And about the Hyperboreans, who inhabit the edges,
under the temple of Apollo, unknowing of war.
They sing now of their origins from the blood
of the Titans, sprouting above the clear-skied course,
of the Arimasp king, settling them in the land of Boreas.
Author: Pherenikos of Herakleia Pontike
Title of Work: Unknown
Location in Work: Pindar old scholia, Olympian III 28 (Drachmann 113.1-5)
Date of Work: c. 200 BCE
Original Language: Greek (Ionic)
Original Text:
ἀμφί θ Ὑπερβορέων, οἵτ ἔσχατα ναιετάουσι
νηῷ ὑπ Ἀπόλλωνος, ἀπείρητοι πολέμοιο.
τοὺς μὲν ἄρα προτέρων ἐξ αἵματος ὑμνήσουσι
Τιτήνων βλαστόντας ὑπὲρ δρόμον αἰθρήεντα
νάσσασθαι Βορέαο γύην Ἀριμασπὸν ἄνακτα.
Reference Edition: Drachmann, Scholia Vetera
Translation Notes: This translation agrees with that of Renaud Gagné (Cosmography, 384-385) in reading Ἀριμασπὸν as an adjective modifying ἄνακτα. Pär Sandin (Famous Hyperboreans, 214) read Ἀριμασπὸν instead as the personal name of a Hyperborean leader, citing other writers’ confusion of the Arimasps with Hyperboreans, but Pherenikos gives no grounds here to assume inattention on his part.
Commentary:
Pherenikos of Herakleia Pontike (modern Sozopol, Bulgaria) is a very poorly known poet who can only be dated very loosely to sometime in the Hellenistic period. Aside from this excerpt, which is evidently verbatim since it is in clean dactylic hexameter verse, there is also a prose paraphrase by Athenaios (3.14/78b) of a myth about the origin of fig trees attributed to Pherenikos.
The five lines excerpted here are preserved in scholia accompanying a passage in Pindar’s third Olympian Ode, which tells a story of Herakles’ retrieving olive trees from Hyperborea and planting them at the sanctuary to Zeus in Apollo (to come in this collection). Ioannis Tzetzes (Histories, 7.673-674) also quoted the first two of these five lines among a group of citations relating to Hyperborea and the Arimaspeia.
The poem was part of a broader trend among Hellenistic poets of mimicking early Ionic, dactylic hexameter poetry, and together with Simias’ Apollo is one of two such poems known to have drawn from the Arimaspeia. The Arimaspeia’s influence is made clear especially by the presence of the Arimasp king, as there is not known to be any other independent source about the Arimaspeia.
Among the clearly traditional elements is the Hyperboreans living on the ‘edges’ and ‘in the land of Boreas,’ which refer to their traditional location on the outer edge of the flat disc of earth, behind the home of the god and source of the wintry north wind, by the world-encircling river Okeanos. The temple to Apollo in Hyperborea can be identified as a feature of the Arimaspeia, as it also figures in another story told by Antoninus Liberalis that was at least partly based on Simias’ Apollo.
It is unclear how much of the other story elements in this excerpt of Pherenikos are original and how much are drawn from the Arimaspeia. The story of the Hyperboreans springing up from the blood of Titans, presumably after their defeat by Zeus, is known only from this text. The use of the word δρόμος – usually a race-course – seems to refer to the path taken by Zeus and the Titans as they battled and the Titans’ blood fell. It might also allude to the above-mentioned Hyperborean connection to the sanctuary to Zeus in Olympos and the famous δρόμος there. Pherenikos might have had in mind specifically Zeus’ defeat of Typhoeus, the primordial monster that Zeus sent crashing down from the sky to land among the Arimoi, a mythical subterranean people possibly related to the Arimasps (to come in this collection). The story of the Arimasp king settling the Hyperboreans in their homeland is also unique to this text. These stories place the origins of the Hyperboreans and Arimasps early in the history of the cosmos, thus clearly distinguishing them from ordinary human beings. The role of the Arimasp king also suggests the Hyperboreans were to some extent under the protection of the Arimasps, which fits with other evidence connecting the Arimasps to creatures in Near Eastern mythology with liminal and hypotropaic roles (to come in this collection).
The scholia that contain this excerpt also mention alternate stories that trace the Hyperboreans’ ancestry to an early patriarch from Greece named Hyperboreos, who was either an Athenian (per Philodemos of Gadara, a 1st c. BCE Epicurian philosopher-poet), a Thessalian (per Philostephanos of Kyrene, a 3rd c. BCE writer of local histories), or the son of Pelasgos of Peloponnesia (per ‘others’). The scholia also mention that Hekataios of Abdera, an early Hellenistic writer who wrote a book about Hyperborea (to come in this collection), told a different version of the Hyperboreans’ origin, but don’t elaborate. The oldest recensions of Pindar scholia, known as the ‘old scholia,’ were the work of numerous ancient scholars, most actively Aristarchos of Samothrake (mid-2nd c. BCE) and Didymos Chalkederos (a contemporary of Augustus). Probably nearly all the text that went into these scholia was written by the mid-2nd century CE (see Deas, Vetera Scholia), but some material may have been added later as the texts went through multiple reorganizations and redactions to reach the state preserved in medieval manuscripts.
Concordance: Supplementum Hellenisticum, Pherenicus 671; Renaud Gagné, Cosmography, 384-385