The area was vaguely described as the Hyperborea ("beyond the North wind") and its mythical inhabitants, the Hyperboreans, were said to lived blissfully under eternal sunshine.
It is one of the legendary peoples postulated at the extremity of the known world (from the perspective of the Greeks), in this case in the extreme south, contrasting with the Hyperboreans in the extreme north.
Hecateus of Abdera writes that the Oceanus of the Hyperboreans is neither the Arctic Ocean nor Western Ocean, but the sea located to the north of the ancient Greek world, called "the most admirable of all seas" by Herodotus (lib. IV 85), called the "immense sea" by Pomponius Mela (lib. I. c. 19) and by Dionysius Periegetes (Orbis Descriptio, v. 165), and which is named Mare majus on medieval geographic maps.