Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1849 edition. Excerpt:...his companions had actually set foot in the Iberian peninsula. 1 This was the opinion of Krates of Mallus, one of the most distinguished of the critics on Homer: it was the subject of an animated controversy between him and Aristarchus (Aulus Gellius, N. A. jriv. 6; Strabo, iii. p. 157). See the instructive treatise of Lehrs, De Aristarchi Studiis, c. v. 4. p. 251. Much controversy also took place among the critics respecting the ground which Menelaus went over in his wanderings (Odyss. iv.). Krates affirmed that he had circumnavigated the southern extremity of Africa and gone to India: the critic Aristonikus, Strabo's contemporary, enumerated all the different opinions (Strabo, i. p.38). Strabo, iii. p. 15/. The fabulous island of Erytheia, --the residence of the three-headed Gery6n with his magnificent herd of oxen, under the custody of the two-headed dog Orthrus, and described by Hesiod, like the garden of the Hesperides, as extra-terrestrial, on the farther side of the circumfluous ocean, --this island was supposed by the interpreters of Stesichorus the poet to be named by him off the south-western region of Spain called Tartessus, and in the immediate vicinity of Cade's. But the historian Hekatseus, in his anxiety to historicise the old fable, took upon himself to remove Erytheia from Spain nearer home to Epirus. He thought it incredible that Herakles should have traversed Europe from east to west, for the purpose of bringing the cattle of Gery6n to Eurystheus at Myke"nse, and he pronounced Geryon to have been a king of Epirus, near the Gulf of Ambrakia. The oxen reared in that neighbourhood were proverbially magnificent, and to get them even from thence and bring them to Myke'nae (he contended) was no inconsiderable task....