The plant which shades that hallow'd place
His voice persuasive could obtain;
Where Jupiter's tall grove a shelter gave 35
Common to all mankind, and chaplets to the brave.
For now to his great father's name
Perform'd was every sacred rite;
And when the full-orb'd lamp of night [1]
Pour'd from her golden car the severing flame, 40
He gave each fifth revolving year,
Where falls Alpheus' high career,
To judge the well-earn'd meed of fame. 39
But in Saturnian Pelops' vale
No trees waved beauteous to the gale— 45
No verdant grove, no depth of shade
The raging solar beam allay'd;
His mind impell'd him then to go
Where Ister's streams through Scythian regions flow;
Latona's huntress daughter there 50
Received the hero as he came
From Arcady's deep glens and summits fair.
- ↑ The Olympic games were celebrated on the day nearest to
graphical position of the Hyperboreans: some placing them in Europe and others in Asia; nay, they have been said to dwell within the polar circle, in a fruitful and temperate clime, free from all skyey influences of an adverse and malignant nature. In Olymp. viii. 70, Pindar says that the Ister flows through the land of Scythia. Hence this northern El Dorado would be situated in a latitude above the equator, as high as that of the modern Siberia. But nothing can be more vague and undefined than the notions of antiquity respecting the limits of the Ister and the territories of the Scythians. In the [[../../Isthmian Odes/6|sixth Isthmian ode]], v. 36, Pindar appears to consider the Nile and the Hyperborean regions as the northern and southern extremities of the habitable globe. It appears that the sacred olive which the Theban Hercules is fabled to have transplanted from their regions grew somewhere above the fountains of the Ister or Danube. The [[../../Pythian Odes/10|tenth Pythian ode]] contains a poetical description of the fertility and blessedness of these Utopian regions.
