From the various passages quoted we may draw the probable conclusion that there was a well-defined trade route existing for untold ages between the heart of Asia, the valley of the Danube and the head of the Adriatic. The nameless poets who framed the legends of Herakles and his wanderings would certainly make the hero travel by the routes where both in their own time and from tradition they knew of the existence of highways from nation to nation. Thus in his journey to the Hyperboreans Herakles is represented as having visited the shady forests of the Danube, which points to the same road as that assigned to the Hyperborean maidens by the Delian tale. Finally it may not be farfetched to conjecture that the sacrifice of hecatombs of asses may be taken as evidence that the Hyperborean legend points to a people of Central Asia, which is the natural habitat of the wild ass. However, as it seems that there was an annual sacrifice of asses to Apollo at Delphi[160], we must be careful not to lay much stress on this argument, although it is quite possible that a vague knowledge of a far-off region where asses abounded and were sacrificed may have given the Greeks the idea that the Hyperboreans were worshippers of their own god Apollo, at whose altar like offerings were made. Having seen some reasons for believing that before the beginning of history there was a well-defined route from Central and perhaps Further Asia across Southern Russia to the valley of the Danube, and then by one of the valleys of its tributaries to within a short distance of the Adriatic, whence after crossing the watershed it reached the head of that sea, we are now in a position to enquire whether we have similar evidence for the further continuance towards the west of this highroad of nations. We have had occasion already to remark that the legends of the Voyage of the Argo in quest of the Golden Fleece, and the journeyings of Herakles and such-like stories, really represent the earliest knowledge of the regions which lay far away to the east and north-west. There is no tale of the hero Herakles more famous than that of his travelling to the very marge of Ocean, where in the Pillars of Hercules he left an imperishable record of his wayfaring for the men of aftertime. His object, so goes the story, was the capture of the famous kine of the giant Geryon who dwelt in the island of Erythia, in after years the site of Gaddir, or Gadeira as the Greeks called it, the Gades of the Romans, and the modern Cadiz. Many vague stories relating to the early ethnology of Western Europe and Northern Africa cycle round this expedition[161]. But for our present purpose it is only the fabled route by which he went with which we are concerned. As might naturally be expected that part of Italy with which the Greeks seem first to have become acquainted was the district lying in the Adriatic around the mouths of the Po (Eridanus). The reason why they came thither is not far to seek. They