“Them on earth’s utmost verge the god assign’d
A life, a seat, distinct from human kind:
Beside the deepening whirlpools of the main,
In those blest isles where Saturn holds his reign,
Apart from heaven’s immortals calm they share
A rest unsullied by the clouds of care:
And yearly thrice with sweet luxuriance crown’d
Springs the ripe harvest from the teeming ground.”[293]
“Those who have had the courage to remain stedfast thrice in each life, and to keep their souls altogether from wrong,” sang Pindar, “pursue the road of Zeus to the castle of Cronos, where o’er the isles of the blest ocean breezes blow, and flowers gleam with gold, some from the land on glistering trees, while others the water feeds; and with bracelets of these they entwine their hands and make crowns for their heads.”[294]
The Islands of the Blest, μακάρων νῆσοι, do not vanish henceforward from the world’s literature, but continue to haunt the Atlantic through the Roman period and deep into the Middle Ages. In the west, too, were localized other and wilder myths; here were the scenes of the Perseus fable, the island of the weird and communistic sisters, the Graeae, and the Gorgonides, the homes of Medusa and her sister Gorgons, the birthplace of the dread Chimaera.[295] The importance of the far west in the myths connected with Hercules is well known. In the traditionary twelve labors the Greek hero is confused with his prototype the Tyrian Melkarth, and those labors which deal with the west were doubtless borrowed from the cult which the Greeks had found established at Gades when trade first led them thither. In the tenth labor it is the western isle Erytheia, which Hercules visits in the golden cup wherein Helios was wont to make his nocturnal ocean voyage, and from which he returns with the oxen of the giant Geryon. Even more famous was the search for the apples of the Hesperides, which constituted the eleventh labor. This golden fruit, the wedding gift produced by Gaa for Hera, the prudent goddess, doubtful of the security of Olympus, gave in charge to the Hesperian maids, whose island garden lay at earth’s furthest bounds, near where the mysterious Atlas, their father or their uncle, wise in the secrets of the sea, watched over the pillars which propped the sky, or himself bore the burden of the heavenly vault. The poets delighted to depict these isles with their shrill-singing nymphs, in the same glowing words which they applied to the Isles of the Blessed. “Oh that I, like a bird, might fly from care over the Adriatic waves!” cries the chorus in the Crowned Hippolytus,
“Or to the famed Hesperian plains,
Whose rich trees bloom with gold,
To join the grief-attuned strains
My winged progress hold:
Beyond whose shores no passage gave
The ruler of the purple wave;
“But Atlas stands, his stately height
The awfull boundary of the skies:
There fountains of Ambrosia rise,
Wat’ring the seat of Jove: her stores
Luxuriant there the rich soil pours
All, which the sense of gods delights.”[296]
When these names first became attached to some of the Atlantic islands is uncertain. Diodorus Siculus does not apply either term to the island discovered by the Carthaginians, and described by him in phrases applicable to both. The two islands described by sailors to Sertorius about 80 b.c. were depicted in colors which reminded Plutarch of the Isles of the Blessed, and it is certain that toward the close of the republic the name Insulae Fortunatae was given to certain of the Atlantic islands, including the Canaries. In the time of Juba, king of Numidia, we seem to distinguish at least three groups, the Insulae Fortunatae, the Purpurariae, and the Hesperides, but beyond the fact that the first name still designated some of the Canaries identification is uncertain; some have thought that different groups among the Canaries were known by separate names, while others hold that one or both of the Madeira and Cape de Verde groups were known.[297] The Canaries were soon lost out of knowledge again, but the Happy or Fortunate Islands continued to be an enticing mirage throughout the Middle Ages, and play a part in many legends, as in that of St. Brandan, and in many poems.[298]