ern Ocean; while, by others, they are represented as having sailed up
the Danube to the Po or the Rhine.

Amidst such obscure and evidently fictitious accounts, it may appear
useless to offer any conjecture; but there is one route by which the
Argonauts are supposed to have returned, in favour of which some
probability may be urged. All writers agree in opinion that they did not
return by the route they followed on going to the Euxine; if this be true,
the least absurd and improbable mode of getting back into the Mediterranean
is to be preferred: of those routes already mentioned, all are eminently
absurd and impossible. Perhaps the one we are about to describe, may, in
the opinion of some, be deemed equally so; but to us it appears to have
some plausibility. The tradition to which we allude is, that the Argonauts
sailed up some sea or river from the Euxine, till they reached the Baltic
Sea, and that they returned by the Northern Ocean through the straits of
Hercules, into the Mediterranean. The existence of an ocean from the east
end of the Gulf of Finland to the Caspian or the Euxine Sea, was firmly
believed by Pliny, and the same opinion prevailed in the eleventh century;
for Adam of Bremen says, people [could sail->could formerly sail] from the
Baltic down to Greece. Now the whole of that tract of country is flat and
level, and from the sands near Koningsberg, through the calcareous loam of
Poland and the Ukraine, evidently alluvial and of comparatively recent
formation.

If the Trojan war happened, according to the Arundelian Marbles, 1209 years
before Christ, this event must have been subsequent to the Argonautic
expedition only about fifty years: yet, in this short space of time, the
Greeks had made great advances in the art of ship building, and in
navigation. The equipment of the Argonautic expedition was regarded, at the
period it took place, as something almost miraculous; yet the ships sent
against Troy seem to have excited little astonishment, though, considering
the state of Greece at that period, they were very numerous.

It is foreign to our purpose to regard this expedition in any other light
than as it is illustrative of the maritime skill and attainments of Greece
at this era, and so far connected with our present subject. The number of
ships employed, according to Homer, amounted to 1186: Thucydides states
them at 1200; and Euripides, Virgil, and some other authors, reduce their
number to 1000. The