This is a specimen of the manner in which the seeds of Grecian mythus came to be distributed over so large a surface. To an ordinary Greek reader, these legendary discoveries of Asklepiadês would probably be more interesting than the positive facts which he communicated respecting the Iberian tribes; and his Turditanian auditors would be delighted to hear—while he was reciting and explaining to them the animated passage of the Iliad, in which Agamemnôn extols the inestimable value of the bow of Teukros (viii. 281)—that the heroic archer and his companions had actually set foot in the Iberian peninsula. [599] This was the opinion of Kratês of Mallus, one of the most distinguished of the critics on Homer: it was the subject of an animated controversy between him and Aristarchus (Aulus Gellius, N. A. xiv. 6; Strabo, iii. p. 157). See the instructive treatise of Lehrs, De Aristarchi Studiis, c. v. § 4. p. 251. Much controversy also took place among the critics respecting the ground which Menelaus went over in his wanderings (Odyss. iv.). Kratês affirmed that he had circumnavigated the southern extremity of Africa and gone to India: the critic Aristonikus, Strabo’s contemporary, enumerated all the different opinions (Strabo, i. p. 38). [600] Strabo, iii. p. 157. [601] Strabo, i. p. 22-44; vii. p. 299. The fabulous island of Erytheia,—the residence of the three headed Geryôn with his magnificent herd of oxen, under the custody of the two-headed dog Orthrus, and described by Hesiod, like the garden of the Hesperides, as extra-terrestrial, on the farther side of the circumfluous ocean;—this island was supposed by the interpreters of Stesichorus the poet to be named by him off the south-western region of Spain called Tartêssus, and in the immediate vicinity of Gadês. But the historian Hekatæus, in his anxiety to historicize the old fable, took upon himself to remove Erytheia from Spain nearer home to Epirus. He thought it incredible that Hêraklês should have traversed Europe from east to west, for the purpose of bringing the cattle of Geryôn to Eurystheus at Mykênæ, and he pronounced Geryôn to have been a king of Epirus, near the Gulf of Ambrakia. The oxen reared in that neighborhood were proverbially magnificent, and to get them even from thence and bring them to Mykênæ (he contended) was no inconsiderable task. Arrian, who cites this passage from Hekatæus, concurs in the same view,—an illustration of the license with which ancient authors fitted on their fabulous geographical names to the real earth, and brought down the ethereal matter of legend to the lower atmosphere of history.[602]