Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/277

 FABULOUS LOCALITIES. 245 Tyndarids Kastor and Pollux, the heavenly pi elector*, .invoked dui'ing storm and peril. He localized the legend anew wherever he went, often with some fresh circumstances suggested either by his own adventures or by the scene before him. He took a sort of religious possession of the spot, connecting it by a bond of faith with his native land, and erecting in it a temple or an altar with appropriate commemorative solemnities. The Jasonium thus established, and indeed every visible object called after the name of the hero, not only served to keep alive the legend of the Argo in the minds of future comers or inhabitants, but was accepted as an obvious and satisfactory proof that this marvellous vessel had actually touched there in her voyage. The epic poets, building both on the general love of fabulous incident and on the easy faith of the people, dealt with distant and unknown space in the same manner as with past and unre- corded time. They created a mythical geography for the for- mer, and a mythical history for the latter. But there was this material difference between the two : that while the unrecorded time was beyond the reach of verification, the unknown space gradually became trodden and examined. In proportion as au- thentic local knowledge was enlarged, it became necessary to modify the geography, or shift the scene of action, of the old mythes ; and this perplexing problem was undertaken by some of the ablest historians and geographers of antiquity, for it was painful to them to abandon any portion of the old epic, as if it were destitute of an ascertainable basis of truth. Many of these fabulous localities are to be found in Homer and Hesiod, and the other Greek poets and logographers, Ery- theia, the garden of the Hesperides, the garden of Phoebus, 1 tc which Boreas transported the Attic maiden Orithyia, the deli- cious country of the Hyperboreans, the Elysian plain, 2 the fleet ing island of -ZEolus, Thrinakia, the country of the^ZEthiopians, the 1 Sojihokl. ap. Strabo. vii. p. 295. TE T7WTOV 7TUV~' it' Iff^OTa OVOf, rof re m)yu<; ovpai'ov T' uva~rt>;fuf, QoijBov re jrahaiov KT/TTOV. 1 Odyss. iv. 562. The Islands of the Blessed, in Hesiod, are near UM ocean (Opp. Di. 169).