PREHISTORIC DACIA

PART 3  –  Ch.XVI

‘ERAKLEOS STELAI -  The Columns of Hercules

 

PART 3

 

XVI.1. The old traditions about the Columns of Hercules

 

In the Greek-Roman antiquity a memory had been retained about two famous monuments of the prehistoric world, named ‘Erakleos stelai or The Columns of Hercules, which were situated near a mountain gorge in the western parts of the Homeric Ocean.

 

Two versions were circulating in antiquity about the origin and function of these columns.

Some of these traditions claimed that the famous Columns of Hercules were simple commemorative monuments “laborum Herculis metae”. Hercules, as Pliny tells us (H. N. III), had reached these domains and, because here the mountains on both sides were joined together, he had cut the mountain catenary, had opened the gorge and had let the inland sea beyond it to drain through. In memory of this expedition and its everlasting achievements, the indigenous population had named the two mountains which form this gorge, “The Columns of Hercules” (Mela, lib. I. c. 5; Diodorus Siculus, I. IV. 18. 4; Strabo, I. III. 5).

 

According to another tradition, as ancient as the first, presented by the poet Pindar, the Columns of Hercules were simple guide posts for navigation on the ocean and of travel on land.

Hercules, writes Pindar, has erected these columns as famous evidence for the extreme reach of navigation, because he had subdued the sea monsters (to make the sea navigable), he had scrutinized the fords of the flowing rivers right to the end of the road, and at the same time he had also surveyed the land; and beyond these columns neither the wise nor the imprudent could pass (Nem. III. v. 19-20; IV. v. 69-70; Olymp. III. v. 46-48; Pyth. III. v. 22; Isthm. III. v. 30). Here was therefore the extreme reach of navigation on the old Ocean, because, as Scylax writes, near the Columns of Hercules, there stretched from one shore to the other a strip of crags, some of which were hit by waves, while others were hidden under the water (Periplus, 112).

 

The geographical position of these columns was very well known during the first times of history, as it results from the sentences of oracles and from some more authentic topographical descriptions.

Later though, when navigation on the big seas passed from Pelasgian hands into the hands of the Phoenicians, when the Homeric Ocean became confused with the External Sea or the Iberian Ocean, the true position of the Columns of Hercules became enigmatic for the Greek world of the southern parts of Europe. This geographical obscurity led afterwards the Greek authors to assume that the Columns of Hercules were situated not near the Pelasgian Ocean, or the Ocean of Theogony, but near the Iberian Ocean, which anyway, became known to the commercial world of the Eastern Mediterranean at a very late date.

So it was that in Greek literature arose the general belief that the miraculous Columns of Hercules had to be found near the straits of the Mediterranean, between Spain and Mauritania. And, because there were neither traditions in those parts, nor monuments regarding Hercules, the name of Columns was given (contrary to all ancient customs) to the two promontories of Europe and Africa, the northern one being named Calpe and the southern Abila.

 

This transplantation of the Columns of Hercules from the Homeric Ocean to the Iberian Ocean brought afterwards an enormous confusion in the geography, ethnography and history of the pre-Herodotic times. Mountains and rivers, islands and lakes, peoples and cities, legends and historical events were dislocated from the Eastern parts of Europe and thrown on the geographical maps of the extreme Occident. The errors had multiplied from century to century and the fiction of some plagiarists and poets about the Columns of Hercules at the straits of the Mediterranean had assumed a geographical character [1].

 

[1. A curious proof in this regard is offered by “The cosmography of Iulius Honorius”. According to this treatise of scholastic geography, compiled in the 5th to 6th century, without order and critical view, but which mostly sums up the theories of some older authors, the Hem and Rhodope Mountains, Moesia province, the Sarmatians, Bastarnii and Carpii were considered as belonging to the province of the western Ocean (Riese, Geographi latini minores, p. 34-41)].

 

 

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