As the temple at Olympia was connected with Delphi, we find also here some traditions respecting the country of the Hyperboreans, as the native land of the wild olive-tree which flourished in the grove of Zeus.
4. Thus much concerning the places where the fable of the Hyperboreans really existed; we must next notice the situation generally assigned to that sacred nation. In this the name is our chief guide. In the first place it indicates a _northern_ nation; which idea is sufficiently accounted for by the fact that the worship of Apollo came from the most northern part of Greece, from the district of Tempe;(1170) and although the actual distance was not great, yet the imagination might have been moved by this circumstance to conceive Apollo as coming from the most remote regions of the north. But, in the second place, the Hyperboreans are said to dwell _beyond_ Boreas; so that this happy nation never felt the cold north wind: in the same manner that Homer represents the summit of Olympus as rising above the storms, nor ever covered with snow, but surrounded by an atmosphere of cloudless and undisturbed serenity.
5. This is nearly the whole of our information on the origin of this fabulous people. Poets, however, and geographers, dissatisfied with such accounts, attempted to assign to it a fixed habitation in the catalogue of nations: and for this purpose connected multifarious and foreign accounts of the northern regions of the world with the religious fable of the Hyperboreans, and moulded the whole into an imaginary picture of a supposed real people.
Among these stories the most remarkable is that which connects the Hyperboreans with the Scythians. Herodotus found them mentioned in the Arimaspea of Aristeas the Proconnesian, in which poem his ideas of the worship of Apollo were interspersed with obscure accounts of the northern regions.(1171) He came, led by the spirit of Apollo, through Scythia to the Issedones,(1172) the one-eyed Arimaspians, the Griffins that kept watch over the gold, and thus at last reached the Hyperboreans who inhabited the shores on the further side of the ocean. Now Aristeas must have collected the tradition concerning these nations and monsters from the same sources as Herodotus; viz., from the Greeks dwelling on the Pontus and Borysthenes, and through these from the Scythians.