text: Pliny's contemporary Pomponius Mela () tells that Achilles was buried on an island named Achillea, situated between the Borysthenes and the Ister, adding to the geographical confusion.Ruins of a square temple, measuring 30 meters to a side, possibly that dedicated to Achilles, were discovered by Captain Kritzikly () in 1823 on Snake Island.A second exploration in 1840 showed that the construction of a lighthouse had destroyed all traces of this temple.A fifth century BC black-glazed lekythos inscription, found on the island in 1840, reads: "Glaukos, son of Poseidon, dedicated me to Achilles, lord of Leuke." In another inscription from the fifth or fourth century BC, a statue is dedicated to Achilles, lord of Leuke, by a citizen of Olbia, while in a further dedication, the city of Olbia confirms its continuous maintenance of the island's cult, again suggesting its quality as a place of a supra-regional hero veneration.The heroic cult dedicated to Achilles on Leuce seems to go back to an account from the lost epic Aethiopis according to which, after his untimely death, Thetis had snatched her son from the funeral pyre and removed him to a mythical (Leúkē Nêsos "White Island").Already in the fifth century BC, Pindar had mentioned a cult of Achilles on a "bright island" (φαεννά νᾶσος, phaenná nâsos) of the Black Sea, while in another of his works, Pindar would retell the story of the immortalized Achilles living on a geographically indefinite Island of the Blest together with other heroes such as his father Peleus and Cadmus.Well known is the connection of these mythological Fortunate Isles (μακαρῶν νῆσοι, makárôn nêsoi) or the Homeric Elysium with the stream Oceanus which according to Greek mythology surrounds the inhabited world, which should have accounted for the identification of the northern strands of the Euxine with it.