Ireland and the Classical World

3. Ancient Authors

  AncientAuthors 7 RufiusFestus Avienus Sources for the Ora maritima It is ironic that the earliest classical reference to Ireland may be contained in a very late document, the Ora maritima of Rufius Festus Avienus, who wrote in the mid-fourth century .. Avienus served as a Roman proconsul and composed rather second-rate poetry based on earlier authors. His rambling Ora maritima is a periplus, or coastal description, over  lines long that primarily describes the coast from Gades (Cadiz) in the southwestern Iberian peninsula to Massalia (Marseilles) in Gaul, but with frequent digressions on other parts of western Europe. Avienus apparently drew on a variety of sources, including Greek and Carthaginian records from around  .. However, the intermixture and uncertainty of Avienus’ sources as well as the permutations they may have undergone before reaching him make the Ora maritima an extremely problematic source for early Ireland. If, however, the sources for the Ora maritima that describe Ireland were genuinely composed in the late sixth or early fifth century .., they predate the next surviving classical references to the island by several centuries. One section of the poem arguably drawing on the earliest sources is a digression beginning at the Oestrymnides Islands, but the location of the islands is itself debatable:1    ast hinc duobus in Sacram (sic insulam dixere prisci) solibus cursus rati est. haec inter undas multam caespitem iacet, eamque late gens Hiernorum colit. propinqua rursus insula Albionum patet. Tartessisque in terminos Oestrumnidum negociandi mos erat. Carthaginis et iam colonis et vulgus inter Herculis agitans columnas haec adhibant aequora. quae Himilco Poenus mensibus vix quattuor, ut ipse semet rem probasse retulit enavigantem, posse transmitti adserit. From here it is a two-day voyage to the Sacred Isle, for by this name the ancients called the island. It lies rich in turf among the waves, thickly populated by the Hierni. Nearby lies the island of the Albiones. The Tartessians were accustomed to trade even to the edge of the Oestrymnides. The Carthaginian colonists and people around the Pillars of Hercules frequented these waters. Four months scarcely is enough for the voyage, as Himilco the Carthaginian proved by sailing there and back himself. The poem claims it is a two-day sail from the Oestrymnides to the insula sacra (‘‘Sacred Isle’’). The epithet insula sacra, if it refers here to Ireland , probably originated with a false etymology, as the oldest Greek name for Ireland, Iernē (᾿Ιέρνη), is similar to the Greek phrase hiera nēsos (ἱερὰ νήσος), ‘‘sacred/holy island.’’ If the term originated in the western Greek colony of Massalia, it may have been an even more similar iera nēsos (ἰερὰ νήσος), without the initial h-, as Massalia was founded around  .. by the Ionic Greek-speaking city of Phocaea on the coast of Asia Minor. The East Ionic dialect of Greek lost the aspirant, or h-sound, early in its linguistic history, whereas most other Greek dialects (such as the Attic speech of Athens) retained the sound. But to a Greek sailor of any dialect, Iernē must have sounded vaguely similar to (h)iera nēsos. The association would       have been aided by the Greek tradition of distant sacred or supernatural islands to the west, such as Calypso’s Ogygie, Scheria of the Phaeacians, or the Isles of the Blessed.2 The ancient Irish themselves probably called their island *Iweriu (from an *Iwerion- root), though there is some debate about the exact form used.3 The name seems to derive ultimately from an Indo-European form *piwer-, meaning ‘‘fat, fertile,’’ so that the ancient Irish name for Ireland might be translated ‘‘The Fertile Land’’—a suitable description given Pomponius Mela’s description of Ireland as being so fertile that the cattle grazing there were in danger of bursting from the rich fodder.4 This holy island is, intriguingly, rich in turf of the kind still burned in Irish cottages today. It is densely populated by the Hierni, a name not used for the Irish by any other ancient author, but certainly a reasonable Roman derivative of the Greek Iernē. The neighbors of the Hierni in the Ora maritima are the Albiones, an archaic name for the inhabitants of Britain. Tartessus, whose citizens frequently sailed to the Oestrymnides, was a town and region around the Guadalquivir River in southern Iberia visited by Samnian and Phocaean Greeks as early as the seventh century .. (see Fig. ).5 The Oestrymnides may be islands off the Brittany coast near...