In Greek mythology, Hyperborea was the country located to the far n of the known world and it was so remote it was considered even beyond the North Wind. At that place a legendary race known equally the Hyperboreans lived and worshipped the lord's day god Apollo.
Hyperborea was thought of as an earthly paradise of eternal youth and abundance, but and then inaccessible was this far-off land to ordinary mortals, the Greeks believed that merely semi-divine heroes like Hercules were capable of always visiting at that place. Hyperborea crops up in many Greek legends, usually to explain the otherwise unexplainable appearance or disappearance of legendary figures and objects. The historical origin of Hyperboreans may well have been peoples living northward of the Black Sea or the Iron Age Celts living along the Danube river who nosotros know had trade contacts with the Mediterranean cultures at least as early as the 6th century BCE. Another candidate for Hyperborea is Celtic Britain. Wherever Hyperborea was located in the minds of the Greeks, it symbolised, similar Atlantis, the Amazons, and Centaurs, a mysterious and little-known culture that existed at the very border of the globe they knew.
Location
The Greeks believed that a legendary race they chosen the Hyperboreans lived in the far north of the known world. Indeed, they were thought to live beyond the North Wind. The name, therefore, likely derives from Boreas, the god of the icy North Wind in Greek mythology. Such is the difficulty of reaching this mysterious and distant state, the Greeks believed that the merely people capable of ever getting there were semi-divine heroes like Hercules and Perseus.
'No sickness or ruinous old historic period is mixed into that sacred race; without toil or battles they live without fear.' Pindar
The remoteness of Hyperborea does not necessarily mean the Greeks considered it to be the Arctic region. A much more likely candidate is either that part of Eurasia in a higher place the area populated by the Scythians (north of the Blackness Bounding main) or central Europe northward of the River Danube. The former, with its entirely unknown peoples or the latter, with its temperate climate and forests quite dissimilar from those the Greeks were familiar with would both have inspired fanciful tales in the Greek imagination. Both of these regions traded with Mediterranean cultures, notably amber (originally from the Baltic), slaves, and furs. All the same another possibility for the origin of the Hyperboreans is Celtic Britain (come across the last section below on the Celts).
Boreas and Odysseus
Carole Raddato (CC BY-SA)
Hyperborea in Hesiod & Pindar
The starting time mention of the Hyperboreans comes from a fragment (no. 150) of Hesiod'due south Catalogue, written former in the late 8th century BCE or early on 7th century BCE. Another early source is the Greek writer Pindar (c. 518 - c. 448 BCE), who noted in his Pythian Odes (no. 10) that Apollo lived some parts of the twelvemonth in the land of the Hyperboreans, specifically the winter months, and he describes this identify as a sort of paradise of eternal youth and plenty:
Neither by ship nor on foot could you lot find the marvellous road to the meeting-place of the Hyperboreans. In one case Perseus, the leader of his people, entered their homes and feasted among them, when he found them sacrificing glorious hecatombs of donkeys to the god. In the festivities of those people and in their praises Apollo rejoices nigh, and he laughs when he sees the erect airs of the beasts. The Muse is not absent from their community; all effectually swirl the dances of girls, the lyre'southward loud chords and the cries of flutes. They wreathe their hair with golden laurel branches and revel joyfully. No sickness or ruinous old historic period is mixed into that sacred race; without toil or battles they live without fearfulness of strict Nemesis. Animate boldness of spirit, once the son of Danae went to that gathering of blessed men, and Athena led him there. He killed the Gorgon, and came back bringing stony death to the islanders, the head that shimmered with hair fabricated of serpents.
In an Olympian Ode (no. 3), Pindar tells how Hercules visited the Hyperboreans subsequently he chased a doe across the Danube and he so brought dorsum the olive copse he planted at the site of Olympia in readiness for the first Olympic Games.
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..the olive which once the son of Amphitryon [Hercules] brought from the shady springs of the Danube, to be the well-nigh cute memorial of the Olympian contests, when he had persuaded the Hyperborean people, the servants of Apollo, with voice communication. With trustworthy intentions he was entreating them for a shady establish, to be shared by all men and to be a garland of excellence in the grove of Zeus which is hospitable to all…He saw that this garden [at Olympia], bare of trees, was exposed to the piercing rays of the sun. And so his spirit prompted him to travel to the land of the Danube where the horse-driving daughter of Leto had received him when he came from the mount-glens and deep, winding valleys of Arcadia; through the commands of Eurystheus, compulsion from his father urged him on the quest of the doe with the gilt horns, which once Taÿgete had inscribed as a sacred dedication to Artemis who sets things right. Pursuing that doe he had also seen that state beyond the cold blasts of Boreas; there he had stood and marvelled at the trees, and sweet desire for them possessed him, to plant them around the purlieus-line of the horse-racing footing with its twelve courses.
