e they are sent forward towards the South, and the people of Dodona
receive them first of all the Hellenes, and from these they come down to
the Malian gulf and are passed over to Euboea, where city sends them on
to city till they come to Carystos. After this Andros is left out, for
the Carystians are those who bring them to Tenos, and the Tenians to
Delos. Thus they say that these sacred offerings come to Delos; but at
first, they say, the Hyperboreans sent two maidens bearing the sacred
offerings, whose names, say the Delians, were Hyperoche and Laodike, and
with them for their protection the Hyperboreans sent five men of their
nation to attend them, those namely who are now called Perpherees and
have great honours paid to them in Delos. Since however the Hyperboreans
found that those who were sent away did not return back, they were
troubled to think that it would always befall them to send out and not
to receive back; and so they bore the offerings to the borders of their
land bound up in wheat straw, and laid a charge upon their neighbours,
bidding them send these forward from themselves to another nation. These
things then, they say, come to Delos being thus sent forward; and I know
of my own knowledge that a thing is done which has resemblance to
these offerings, namely that the women of Thrace and Paionia, when they
sacrifice to Artemis "the Queen," do not make their offerings without
wheat straw.

34. These I know do as I have said; and for those maidens from the
Hyperboreans, who died in Delos, both the girls and the boys of the
Delians cut off their hair: the former before marriage cut off a lock
and having wound it round a spindle lay it upon the tomb (now the tomb
is on the left hand as one goes into the temple of Artemis, and over it
grows an olive-tree), and all the boys of the Delians wind some of their
hair about a green shoot of some tree, and they also place it upon the
tomb.

35. The maidens, I say, have this honour paid them by the dwellers in
Delos: and the same people say that Arge and Opis also, being maidens,
came to Delos, passing from the Hyperboreans by the same nations which
have been mentioned, even before Hyperoche and Laodike. These last, they
say, came bearing for Eileithuia the tribute which they had laid upon
themselves for the speedy birth, 37 but Arge and Opis came with the
divinities themselves, and other honours have been assigned to them by
the people of Delos: for the women, the