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THE DISCOVERERS OF THE CAUCASUS 3
unknown to the ancients, or outside their mythology. A fVw
Greek merchant-adventurers had pierced the Symplegades, had
followed the southern coast of the Euxine past the woods and
cherr}^ orchards of Kerasund to its farthest bay,
had crossed the
dangerous bar and pushed their prows against the swift grey
flood of the Phasis.^ They had brought back reports of a realm
rich in natural fertility and mineral wealth, where the cities were
embowered in orchards, the vines hung wild fi-om the fruit-trees, and
the rivers ran gold — gold which the natives secured by the simple
device of leaving sheepskins in the mountain streams to catch the
precious sediment they brought down." And over the dark waves
of the Euxine, or above the shadowy forests of the foot-hills and
shining mists that i-ise from the marshes of the Phasis, these
Gi'eek mariners had seen at midsummer a strange sight, a silver
indenture on the horizon, the 'star-neighbouring summits'^ of the
Frosty Caucasus.
The romantic tales of the Caucasus must have touched the
Greek imagination much as those brought from the new regions
beyond the Atlantic fired the fancy of our Elizabethan ancestors.
And the great range soon found its vates sacer. Before any being
more civilised than a dark Iberian or a long-limbed Gaul had
looked up to the Alpine heights, ^Eschylus had secured for the
remote snows of the Caucasus their place
in the world's poetry.
He had celebi'ated them as the prison
of Prometheus, of the
hero in whose gift of fire to liis fellows was represented the first
step in the progress
of the human intellect from the level of the
lowest savage to the ai-ts of civilisation ; the hero who, in his
captivity, stood as the Protagonist of humanity against the
appai'ently blind injustice of the Universe.
^Eschylus had done something more. So little do poets know
1
'Rapidas limosi Phasidos undas,' writes Ovid, Met. vii. 6. Observe the accuracy of
the epithets applied to a glacier stream.
This practice, already noted by Strabo, is stated by more recent writers
continued in modem times on the Lower Ingur, the river of Suanetia.
to have been
3 The .-Eschylean epithet may be illustrated by a coin of Dioskurias (the site of which,
disputed by antiquarians, was probably somewhat east of Sukhum Kale) figured in Captain
Telfer's Caucasus, vol. i. p. 124, on which are represented two mountain-tops (the summits of
Elbruz ?), surmounted by the stars of the Dioskuri.