There and Back Again

I wonder if we have a conflation of historical and mythological in the accounts of Hyperborea.

Diodoros of Sicily tells us (Library of History II xlvii) that Hyperborea is an island larger than Sicily north of Celtia, noting that Leto was born and Apollon peculiarly honored there. He says that the moon is much closer there, so much so that one can even see the mountains on it.

Bakkhulides (Ode 3) tells us that King Kroisos of Ludia, when his city was besieged, set a pyre for himself and his family, but that Apollon put out the pyre and took he and his family away to Hyperborea on account of his piety. Herodotos (Histories I §87) gives a more mundane account, recognizing the rescue of Apollon but simply saying that he became the slave of Kurus the Great.

We see in the contrast of Bakkhulides and Herodotos a sort of mundanizing of the mysterious: what to Bakkhulides is a spiriting away is merely the learning of a lesson to Herodotos. I wonder if we see the same in Diodoros: was Leto's Hyperborea originally a purely mythic place, which was later conflated with a more mundane "Hyperborea" by Diodoros? This would at least be no surprise, as Diodoros explicitly mentions his indebtedness "to those writers who have composed universal⁠ histories" (referring certainly to at least Herodotos), and thus he might be expected to follow Herodotos's historicizing tendency.

If this is so, it is perhaps mistaken to think that Apollon came to Greece from the literal, physical island of Britain; one might presume that the Hyperborea is "beyond the north wind" in a metaphysical sense, thus perhaps linking it with Ploutarkhos's middle world (related, as we are told, from people beyond Britain, who also describe the geography of the lunar surface); that is, the world where we go after the first death but before the second; that is, the world of Water.

This is all to perhaps lend weight to the arm of the scale which holds that Apollon simply came from beyond the sensible world to offer those of us poor mortals who cry for help in this dark world of Earth a faster way out than the usual should we require it.