[Greek: eyplôta]. 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 Hyperboreans[1]."
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 of the golden horns, consecrated to Artemis Orthosia by Taygeta[2]; "In quest of her he likewise beheld that land behind the chilling north wind; there he stood and marvelled at the trees." The judge at the Olympic festival placed round the locks of the victor "the dark green adornment of the olive, which in days of yore Amphitryon's son had brought from the shady sources of the Ister, a most glorious memorial of the contests at Olympia, when he had won over by word the Hyperborean folk that are the henchmen of Apollo[3]." The hero Perseus too had reached that land where no ordinary mortal could find his way. "Neither in ships nor yet on foot wouldst]
