MEDITERRANEAN MYTHS 39 



Thus the two singular masses of rock in which, at 

 Gibraltar and Ceuta, the European and African conti- 

 nents respectively terminate, and which form, on each 

 side of an intervening strait, only some seventeen miles 

 wide, a kind of gateway for the vast Mediterranean 

 basin, naturally fixed the attention of the early navi- 

 gators on those distant waters, and filled a prominent 

 place among the travellers' tales from the remote West. 

 They took their part in the myths, becoming the 

 ' pillars of Hercules,' that were erected by this 

 legendary explorer and knight-errant as an eternal 

 record of his labours and of the ultimate limit of his 

 wanderings. The details of the story vary. By some 

 narrators the hero was represented as having narrowed 

 and shallowed the strait, and built his pillars on the 

 two sides to keep the huge monsters of the outer 

 ocean from entering the Mediterranean sea. By 

 others he was believed to have actually excavated 

 the strait itself, and by thus separating Europe and 

 Africa, previously joined together, to have allowed 

 the waters of the ocean and those of the inner sea 

 to mingle. 1 



In a mountainous country, where the streams, 

 swollen by sudden or heavy rains, sweep down 

 much detritus into the valleys and plains, the great 

 changes of topography thereby produced impress the 

 imagination and dwell in the memory of the inhabi- 

 tants. In Greece, the myths that gathered round 

 the Achelous — the largest and most famous river in 

 the country — probably arose, as Strabo showed, from 



1 Diod. Sic, iv. 1 8, who allows his readers to choose which 

 version of the legend they prefer. 



