At Delos the same tradition is to be encountered, with but a few local alterations: such as that of Latona having arrived there from the Hyperboreans, in the form of a she-wolf; Apollo and Diana, with the virgins Arge and Opis, following afterwards. Two other virgins, viz. Laodice and Hyperoche, succeeded, and with them five men, who were called peripherees, or carriers, from their bringing with them offerings of first-fruits, wrapt in bundles of wheaten straw.
But is this embassy altogether a fiction? “There is not a fact in all antiquity,” says Carte, “that made a greater noise in the world, was more universally known, or better attested by the gravest and most ancient authors among the Greeks, than this of the sacred embassies of the Hyperboreans to Delos, in times preceding, by an interval of ages, the voyages of the Carthaginians to the north of the Straits of Gibraltar.” “No argument to the contrary,” says Müller, “can be drawn from its not being mentioned either in the Iliad or Odyssey, these poems not affording an opportunity for its introduction: moreover, the Hyperboreans were spoken of in the poem of the Epigoni, and by Hesiod.... Stephanus quotes here a supposed oracle of a prophetess named Asteria, that the inhabitants and priests of Delos came from the Hyperboreans.” So that we are by no means dependent, as implied before, upon Diodorus Siculus, for the narrative.
On this subject Herodotus says that “the suite of this Hyperborean embassy having been ill-treated by the Greeks, they took afterwards another method of sending their sacred presents to the temples of Apollo and Diana, delivering them to the nation that lay nearest to them on the continent of Europe, with a request that they might be forwarded to their next neighbour: and thus they were transmitted from one people to another, through the western regions, till they came to the Adriatic, and there, being put into the hands of the Dodoneans, the first of the Greeks that received them, they were conveyed thence by the Melian Bay, Eubœa, Carystus, Andras, and Tenos, till at last they arrived at Delos.”
Could he, I ask, more geographically pourtray their route from Ireland?
Alcæus, in a hymn to Apollo, says that “Jupiter adorned the new-born god with a golden fillet and lyre, and sent him in a chariot drawn by swans to Delphi, in order to introduce justice and law among the Greeks. Apollo, however, ordered the swans first to fly to the Hyperboreans. The Delphians, missing the god, instituted a pæan and song, ranged choruses of young men around the tripod, and invoked him to come from the Hyperboreans. The god remained an entire year with that nation, and, at the appointed time, when the tripods of Delphi were destined to sound, he ordered the swans to resume their flight. The return of Apollo takes place exactly in the middle of summer; nightingales, swallows, and grasshoppers sang in honour of the god; and even Castalia and Cephisus heave their waves to salute him.”
Now Mr. Bryant assures us that—
“The Celtic sages a tradition hold,
That every drop of amber was a tear
Shed by Apollo, when he fled from heaven,—
For sorely did he weep,—and sorrowing passed
Through many a doleful region, till he reached
The sacred Hyperboreans.”[512]
Words could not convey a more direct delineation of the first arrival of the Tuath-de-danaans amongst us, with their mysterious worship, after their ejectment from Iran, their paradise, or earthly heaven, for the loss of which they “sorely wept,” until at length they found a substitute in Irin. The lyre or harp which they brought with them, and solely for celebrating the praises of Apollo, continues still our national emblem; and those swans which are said to have drawn his chariot formed so essential a part of our ceremonial, that you shall be presented by and by with one of his magic implements, to which they are still attached, as they are similarly figured upon the painted vases, remaining after our allied Etrurians in the south of Italy.
As to the embassy of Abaris, the direct fact is so completely authenticated by our ancient records, which narrate the circumstance, with no view to decide an historical controversy, but with indifference thereto, and as in ordinary course,—that it is inevitable but that, when the Greeks say that this philosopher had gone to them from the Hyperboreans,—and when we produce proofs to show that a man of the same name had repaired on the errand alluded to, from our country to Greece, it is inevitable, I say, but that, when both statements so perfectly tally, the island of the Hyperboreans and that of the Hibernians must be one and the same.
I shall now subjoin from General Vallancey’s works, as he translates it from an old Irish poem, the authentic narrative of this our Hyperborean embassy.