When the Greeks shivered in the cold north-wind, they thought that
Boreas, one of their divinities who dwelt beyond the high mountains,
had loosened the blast from a mysterious cave. The North was to them an
unknown region. Far beyond the hills they thought there dwelt a nation
known as Hyperboreans, or people beyond the region of Boreas, who lived
in an atmosphere of feathers, enjoying Arcadian happiness, and
stretching their peaceful lives out to a thousand years. That which is
unknown is frightful to the ignorant or the superstitious, and so it
was that the North was a land in which all that was alarming might be
conjured up. The inhabitants of the Northern lands were called Gauls by
the Romans. They lived in villages with no walls about them, and had no
household furniture; they slept in straw, or leaves, or grass, and
their business in life was either agriculture or war. They were hardy,
tall, and rough in appearance; their hair was shaggy and light in color
compared with that of the Italians, and their fierce appearance struck
the dwellers under sunnier climes with dread.

These warlike people had come from the plains of Asia, and in Central
and Northern Europe had increased to such an extent that they could at
length find scarcely enough pasturage for their flocks. The mountains
were full of them, and it was not strange that some looked down from
their summits into the rich plains of Italy, and then went thither;
and, tempted by the crops, so much more abundant than they had ever
known, and by the wine, which gave them a new sensation, at last made
their homes there. It was a part of their life to be on the move, and
by degrees they slipped farther and farther into the pleasant land.
They flocked from the Hercynian forests, away off in Bohemia or
Hungary, and swarmed over the Alps; they followed the river Po in its
course, and they came into the region of the Apennines too. [Footnote: