they see, as it appears, the ships which are sailing into the Pontus (Black Sea). And there is likewise a certain spot in the intervening region in which, when a common mart is held, Lesbian, Chian and Thasian wares are set out for sale by the merchants who come up from the Black Sea, and Corcyraean wine jars by those who come up from the Adriatic. They say likewise that the Ister, taking its rise in what are called the Hercynian forests, divides in twain, and disembogues by one branch into the Black Sea, and by the other into the Adriatic. And we have seen a proof of this not only in modern times, but likewise still more so in antiquity, as to how the regions there are easy of navigation (reading εὔπλωτα). For the story goes that Jason sailed in by the Cyanean Rocks, but sailed out from the Black Sea by the Ister.”
The story of the meeting between the traders from the Black Sea and Adriatic has every mark of probability, whilst we are possibly justified in regarding the legend of Jason as evidence that for long ages the Greeks knew that up the valley of the Danube traders from the Pontus made their way. Doubtless too it was with a view to tapping the trade of this very route that the trading factories like Istropolis were founded on the Danube.
The branch of the Danube flowing into the Adriatic can only mean that travellers from the Danube by passing up one of its tributaries would reach a point from which it was but a short journey to the Adriatic shore. But a famous story in Herodotus will yield us more efficient aid. To the Greeks of the fifth century B.C. the extreme north was represented by the land of those happy beings the Hyperboreans, just as the furthest south was represented by the sources of the Nile. Thus Pindar sings: “Countless broad paths of glorious exploits have been cut out one after another beyond Nile’s fountains and through the land of the Hyperboreans3.”
Some of the oldest legends of the young world’s prime cluster around this shadowy region. Herakles had wandered there in quest of the hind