Hesiod, in the Theogony, calls it "deep-eddying Eridanos" in his list of rivers, the offspring of the Titans
Tethys and her brother-husband
Oceanus.[1] He was called the king of the rivers.[2]
Herodotus suspects the word Eridanos to be essentially Greek in character, and notably forged by some unknown poet, and expresses his disbelief in the whole concept—passed on to him by others, themselves not eye-witnesses—of such a river flowing into a northern sea, surrounding Europe, where the mythical
Amber and
Tin Isles were supposed; he upholds the belief in the abundance of natural goods at the world's ends though, to be found in the north of Europe as well as in India (east: big animals, gold,
cotton) and Arabia (south:
incense,
myrrh, etc.).[3] The Eridanos was later associated with the river
Po, because the Po was located near the end of the
Amber Trail.
According to
Apollonius of Rhodes[4] and
Ovid,[5]amber originated from the tears of the
Heliades, encased in
poplars as
dryads, shed when their brother,
Phaethon, died and fell from the sky, struck by Zeus' thunderbolt, and tumbled into the Eridanos, where "to this very day the marsh exhales a heavy vapour which rises from his smouldering wound; no bird can stretch out its fragile wings to fly over that water, but in mid-flight it falls dead in the flames";[6] "along the green banks of the river Eridanos,"
Cygnus mourned him—Ovid told—and was transformed into a swan. There in the far west,
Heracles asked the
river nymphs of Eridanos to help him locate the
Garden of the Hesperides.
Strabo commented disregardingly on such mythmaking:
[...] one must put aside many of the mythical or false accounts such as those of Phaethon and of the Heliades changed into black poplars near the Eridanos (a river that does not exist anywhere on earth, although it is said to be near the Po), and of the Islands of Amber that lie off the Po, and of the
guinea-fowl on them, because none of these exist in this area.
When in
Nonnus' fourth- or fifth-century CE Dionysiaca the vast monster
Typhon boasts that he will bathe in "starry Eridanus", it is
hyperbole, for the
constellation Eridanus, represented as a river, was one of the 48 constellations listed by the second-century astronomer
Ptolemy; it remains one of the 88 modern constellations.
Real river
There have been various guesses at which real river was the Eridanos: these include the
Po River in north Italy, the
Rhone in France and the
Rhine. The Eridanos is mentioned in
Greek writings as a river in northern
Europe rich in
amber (
Vistula on
Amber Road?).[9] A small river near Athens was named
Eridanos in ancient times, and has been rediscovered with the excavations for construction of the
Athens Metro.
^"The holy isle of Elektris", named for elektron ("amber") off the mouth of the Eridanos, was reached by the Argonauts, who were fleeing from the
Colchians, in
Apollonius of Rhodes' Argonautica, Book IV; their return trip from Colchis, in which they passed "the farthest reaches of the stream Eridanos" (IV, 597), can probably not be made to coincide with actual geography.