7.

Megasthenes, and a few others, think the stories respecting Hercules and Bacchus to be credible, but the majority of writers, among whom is Eratosthenes, regard them as incredible and fabulous, like the Grecian stories. Dionysus, in the Bacchæ of Euripides, makes this boasting speech:

[Pg 76]
[CAS. 687]

“But now from Lydia’s field,

With gold abounding, from the Phrygian realm

And that of Persia scorch’d by torrid suns,

Pressing through Bactrian gates, the frozen land

Of Media, and through Araby the Blest,

With Asia’s wide extended continent——”311

In Sophocles, also, a person is introduced speaking the praises of Nysa,312 as being a mountain sacred to Bacchus:

“whence I beheld the famed Nysa, the resort of the Bacchanalian bands, which the horned Iacchus makes his most pleasant and beloved retreat, where no bird’s clang is heard,”

and so on. [He is called also Merotraphes.]313

Homer also mentions Lycurgus the Edonian in these words,

“who formerly pursued the nurses of the infuriate Bacchus along the sacred mountain Nysa.”314

So much respecting Bacchus. But with regard to Hercules, some persons say, that he penetrated to the opposite extremities on the west only, while others maintain that he also advanced to those of the east.