See Apollodorus iii. 1; Ovid, _Metam._ ii. 833; articles by Helbig in Roscher's _Lexikon der Mythologie_, and by Hild in Daremberg and Saglio's _Dictionnaire des antiquités_. Fig. 26 in the article GREEK ART (archaic metope from Palermo) represents the journey of Europa over the sea on the back of the bull.
EUROPE, the smallest of those principal divisions of the land-surface of the globe which are usually distinguished by the conventional name of continents.
It has justly become a commonplace of geography to describe Europe as a mere peninsula of Asia, but while it is necessary to bear this in mind in some aspects of the geography of the continent, more particularly in relation to the climate, the individuality of the continent is established in the clearest manner by the course of history and the resultant distribution of population. The earliest mention of Europe is in the Homeric _Hymn to Apollo_, but there Europe is not the name of a continent, but is opposed to the Peloponnesus and the islands of the Aegean. The distinction between Europe and Asia is found, however, in Aeschylus in the 5th century B.C., but there seems to be little doubt that this opposition was learnt by the Greeks from some Asiatic people. On Assyrian monuments the contrast between _asu_, "(the land of) the rising sun," and _ereb_ or _irib_, "(the land of) darkness" or "the setting sun," is frequent, and these names were probably passed on by the Phoenicians to the Greeks, and gave rise to the names of Asia and Europe. Where the names originated the geographical distinction was clearly marked by the intervention of the sea, and this intervention marked equally clearly the distinction between Europe and Libya (Africa). As the knowledge of the world extended, the difficulty, which still exists, of fixing the boundary between Europe and Asia where there is land connexion, caused uncertainty in the application of the two names, but never obscured the necessity for recognizing the distinction. Even in the 3rd century B.C. Europe was regarded by Eratosthenes as including all that was then known of northern Asia. But the character of the physical features and climate finally determined the fact that what we know as Europe came to be occupied by more or less populous countries in intimate relation with one another, but separated on the east by unpeopled or very sparsely peopled areas from the countries of Asia, and the boundary between the two continents has long been recognized as running somewhere through this area. Within the limits thus marked out on the east and on other sides by the sea "the climatic conditions are such that inhabitants are capable of and require a civilization of essentially the same type, based upon the cultivation of our European grains."[1] Those inhabitants have had a common history in a greater measure than those of any other continent, and hence are more thoroughly conscious of their dissimilarities from, than of their consanguinity with, the peoples of the east and the south.