World Map of Herodotus
Bibi Saint-Politician (Public Domain)
Hyperborea in Herodotus
In the Histories of the Greek writer Herodotus (c. 484 - 425/413 BCE), the location of Hyperborea is described as follows:
Higher up the Issedones...live the Arimaspians, 1-eyed-men; above them dwell the gilded-guarding griffins; and higher up the griffins, the Hyperboreans, whose state extends all the mode to the sea. With the exception of the Hyperboreans, all these peoples, beginning with the Arimaspians, attacked their neighbours in successive waves.
(4.xiii)
Here, Herodotus is describing the peoples who live in the unknown lands north of the Black Bounding main, just the precise location of the Issedones and Arimaspians is non known. Herodotus elaborates on the Hyperboreans a few pages farther on:
Only nearly the Hyperboreans, neither the Scythians nor whatsoever other inhabitants of this region have annihilation to say, except possibly for the Issedones; but I suppose they say nothing most them either, since if they did, the Scythians would repeat it, just as they do the Issedones' account of the ane-eyed men.
(iv.32)
Apollo, Macedonian Gold Stater
Mark Cartwright (CC BY-NC-SA)
Fortunately, Herodotus goes on to draw one grouping who do seem to know about the Hyperboreans, the people living on the sacred island of Delos in the Greek Cyclades, not coincidentally, the birthplace of Apollo in Greek mythology and the location of a major sanctuary to the god.
But the Delians take by far the near to say nearly them. They tell how the Hyperboreans ship sacred offerings spring in stalks of wheat to Scythia, and these offerings are received in succession past each neighbouring state until they are brought as far due west as the Adriatic Ocean [and from at that place ultimately to Greece]…But initially the Hyperboreans sent 2 girls to carry the offerings. Their names, according to the Delians, were Hyperoche and Laodike. The Hyperboreans also sent along with them an escort of 5 of their men for their safety; these men are now called Perpherees and are granted high honours on Delos. Only the girls and men sent by the Hyperboreans did not return home again, and the Hyperboreans, perturbed and afraid that if they connected to ship others they would never get them back again either, wrapped their offerings in stalks of wheat, took them to the borders of their country, and laid a strict obligation upon their neighbours to send them on to the next people.
(4.33)
Herodotus goes on to say that the young people of Delos continue to cut their hair in honour of the Hyperborean virgins who had died on their mission:
Before marriage, the girls cut off a lock of their hair, wind it around a spindle, and identify information technology upon the tomb. The tomb is located inside the sanctuary of Artemis to the left of the entrance, and has an olive tree growing over it. All the boys, too, wind some of their pilus around a found shoot and set it on the tomb.
(4.34)
The whole tone of Herodotus regarding Hyperborea is rather sceptical, and he concludes his brief treatment of them with the following annotate: "If in that location actually are Hyperboreans, then there are also Hypernotians" (4.36), Hypernotians being people who live due south of the South Wind.
Associated Legends
Curiously, despite the demise of the race as they met the stony gaze of Medusa in Pindar'due south ode, some Greeks believed that the last resting identify of the Hyperboreans was the island of Delos. Such an association might have been a confusion of Herodotus' story virtually Hyperborean ambassadors or it was created to heighten the prestige of Delos and improve its standing against its great rival as the foremost pan-Hellenic religious site: Delphi, site of Apollo's oracle. Delos features in some other curious snippet concerning Hyperborea. According to Aristotle (384-322 BCE), Apollo'southward female parent Leto was non a goddess (the conventional Greek view) but was a she-wolf who came to Delos from the land of the Hyperboreans.
Delos Panorama
Mark Cartwright (CC By-NC-SA)
The Hyperborean connection to Delos is also mentioned in Axiochus, a work oft attributed to Plato (c. 429 - c. 347 BCE) just not thought past modernistic scholars to have been written by the Greek philosopher. The text states that the nymphs Opis and Hecaerge brought bronze tablets from Hyperborea to Delos, which described the journey of the soul after decease to the Underworld (371a). Herodotus also mentions a pair of similar names - Opis and Arge, the first 2 Hyperborean virgins who bring offerings to Delos (Histories four.35).
