> ... in the USA, it has long been believed and written in history
> books that the everyone at the time of Columbus believed the earth
> was flat. Not so, we know.
A neat disproof can be found by looking up Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book 1.
Ovid was not one of the great ancient astronomers; he presumably knew
what every educated Roman of his time did about such matters.
http://classics.mit.edu/Ovid/metam.1.first.html reveals what that was,
in a rather antiquated but clear translation:
And as five zones th' aetherial regions bind,
Five, correspondent, are to Earth assign'd:
The sun with rays, directly darting down,
Fires all beneath, and fries the middle zone:
The two beneath the distant poles, complain
Of endless winter, and perpetual rain.
Betwixt th' extreams, two happier climates hold
The temper that partakes of hot, and cold.
The symmetry about the "middle zone" implied above works for a spherical
Earth, not a flat one. Ovid has never been an obscure author, and in the
past both classics and geometry were much more widely taught than now.
I therefore suspect that the originator of the flat-earth calumny may
have been deliberately trying to mislead.
John Harper, School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences,
Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand
e-mail john.harper@vuw.ac.nz phone (+64)(4)471 5341 fax (+64)(4)495 5045
(I am currently overseas but please continue to use that e-mail address)