Oestriminis

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In Latin poetry Oestreminis ("Extreme West") was a name given to the territory of what is today modern Portugal, comparable to Finis terrae, the "end of the earth" from a Mediterranean perspective. Its inhabitants were named Oestrimni from their location.

The fourth century CE Roman poet on geographical subjects, Rufus Avienus Festus, in Ora Maritima ("Seacoasts"), a poem inspired by a much earlier Greek mariners' periplus, records that Oestriminis was peopled by the Oestrimni, a people that had lived there for a long time, who had to run away from their native lands after an invasion of serpents. His fanciful account has no archeological or historical application, but the poetical name has sometimes been ambitiously applied to popularized accounts of the paleolithic inhabitants of Altantic Iberia when they are reckloned the ancestors of the modern Portuguese.

The expulsion of the Oestrimni, from Ora Maritima:

Ophiussam ad usque. rursum ab huius litore

internum ad aequor, qua mare insinuare se

dixi ante terris, quodque Sardum nuncupant,

septem dierum tenditur pediti via.

Ophiussa porro tanta panditur latus

quantam iacere Pelopis audis insulam

Graiorum in agro. haec dicta primo Oestrymnis est

locos et arva Oestrymnicis habitantibus,

post multa serpens effugavit incolas

vacuamque glaebam nominis fecit sui.

The "serpent people" of the semi-mythical Ophiussa in the far west are noted in ancient Greek sources.