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Ίστρος. H. is much interested in this river, which he describes again in iv. 48-50 (where ‘it is the greatest of all rivers that we know’; cf. also iv. 99). Here he supposes it to rise in the extreme west of Europe. This view was held also by Aristotle [Meteor. i. 13 ἐκ δὲ τῆς Πυρήνης (τοῦτο δ᾽ ἐστὶν ὄρος) ῥέουσιν ὅ τε Ἴστρος καὶ ὁ Ταρτησσός: the Ister then ‘flows through the whole of Europe’]. It is difficult to see how the Greeks reconciled it with their knowledge of the Rhone, but it is suggested that this was looked on as a southern offshoot of the Danube. Older geographers had made the Ister rise in the Rhipaean mountains, among the Hyperboreans; H. rightly ignored this mythical explanation, but his information was insufficient for an accurate account. Πυρήνη: an old town at the foot of the Pyrenees (hod. Port Vendres); its trade passed to Massilia, and its name was transferred to the neighbouring mountains (cf. iv. 49. 2 n. for a similar transference of Ἄλπις and Κάρπις). Κελτοί. H. derives his information, indirectly at any rate, from he Phoenicians, and therefore speaks of the Celts as being ‘outside the Pillars of Hercules’, where the Phoenicians found them. The ‘Pillars of Hercules’ are not found in Homer, but in Pindar (Olym. iii. 44) they occur, as the limit of the world; by H.'s time they had been definitely fixed. For the legends connecting Heracles with the W. cf. iv. 8 seq. The name was partly due to the identification of Heracles with the Tyrian Melcarth, partly to the tendency (Tac. Germ. 34) to give him ‘quidquid ubique magnificum’. Strabo (169-72) discusses the legends as to them; but Pomponius Mela (i. 5. 27), as befits a Spaniard, is the first to give an accurate account of them. So far as they are a reality, they correspond to Calpe and Abila (i.e. Gibraltar and the African Ceuta). The Kynesioi (Κύνητες, iv. 49. 3) are placed by Avienus (201 seq.) on the Guadiana. Their name disappears early from geography.
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