[Footnote 121: This is the old name of the Straits of Gibraltar, which is still retained in the modern form Cadiz. Gadeira, which the Romans called Gades, was an old Phœnician town, on the island of Leon, where Cadiz now stands. Strabo (p. 168, ed. Casaub.) says that Gades in his time (the beginning of the reign of Tiberius) was not inferior in population to any city except Rome, and was a place of great trade, as it is now.]
[Footnote 122: This river, now the Guadalquivir, gave the name of Bætica to one of the three provinces into which the Spanish Peninsula was ultimately divided by the Romans for the purposes of administration.]
[Footnote 123: This was the name for so much of the ocean that washes the west coast of Europe and Africa as the Greeks and Romans were acquainted with. The Greeks and Romans had no name for the Mediterranean.]
[Footnote 124: The only islands in the Atlantic that correspond to this description are Madeira and Porto Santo, but Porto Santo is forty miles north-east of Madeira. The distance of Madeira from the coast of Africa is about 400 miles or about 4000 stadia. The climate of Madeira is very temperate: the thermometer seldom sinks below 60°, though it sometimes rises as high as 90° of Fahrenheit. On the high and mountainous parts there are heavy dews, and rain falls at all seasons. Owing to the variety of surface and elevation the island produces both tropical products and those of temperate countries. The fame of this happy region had spread to all parts of the ancient world, though we cannot safely conclude that the islands were known by report to Homer. Horace in his 16th _Epode_ is probably alluding to these islands when he is speaking of the Civil Wars and of flying from their horrors in those beautiful lines:
Nos manet Oceanus circumvagus; arva beata Petamus arva divites et insulas, &c.
[Footnote 125: The passage is in the fourth book of the 'Odyssey,' v. 563, and is quoted by Strabo (p. 31):
And there in sooth man's life is easiest; Nor snow, nor raging storm, nor rain is there, But ever gently breathing gales of zephyr Oceanus sends up.
Strabo in another passage expresses an opinion that the Elysian fields were in the southern parts of Spain. That would at least be a good place for them.]