The Atlantic Islands and Beyond

Since the earliest days of Greek culture, there have been tales about islands beyond the Pillars of Herakles that had a special, magical quality. Such mythical places had long been associated with the far west. The earliest reference in Greek literature is Homer’s description of the Elysian Fields, where Menelaos was fated to end his days, a place at the limits of the earth where the Ocean always provides fair breezes and there is no winter. ¹ According to Hesiod, the home of heroes was on the shores of the Ocean, a fertile paradise called the Islands of the Blessed, or Islands of the Dead (µακάρων νῆσoι). ² Pindar cited specific heroes who lived there, such as Kadmos, Peleus, and Achilles. ³ Others residing in this mythical world included the Hesperides, the daughters of the Night. ⁴ As the guardians of the golden apples that were the key to divine immortality, ⁵ they too were associated with a world beyond death. Place and aspect were thus intertwined: the world beyond death was the world beyond the Pillars of Herakles, and, eventually, beyond the Ocean. Localization is futile, in part because the concept is largely dependent on pre-Greek myths. ⁶ There are even hints that the Blessed Islands were originally within the Mediterranean. ⁷ Yet as knowledge moved west, so did the islands, and even as late as the first century bc they remained a powerful cultural force, somewhere out in the Atlantic, the refuge from the troublesome world of the collapse of the Roman Republic. They continued as a significant part of cultural geography after antiquity. ⁸