page_title: Hyperborea
section_title: Hyperboreans in Delos
hierarchical_section_title: Hyperborea / Legends / Hyperboreans in Delos
caption_attribution_description: Português: Typus Orbis Terrarum. (Imagem da Terra) ORTELIUS, Abraham 1587 Buril e aquarela sobre papel 10 x 10 cm Acervo Fundação Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro
context_page_description: In Greek mythology the Hyperboreans were a race of giants who lived "beyond the North Wind". The Greeks thought that Boreas, the god of the North Wind lived in Thrace, and therefore Hyperborea indicates that it is a region beyond Thrace.
  This land was supposed to be perfect, with the sun shining twenty-four hours a day, which to modern ears suggests a possible location within the Arctic Circle during the midnight sun-time of year. It is also possible that Hyperborea had no real physical location at all, for according to the classical Greek poet Pindar, "neither by ship nor on foot would you find the marvellous road to the assembly of the Hyperboreans."
  Pindar also described the otherworldly perfection of the Hyperboreans:
  Never the Muse is absent
  from their ways: lyres clash and flutes cry
  and everywhere maiden choruses whirling.
  Neither disease nor bitter old age is mixed
  in their sacred blood; far from labor and battle they live.
context_section_description: Alone among the Twelve Olympians, Apollo was venerated among the Hyperboreans, the Hellenes thought: he spent his winter amongst them. 
  According to Herodotus, offerings from the Hyperboreans came to Scythia packed with straw, and they were passed from tribe to tribe until they arrived at Dodona and from them to other Greek peoples until they to came to Apollo's temple on Delos. He says they used this method because the first time the gifts were brought by two maidens, Hyperoche and Laodice, with an escort of five men, but none of them returned. To prevent that, since then the Hyperboreans brought the gifts to their borders and asked their neighbours to deliver them to the next country and so on until they arrived to Delos.
  Herodotus also details that other two virgin maidens, Arge and Opis, had come from Hyperborea to Delos before, as a tribute to the goddess Ilithyia for ease of child-bearing, accompanied by the gods themselves. The maidens received honours in Delos, where the women collected gifts from them and sang hymns to them.
caption: On this 1570 map, Hyperborea is shown as an Arctic continent and described as "Terra Septemtrionalis Incognita" (Unknown Northern Land). Notice the similarities in the continent to that of Mercator's map above.
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