamb):
- [62d] For suppose there were a solid body evenly-balanced at the center of the universe, [63a] it would never be carried away to the extremities because of their uniformity in all respects; nay, even were a man to travel round it in a circle he would often call the same part of it both “above” and “below,” according as he stood now at one pole, now at the opposite. (πολλάκις ἂν στὰς ἀντίπους) For seeing that the Whole is, as we said just now, spherical, the assertion that it has one region “above” and one “below” does not become a man of sense.
The term is taken up by Aristotle (De caelo 308a.20), Strabo, Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius, and was adopted into Latin as antipodes. The Latin word changed its sense form the original "under the feet, opposite side" to "those with the feet opposite", i. e. a bahuvrihi referring to hypothetical people living on the opposite side of the Earth. Medieval illustrations imagine them in some way "inverted", with their feet growing out of their heads, pointing upward.
In this sense, Antipodes first entered English in 1398 in a translation of the 13th century De Proprietatibus Rerum by Bartholomeus Anglicus, translated by John of Trevisa:
- Yonde in Ethiopia ben the Antipodes, men that haue theyr fete ayenst our fete.
The term plays a certain role in the discussion about the shape of the Earth. The antipodes being an attribute of a spherical Earth, some authors used their perceived absurdity as an argument for a flat Earth. However, knowledge of the spherical Earth being widespread even during the Dark Ages, only occasionally disputed on dogmatic grounds, the medieval dispute surrounding the antipodes mainly concerned the question whether they were inhabitable: since the torrid clime was considered impassable, it would have been impossible to evangelize them, posing a dilemma between two equally unacceptable possibilities that either Christ had appeared a second time in the antipodes, or that the inhabitants of the antipodes were irredeemably damned. Such an argument was forwarded by the Spanish theologian Tostatus as late as the 15th century.
Saint Augustine (354–430) argued against people inhabiting the antipodes and called them a "fable" (De Civitate Dei, xvi, 9).
- Those who affirm [a belief in antipodes] do not claim to possess any actual information; they merely conjecture that, since the Earth is suspended within the concavity of the heavens, and there is as much room on the one side of it as on the other, therefore the part which is beneath cannot be void of human inhabitants. They fail to notice that, even should it be believed or demonstrated that the world is round or spherical in form, it does not follow that the part of the Earth opposite to us is not completely covered with water, or that any conjectured dry land there should be inhabited by men.
Since these people would have to be descended from Adam, they would have had to travel to the other side of the Earth at some point, which apparently was universally considered an absurd proposition; Augustine continues:
- it is too absurd to say that some men might have set sail from this side and, traversing the immense expanse of ocean, have propagated there a race of human beings descended from that one first man.
The idea of dry land, inhabited or not, in the Southern climes, the Terra Australis was introduced by Ptolemy, and appears on European maps as an imaginary continent from the 15th century. In spite of having been discovered relatively late by European explorers, Australia was inhabited very early in human history, the ancestors of the Australian Aboriginals having reached it at least 50,000 years ago.