Only from such a poetical source can Hesiod have derived his conception of a common meeting-place where the Translated enjoy for ever their untroubled existence. He calls that place the "Islands of the Blest"; and these lie far removed from the world of men, in the Ocean, on the confines of the earth, just where the Odyssey puts the Elysian {76} plain, another meeting-place of the still-living Translated, or rather the same under a different name. Its name does not oblige us to regard the "Elysian plain" as an island, but neither does it exclude that assumption. Homer never expressly calls the land of the Phæacians an island,[46\2] but the imagination of most readers will picture Scheriê as such, and so did the Greeks perhaps already at the time of the Hesiodic school of poets. In the same way a poet may have thought of the "Land of Destiny" that receives passing mention in Homer as an island, or group of islands; only an island surrounded and cut off by the sea can give the full impression of a distant asylum far from the world, inaccessible to all save those specially called thither. And accordingly the mythology of many peoples, especially those who live by the sea, has made a distant island the dwelling-place of the souls of the departed. Complete isolation is the essential feature of the whole idea of translation, as Hesiod clearly shows. A later poet has added a line--which does not quite fit into its place--to make this isolation even more marked.[47\2] According to it, these Blessed Ones live not only "far from men" (167), but also (169) far from the immortals, and are ruled over by Kronos. The writer of this line follows a beautiful legend, later, however, than Hesiod, in which Zeus released the aged Kronos, together with the other Titans,[48\2] from Tartaros, so that the old king of the gods, under whose rule the Golden Age had once prevailed with peace and happiness upon earth, now wields the sceptre of another Golden Age over the Blessed in Elysium, himself a figure of peaceful contemplation dwelling far away from the stormy world, from the throne of which he has been ousted by Zeus. Hesiod himself has provoked this transference of Kronos from the Golden Age to the land of the Translated; for in the few lines that he devotes to the description of the life of the Blessed a reminiscence of the picture of the Golden Age's untroubled existence is clearly discernible. Both pictures, the one of a childhood's paradise in the past, the other of unclouded happiness reserved in the future for the elect, are closely related; it is difficult to say which of them has influenced the other[49\2] since the colours must have been the same in any case--the purely idyllic having an inevitable uniformity of its own. § 4