CHAPTER IV. Primaeval Trade Routes.

Having seen some reasons for believing that before the beginning of history there was a well-defined route from Central and perhaps Further Asia across Southern Russia to the valley of the Danube, and then by one of the valleys of its tributaries to within a short distance of the Adriatic, whence after crossing the watershed it reached the head of that sea, we are now in a position to enquire whether we have similar evidence for the further continuance towards the west of this highroad of nations. We have had occasion already to remark that the legends of the Voyage of the Argo in quest of the Golden Fleece, and the journeyings of Herakles and such-like stories, really represent the earliest knowledge of the regions which lay far away to the east and north-west. There is no tale of the hero Herakles more famous than that of his travelling to the very marge of Ocean, where in the Pillars of Hercules he left an imperishable record of his wayfaring for the men of aftertime. His object, so goes the story, was the capture of the famous kine of the giant Geryon who dwelt in the island of Erythia, in after years the site of Gaddir, or Gadeira as the Greeks called it, the Gades of the Romans, and the modern Cadiz. Many vague stories relating to the early ethnology of Western Europe and Northern Africa cycle round this expedition¹¹. But for our present purpose it is only the fabled route by which he went with which we are concerned. As might naturally be expected that part of Italy with which the Greeks seem first to have become acquainted was the district lying in the Adriatic around the mouths of the Po (Eridanus). The reason why they came thither is not far to seek. They doubtless simply followed the example of the Phoenicians who probably had long traded thither to obtain both the highly prized golden amber from the Baltic, and the red amber of Liguria, called from that region Lingurium, or ligurion, a name for which the Greeks found a strange etymology which connected it with the lynx¹². According to Herodotus, “the Phocaeans were the first of the Greeks who made long voyages and discovered Adria, Tyrsenia (Etruria), Iberia and Tartessus” (I. 163). The trade routes to the amber coasts of the north have long been well known; they passed over the Alps, crossed the Danube