in fabulous history, a giant of Libya, son of Neptune and Terra. Designing to build a temple to his father, of men's skulls, he slew all he met. In his combat with Hercules he is said to have received strength from the earth every time he was thrown upon it, which Hercules perceiving, lifted him up from the ground and squeezed him to death.

Anteus was king of Mauritania; and from several circumstances, with which we are supplied by various authors, it appears extremely probable that he was the same person with Atlas. They were both of them the sons of Neptune, who reigned over Mauritania, Numidia, and a great part of Libya; as may be naturally inferred from his having such particular marks of distinction conferred upon him by the inhabitants of those regions: they both ruled with absolute power over a great part of Africa, particularly Tingitana: Hercules defeated and slew Anteus in the same war wherein he took the Libyan world from Atlas: both Atlas and Anteus invaded Egypt, and contended with Hercules in the wars with the gods, and were both vanquished by him: Anteus, as well as Atlas, was famed for knowledge in the celestial sciences: from all which we may fairly conclude that they were the same king of Mauritania.

The golden apples so frequently mentioned by the old mythologists were the treasures that fell into Hercules's hands upon Anteus's defeat, the Greeks giving the oriental word χρυσος, riches, the signification annexed to their own term, μακάρια, apples. After the most diligent and impartial examination of all the different hypotheses of historians and chronologers relating to Atlas and Anteus, we find none so little clogged with difficulties as that of Sir Isaac Newton. According to that illustrious author, Ammon, the father of Sesac, was the first king of Libya, or that vast tract extending from the borders of Egypt to the Atlantic Ocean, the conquest of which country was effected by Sesac in his father's lifetime. Neptune afterwards excited the Libyans to rebellion against Sesac, slew him, and then invaded Egypt under the command of Atlas or Anteus, the son of Neptune, Sesac's brother and admiral. Not long after, Hercules, the general of Thebais and Ethiopia, for the gods or great men of Egypt, reduced a second time the whole continent of Libya, having overthrown and slain Anteus near a town in the Thebais, from that event called Antrea or Anteopolis. This is the notion advanced by Sir Isaac Newton, who endeavours to prove that the first reduction of Libya by Sesac happened a little above a thousand years before the birth of Christ, as the last by Hercules did some few years after.