The Hyperboreans crop upwards in another legend, this fourth dimension involving Croesus, the 6th-century BCE king of Lydia who, in one version of the story, was saved from his funeral pyre past Apollo and magically transported to the country of the Hyperboreans. Indeed, the fabulous land far to the due north became a handy place where unexplained losses ended upward, in other words, lost forever to the world as nosotros know information technology. For case, the first temple at Delphi was thought to have somehow been caused by the Hyperboreans, as was the arrow of Apollo, which was idea to take magical healing properties.
The burial sites of the Celts sometimes contain examples of art & objects probable made or inspired by the Greeks & Etruscans.
Abaris the Hyperborean
Nosotros practice have a specific figure from Hyperborea mentioned in ancient sources: Abaris the Hyperborean. A legendary effigy, Abaris, lived in the 6th century BCE, and it was believed he had contact with the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras (l. c. 571- c. 497 BCE). He is mentioned by name in Plato's dialogue Charmides (158b), although nix is said of him besides that he has great charm. Herodotus also briefly mentions him or rather refuses to mention him: "I shall not tell the story of Abaris, said to accept been a Hyperborean who went around the whole world conveying an arrow and eating nothing" (Histories, four.36). In much more mod Irish mythology, Abaris was considered 1 of the earliest druids. Scholars today believe he was about probable an ascetic holy man or shaman from Central Asia, a place as mysterious and far-flung for the aboriginal Greeks as Hyperborea.
The Celts
In afterward antiquity, Hyperborea became associated with the by-at present-better-known tribes in central and western Fe Historic period Europe, peculiarly the Celts. Nonetheless, even earlier this, there were relatively sophisticated peoples living effectually the Danube in southern Germany, contemporary with Primitive Hellenic republic. Was so Pindar speaking of the early Celts when he mentions Hercules crossing the Danube on his way to Hyperborea? Certainly, the forests of primal Europe would lucifer Pindar'south clarification as a place with marvellous copse. The burial sites of these early Celts practice sometimes contain examples of art and objects likely made or inspired by the Greek and Etruscan Mediterranean cultures, potent evidence there was contact betwixt cultures in northern and southern Europe in the 6th century BCE or even before.
Repaired Greek Cup
Xuan Che (CC By)
An culling location for Hyperborea is non Celtic central Europe but Celtic Britain. The Greek writer Diodorus Siculus, writing in the 1st century BCE, quotes information from the earlier Greek writer Hecataeus of Abdera (c. 360-290 BCE) on the subject of the Hyperboreans:
Of those who have written about the ancient myths, Hecataeus and certain others say that in the regions beyond the land of the Celts there lies in the sea an isle no smaller than Sicily. This island, the business relationship continues, is situated in the n and is inhabited by the Hyperboreans, who are chosen by that name because their home is beyond the point whence the northward wind blows; and the island is both fertile and productive of every ingather, and since it has an unusually temperate climate it produces ii harvests each year. Moreover, the following legend is told apropos it: Leto was born on this isle, and for that reason Apollo is honoured among them above all other gods; and the inhabitants are looked upon every bit priests of Apollo, after a way, since daily they praise this god continuously in song and honour him exceedingly. And there is also on the isle both a magnificent sacred precinct of Apollo and a notable temple which is adorned with many votive offerings and is spherical in shape.
The Hyperboreans besides have a language, nosotros are informed, which is peculiar to them, and are nearly friendly disposed towards the Greeks…They say also that the moon, as viewed from this island, appears to be but a lilliputian distance from the earth.
(Library, Volume xi:47)
Is the isle here described Britain and the spherical temple Stonehenge? Certainly, the much longer days of a northern summertime could explain the Greek belief that the Hyperboreans enjoyed perpetual sunshine. It would besides explicate the connexion with a particular worship for Phoebus Apollo in his guise equally the sun god, which seems to be continued with the Hyperboreans wherever they were placed geographically. Probably, we volition never know exactly where Hyperborea was for the aboriginal Greeks, and perhaps even they shifted its location over time to suit their increasing awareness of different peoples living farther and farther beyond their own familiar earth of the Mediterranean.
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