Historical Disputation on Abaris

(which word sounds like Hyperborean in Latin), because those Hyperboreans were born from the highest stock, he dared to prove with great wit and industry and with many examples sought from the language of the ancient Swedes that that nation was so called.

($ψ$) Geography, Book VII, p. 194, ed. Paris, 1620, fol.
($ω$) Prooemium Book II.
($α$) Antiquitates, Book II, p. 130, ed. Laurent. Rhodomannus, Hanover, 1604, fol.
($β$) Atlantica, Part I, p. 366.

Before I make an end of speaking about the Hyperboreans, I judge it will be necessary to examine what Diodorus Siculus thought about them. Therefore, as far as he is concerned, it must be known that he deals with the Hyperboreans more accurately than all the writers I have reviewed up to this point. For he not only makes mention of their residence, but also discusses more fully in this way the fertility of their region, the inhabitants, their customs, as well as their commerce and manner of speaking ($γ$):
Of those who have recorded the ancient mythologies, Hecataeus and some others say that in the regions beyond the Celtic lands, in the Ocean, there is an island not smaller than Sicily. This lies to the north and is inhabited by those called the Hyperboreans, from the fact that they lie further away from the northern blast. It being a fertile and all-producing land, and also differing in the mildness of the climate, it brings forth fruits twice a year. They mythologize that Leto was born in it; for which reason Apollo is honored among them more than the other gods. They are as it were certain priests of Apollo, because this god is hymned by them daily with song continuously and is honored differentially. There is also on the island a magnificent precinct of Apollo and a noteworthy temple, adorned with many votive offerings, spherical in shape, and there is a city sacred to this god, and most of those who inhabit it are cithara-players, and continuously in the temple playing the cithara, they speak hymns to the god with song, magnifying his deeds. The Hyperboreans have their own peculiar dialect and are very intimately disposed towards the Greeks, and especially towards the Athenians and the Delians, having received this goodwill from ancient times.