Investigation of the Bee-nymphs of Mt. Parnassus and the ancestral Indo-European strain and Anatolian strains of divination introduced into European Hellas by migrant pre-Aeolian communities.

Chapter 4 delves into accounts of meetings between the mighty Aithiopians and their distant neighbors. Herodotus’s iteration of Aithiopia (Hdt. 3.17–26) simultaneously looks back to Homer’s utopian Aithiopia and positions Aithiopia as a historical allegory to critique Athenian imperial aggression. Through the Aithiopian king’s comments to Egyptian spies, Herodotus undermines any fixed, negative assumptions of foreigners that may lurk among his readership. Moreover, Herodotus distinguishes Aithiopians by their height, longevity, and skin color, thereby complicating a facile rendering of black people’s “race.” A reciprocal ethnography of Scythians further exposes the instability of race as two Scythian men, Anacharsis and Scyles, wear Greek clothes and maintain their Scythian identity (Hdt. 4.76–80). Their untimely demise reveals the dangers that Hellenocentric Scythians face once they return to their xenophobic homeland.

The fourth chapter is focused on reconfigurations of cosmography within the expanding, contested archive of the Classical period. It looks at successive rewritings of Hyperborea in the changing epistemological landscape of different Classical genres. The stakes at play in identifying Hyperborea as an object of knowledge are considered from the perspective of the great upheavals in the cultures of wisdom of the Classical city. This chapter is interested in situating Classical rewritings of Hyperborea within the ongoing effort of scholarship to move away from the old evolutionary ‘From Myth to Reason’ narrative. A first section looks at cosmographical usages of the distant North in Attic tragedy. The second section reconsiders the question of Xenophanes' reception of Aristeas of Proconnesus. The monumentalisation of Aristeas in the agora of early-fifth century BCE Metapontum is the focus of the third section, with a review of the evidence for Pythagorean appropriations of Hyperborea in southern Italy, and the early circulation of the Abaris legend. The fourth section deals with some usages of Hyperborea in early prose. This opens the way for the final section, which looks anew at the cosmography at stake in Herodotus' extensive deconstruction of Hyperborea in Book 4 of the Histories.