[6] Cf. Theopompus (about 340 B.C.) in Ælian, “Varia,” iii. c. 18.
[7] The celebrated physician Hippocrates (470-364 B.C.) makes Scythia extend on the north to the Rhipæan Mountains, which stretch far enough to be just below the Great Bear. From them comes the north wind, which therefore does not blow farther north, so that there must be a milder climate where the Hyperboreans dwell. The Rhipæan Mountains had become altogether mythical, but seem often to have been connected with the Ural and placed north of Scythia; sometimes also they were connected with the Alps, or with the mountains farther east.
[8] The Cimmerians of the Odyssey (xi. 14) are undoubtedly the same as the historical Cimmerians of the districts north of the Black Sea, who made several inroads into Asia Minor in the eighth century, and whose name was long preserved in the Cimmerian Bosphorus. Cf. Niese, 1882, p. 224, and K. Kretschmer, 1892, p. 7. W. Christ [1866, pp. 131-132] connects the name with the Cimbri of Jutland, whose name is alleged to have been somewhat modified under the influence of the Phœnician “kamar,” dark, which may be doubtful; but Posidonius seems to have been the first to take Cimmerii and Cimbri for the same name [cf. Strabo, vii. 293], and there is nothing improbable in the supposition that the wandering Cimbri may have reached the Black Sea and been the same people as the Cimmerians, who were remarkable just in the same way for their migrations. Similarly, we find the Goths both on the shores of the Baltic and by the Black Sea, where we first meet with them in literature.
[9] O. Helm of Danzig has shown by chemical analysis that the amber of the Mycenæ beads contains 8 per cent. of succinic acid, and is thus similar to that found on the Baltic and the North Sea, and unlike all known amber from districts farther south, Sicily, Upper Italy or elsewhere. Cf. Schuchhardt, 1890, p. 223, f., and Kretschmer, 1892, p. 10.
[10] “The Times” of Sept. 28, 1909, pp. 9-10. A. W. Brögger [1909, p. 239] mentions a find from a grave at Corinth of six necklaces of amber, of the neolithic period, which is preserved in the Museum für Völkerkunde at Berlin. Brögger informs me that nothing has been published about this find, which was bought in 1877 from Prof. Aus’m Weerth of Kessenich, near Bonn. Prof. Schaafhausen briefly mentioned it at the congress at Stockholm in 1874 [Congrès internat. d’anthrop. et d’archéol. de Stockholm, Compte rendu, 1874, ii. p. 816]. Assuming that this is Baltic or North Sea amber, it points to an intercourse of even far greater antiquity, which is also probable.
[11] Strabo, vii. 295.
[12] Damastes of Sigeum (about 450 B.C., and contemporary with Herodotus) says that “beyond the Scythians dwell the Issedonians, beyond these again the Arimaspians, and beyond them are the Rhipæan Mountains, from which the north wind blows, and which are never free from snow. On the other side of the mountains are the Hyperboreans who spread down to the sea.”
[13] Since the form of the sphere was the most perfect according to the opinion of the Pythagoreans.
[14] It was, moreover, a common belief in mediæval times that people who were connected with the other world could not be killed by iron.
[15] “Hyperboreans” are first mentioned in certain poems doubtfully attributed to Hesiod, but which can scarcely be later than the 7th century B.C. The full development of the myth is first found in Pindar (about 470 B.C.); but his Hyperboreans cannot be considered as dwelling especially in the north; their home, to which “the strange path could be found neither by sea nor by land,” lay rather beyond the sea in the far west, and thither came Perseus borne by wings on his way to Medusa.