In Ovid “the earth” is contradistinguished from the rest of the globe.  It is an island-land, the civilized land, the land of the Tritons or water-deities, of Proteus, Ægeon, Doris, and Atlas.  It is, in my view, Atlantis.

Ovid says, (book ii, fable 1, “The Metamorphoses”)

“The sea circling around the encompassed earth. . . .  The earth has upon it men and cities, and woods and wild beasts, and rivers, and nymphs and other deities of the

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country.”  On this land is “the palace of the sun, raised high on stately columns, bright with radiant gold, and carbuncle that rivals the flames; polished ivory crests its highest top, and double folding doors shine with the brightness of silver.”

In other words, the legend refers to the island-home of a civilized race, over which was a palace which reminds one of the great temple of Poseidon in Plato’s story.

The Atlantic was sometimes called “the sea of ivory,” in allusion, probably, to this ivory-covered temple of Ovid.  Hence Croly sang: 

Now on her hills of ivory
Lie giant-weed and ocean-slime,
Hiding from man and angel’s eye
The land of crime.”

And, again, Ovid says, after enumerating the different rivers and mountains and tracts of country that were on fire in the great conflagration, and once more distinguishing the pre-eminent earth from the rest of the world: 

“However, the genial Earth, as she was surrounded with sea, amid the waters of the main,” (the ocean,) “and the springs dried up on every side, lifted up her all-productive face,” etc.

She cries out to the sovereign of the gods for mercy.  She refers to the burdens of the crops she annually bears; the wounds of the crooked plow and the barrow, which she voluntarily endures; and she calls on mighty Jove to put an end to the conflagration.  And he does so.  The rest of the world has been scarred and seared with the fire, but he spares and saves this island-land, this agricultural, civilized land, this land of the Tritons and Atlas; this “island of the innocent” of Job.  And when the terrible convulsion was over, and the

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rash Phaëton dead and buried, Jove repairs, with especial care, “his own Arcadia.”

It must not be forgotten that Phaëton was the son of Merops; and Theopompus tells us that the people who inhabited Atlantis were the Meropes, the people of Merou.  And the Greek traditions[1] show that the human race issued from Upa-Merou; and the Egyptians claim that their ancestors came from the Island of Mero; and among the Hindoos the land of the gods and the godlike men was Meru.

And here it is, we are told, where in deep caves, and from the seas, receding under the great heat, the human race, crying out for mercy, with uplifted and blistered hands, survived the cataclysm.