s saved his companions by drowning the
Sirens' song with the music of his lyre.

These stories are told in _Odyssey_, 12, in Apollonius Rhodius, 4. 889
ff., and (in English) in Charles Kingsley's _Greek Heroes_.

55. Medea, abandoned by Jason for Creusa, in the later action of this
play slays her rival and her own children. 68-72. Thule: a distant
island not identified,--possibly Iceland, more probably the largest of
the Shetland Islands,--regarded by the ancients as the northern limit of
the known world.

Seneca, considering the progress of maritime discovery in the past, was
led naturally to the thought that new lands would some day be discovered
beyond the ocean. The conception was not new. Cicero, _Tusculanae
Disputationes_, 1. 28, speaks of a south temperate zone, cultivated and
inhabited, unknown to us. This, of course, is not necessarily beyond the
sea, though Mela places it there. Cicero again in _De Republica_, 6. 20
implies that there are other islands than the Roman world surrounded by
other seas than the Atlantic. Plato, _Timaeus_, 24-25, says that beyond
and surrounding the Atlantic there is a vast continent, between which
and the western coast of Europe and of Libya are a number of islands, of
which Atlantis before its submergence was the largest. Strabo, 1. 4. 6,
says it is quite possible that in the temperate zone there may be not
only the island that forms the world as known to his contemporaries, but
two such or even more, especially near the circle of latitude which is
drawn through Athens and the Atlantic Ocean. See Smith, _Dictionary of
Greek and Roman Geography_, 'Atlanticum mare' and 'Atlantis.'

Lowell, in his _Columbus_, represents the discoverer as naming this
passage,--said also by tradition to have made a deep impression on his
mind,--along with Canto XXVI of Dante's _Inferno_ and Plato's _Timaeus_
and _Critias_, as inspiring him to his attempt:

Then did I entertain the poets' song,
My great Idea's guest, and, passing o'er
That iron bridge the Tuscan built to hell,
I heard Ulysses tell of mountain-chains
Whose adamantine links, his manacles,
The western main shook growling and still gnawed.
I brooded on the wise Athenian's tale
Of happy Atlantis, and heard Bjorne's keel
Crush the gray pebbles of the Vinland shore:
_I listened musing to the prophecy
Of Nero's tutor-victim_...
And I believed the poets.

The son of the discoverer wrote in his copy of the traged