“It is related that he undertook a voyage far out into the ocean,” and Maurenbrecher adds that a scholium to Horace [Epod. 16, 42] says: “The ocean wherein are the Insulæ Fortunatæ, to which Sallust in his Histories says that Sertorius wished to retire when he had been vanquished.”
But in L. Annæus Florus, who lived under Hadrian (117-138 A.D.), we read [iii. 22]:[330]
“An exile and a wanderer on account of his banishment, this man [i.e., Sertorius] of the greatest but most fatal qualities filled seas and lands with his misfortunes: now in Africa, now in the Balearic Isles he sought fortune, was sent out into the ocean and reached the Fortunate Isles: finally he raised Spain to conflict.”
It thus appears that by Florus’s time the idea had shaped itself that Sertorius really had sought and found these islands; which, besides, in part at all events, were thought to be the same as those said to have been already discovered by the Carthaginian Hanno on the west coast of Africa about 500 B.C.
Of great interest is the description which Horace gives in his Epodes [xvi. 39 ff.] of the Fortunate Isles in the ocean, though he does not mention them by name. He exhorts the Romans, who were suffering from the civil wars, to abandon the coast of Italy (the Etruscan coast) and sail thither, away from all their miseries. Lord Lytton[331] gave the following metrical translation of the poem:
Ye in whom manhood lives, cease woman wailings,
Wing the sail far beyond Etruscan shores.
Lo! where awaits an all-circumfluent ocean—
Fields, the Blest Fields we seek, the Golden Isles
Where teems a land that never knows the ploughshare—
Where, never needing pruner, laughs the vine—
Where the dusk fig adorns the stem it springs from,
And the glad olive ne’er its pledge belies—
There from the creviced ilex wells the honey;
There, down the hillside bounding light, the rills
Dance with free foot, whose fall is heard in music;
There, without call, the she-goat yields her milk,
And back to browse, with unexhausted udders,
Wanders the friendly flock; no hungry bear
Growls round the sheepfold in the starry gloaming,
Nor high with rippling vipers heaves the soil.
These, and yet more of marvel, shall we witness,
We, for felicity reserved; how ne’er
Dark Eurus sweeps the fields with flooding rain-storm,
Nor rich seeds parch within the sweltering glebe.
Either extreme the King of Heaven has tempered.
Thither ne’er rowed the oar of Argonaut,
The impure Colchian never there had footing.
There Sidon’s trader brought no lust of gain;
No weary toil there anchored with Ulysses;
Sickness is known not; on the tender lamb
No ray falls baneful from one star in heaven.
When Jove’s decree alloyed the golden age,
He kept these shores for one pure race secreted;
For all beside the golden age grew brass
Till the last centuries hardened to the iron,
Whence to the pure in heart a glad escape,
By favour of my prophet-strain is given.
Rendered into prose, Horace’s poem will run somewhat as follows:
“Ye who have manliness, away with effeminate grief, and fly beyond the Etruscan shore. There awaits us the all-circumfluent ocean: Let us steer towards fields, happy fields and rich islands, where the untilled earth gives corn every year, and the vine uncut [i.e., unpruned, growing wild] continually flourishes, and the never-failing branch of the olive-tree blossoms forth, and the fig adorns its tree, honey flows from the hollow ilex, the light stream bounds down from the high mountain on murmuring foot,” etc.
We thus find here in Horace precisely the same ideas of the Elysian Fields or the Fortunate Isles that occur later in Isidore and in the saga’s description of the fortunate Wineland; especially striking are the expressions about the corn that each year grows wild (on the unploughed earth) and the wild vine which continually yields fruit (blossoms, “floret”).
These myths of the Fortunate Isles—originally derived from conceptions of the happy existence of the elect after death (in the Elysian Fields), for which reason they were called by the Greeks the Isles of the Blest—have also, of course, been blended with Indian myths of “Uttara Kuru.” Among the Greeks they were sometimes the subject of humorous productions; several such of the fifth century B.C. are preserved in Athenæus. Thus Teleclides says: “Mortals live there peacefully and free from fear and sickness, and all that they need offers itself spontaneously. The gutter flows with wine, wheat and barley bread fight before the mouths of the people for the favour of being swallowed, the fish come into the house, offer themselves and serve themselves up, a stream of soup bears warm pieces of meat on its waves,” etc. Cf. also Lucian’s description of the Isle of the Blest in Vera Historia (second century A.D.): “The vines bear fruit twelve times a year ... instead of wheat the ears put forth little loaves like sponges,” etc. [Wieland, 1789, iv. p. 196].