Geography

​Not far from Castulo is also the mountain from which they say the Baetis flows, which they call Silver Mountain because of the silver mines in it. Polybius says that both the Anas and this river flow from Celtiberia, being about nine hundred stadia distant from one another; for the Celtiberians, having grown in power, made all the neighboring country homonymous with themselves. The ancients seem to have called the Baetis Tartessos, and Gadeira and the islands near it Erytheia; wherefore they understand Stesichorus to have spoken thus concerning the herdsman of Geryon, that he was born “almost opposite famous Erytheia, near the infinite silver-rooted springs of the river Tartessos, in a cavern of a rock.” Since there are two mouths of the river, they say that a city was formerly inhabited in the intervening space, which was called Tartessos, homonymous with the river, and the country Tartessis, which the Turduli now inhabit. Eratosthenes also says that the country adjacent to Calpe was called Tartessis, and Erytheia a fortunate island. In opposition to him, Artemidorus says that these things also are falsely stated by him, just like his statement that the distance from Gadeira to the Sacred Promontory is a five days’ voyage, though it is not more than one thousand seven hundred stadia; and that the tides terminate here, instead of occurring in a circle around the whole inhabited world; and that the northern parts of Iberia are easier of passage to the Celtic land than for those sailing by the ocean; and whatever else he has said, putting trust in Pytheas.

​But the poet, being of many voices and of great knowledge, gives starting-points to show that he is not without hearing of these places either, if one would rightly collect from both, both the worse statements about them and the better and truer ones. The worse indeed, because this country was heard of as being in the far west, where, as he himself says, “the bright light of the sun falls into the ocean, drawing black night over the grain-giving earth.” And since night is of ill omen and close to Hades, and Hades to Tartarus, one might conjecture that, hearing about Tartessos, he from that name called the lowest of the subterranean places Tartarus, adding also a myth that preserves the poetic character. Just as, knowing that the Cimmerians dwelt in northern and gloomy regions about the Bosporus, he placed them near Hades, perhaps also owing to some common hatred of the Ionians towards this tribe; for they say that in the time of Homer, or a little before him, the invasion of the Cimmerians occurred, reaching as far as Aeolis and Ionia. And he made the Planctae in a similar way to the Cyaneae, always bringing in his myths from some historical facts. For he mythologizes certain dangerous rocks, as they say of the Cyaneae, whence they are also called Symplegades; wherefore he also introduced the voyage of Jason through them; and the strait at the Pillars and that at Sicily suggested to him the myth concerning the Planctae. With respect to the worse, then, from the myth-making of Tartarus, one might hint at the memory of the places around Tartessos.