Eridanos (mythological river)
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.[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.).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.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.[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.There were no serious scientific works that would investigate the connection of Eridanus with the Balkan hydronym for the river Drina, although such studies would be necessary, bearing in mind the proximity of the Lower Danube to ancient trade centers on the Mediterranean, as well as the archaeologically increasingly confirmed importance of this area in ancient and pre-antique history.