24 ANCIENT MYTHOLOGY. 



and fathers of the church, and exhibiting Alexandria and Car- 

 thage on a footing with the greatest cities which owned the 

 imperial sway." 



But while the banks of the Nile and the shores of the Medi- 

 terranean were conspicuous in ancient civilization, the power 

 and glory did not penetrate the continent ; there was only a nar- 

 row strip of light fringing the sea and the river, back of it there 

 was the mysterious and the unknown. 



The traveller who ventured into that background found him- 

 self among wild and wandering tribes, who exhibited human 

 nature under its rudest and most repulsive forms. If he journeyed 

 far, there confronted him "a barrier vast and appalling — endless 

 plains of moving sand, waste and wild, without a shrub, a blade 

 of grass, a single cheering or life-sustaining object." Victorious 

 armies turned back from the borders of the desert as the limit 

 of the possible, and the intervening tract of alternate rock and 

 valley and plain furnished many of those fabulous stories which 

 have come down to us in classic measure and become a grand 

 theatre of ancient mythology. 



Thither, according to Diodorus, the "ancients referred the 

 early reign of Saturn under the appellation of Ouranus or 

 Heaven ; the birth of Jupiter and his nursing by Amalthsea ; 

 the impious race of Titans and their wars with the gods ; Cybele 

 with her doting love for Atys and frantic grief for his fate." 

 And there were placed the hideous Gorgons, and the serpents 

 hissing in the hair of Medusa. And thence came the stories of 

 those dreadful Amazons, "gallant viragoes," who ravaged all 

 the region and carried victorious arms, according to the historian, 

 into Syria and Asia Minor. 



But mingled with so much fable the ancient writers had also 

 some just conceptions of this region, and many things mentioned 

 by Herodotus, Diodorus, and particularly by Strabo, who wrote 

 after the Roman sway was fully established over Africa, indicate 

 that greatest care was used in treasuring the scraps of knowledge 

 which floated up out of the deeper wilderness beyond. Yet that 

 wilderness kept its secrets so jealously that the diligence of 

 historians and the eagerness of explorers and the power of armies 

 were equally ineffectual in extending the range of precise knowl- 

 edge beyond the narrow confines on the north and a limited 



DSI 



