Herodotus (Swayne)/Chapter 6

by George Carless Swayne

CHAPTER VI.

SCYTHIA.

"They dwell
In wattled sheds on rolling cars aloft,
Accoutred with far-striking archery."
—Æschylus, "Prometheus."

Having disposed of Babylon, Darius next bethought himself of the Scythians. He had an old national grudge against this restless race, for having overrun Asia in the days of Cyaxares the Mede. The Behistun inscription only mentions the quelling of a revolt of the Sacæ, or Scythian subjects of Persia; but Herodotus speaks of an expedition on a vast scale against the independent nation.

The Scythians were, according to Herodotus, a people whose seat was in the steppes of northern Russia, more widely spread than the present Cossacks of the Don, but without any definite boundaries, sometimes encroaching on their neighbours and sometimes encroached upon by them, like the Tartar hordes at this day. Their name has been supposed by some to be a synonym for "archers." Their habits were very like those of the terrible Huns and Magyars who overran part of Europe in the last agonies of Rome and afterwards; but the difficulty of identifying a modern and civilised race with an ancient and barbarous one, is shown by the dissimilarity of the handsome and chivalrous Hungarians with their hideous and unkempt progenitors. They seem to have inherited from them little besides their love of horseflesh—in the civilised sense.

That the Scythians disappeared from history, when history itself was at its lowest ebb, is no proof that they exist nowhere now. Their language, specimens of which are given by Herodotus, undoubtedly belongs to that of the Indo-Germanic family. Their connection with the Sacæ is established. Some connect the Sacæ with the Saxons, others also with the Sikhs of northern India. It would indeed be strange if it were discovered from critical philology and archæology that the English were pitted against their cousins at Sobraon, Chilianwallah, and Gujerat, and recovered India through their aid afterwards; and that some of our Saxon ancestors were those who fought best on the losing side at Marathon and Platæa. Certain it is that nearly all the now dominant races of mankind seem to have swarmed, at longer or shorter intervals, from some mysterious hive about or beyond the Caucasus. History records some of the waves of their western or eastern progress. Before the Scythians came a swarm of Cimmerians, sweeping over Asia Minor in the time of the predecessors of Croesus. Their name is still retained in the Crimea and Krim Tartary. They reappear as Cimbri in the latter days of the Roman republic, to which they were very near giving the finishing stroke. Then they are heard of in Schleswick and Jutland, and in Wales it is just possible that at the present day they call themselves Cymry. Before their coming a horde of Celts or Gauls had fallen on Borne, and another invaded Greece later on, leaving permanent settlements in Lombardy and Asia Minor.

In earlier history these tidal waves of population came at long intervals, so that the damage they did was reparable, and the silt they left behind them only strengthened the ground; but in the latter days of the Roman. Caesars, they succeeded one another so quickly that the Empire was swamped, and when the disturbance had subsided, the earth wore a face that was strange and new. The repentant sons of those savage children of the night, calling themselves English, French, Germans, and so forth, are now endeavouring to atone for their fathers' delinquencies by painfully diving after the relics of lost civilisations, and preserving whatever they can find with religious veneration for the use and delight of ages to come. By degrees we are opening up Greece, Italy, Assyria, Persia, India, Egypt, and discovering to our dismay that much of our boasted civilisation is but a parody on what prevailed centuries or millenniums ago; and that, with all our culture, we have still much barbarism to unlearn.

The Scythians described by Herodotus, like the Parthians who defeated the Roman legions, are a race of archers on horseback. From them the Greeks may have derived their fables of the Centaurs. As a pastoral people, they were generally averse to the tillage of land, and moved about with their herds from one feeding-ground to another, carrying their skin-covered huts on carts. That the Sarmatians were allied with them appears from the fable which traces their descent to the union of Scythians with Amazons, those wonderful viragos whose manlike habits are still kept up by the women of some Tartar tribes.

To account for the origin of the Scythians, Herodotus givers two fables. According to one, a certain Targitaus, a son of Jupiter, and grandson by his mother's side of the river Borysthenes or Dnieper, was the first man in Scythia. He had three sons. At first they were all equal, when there fell from heaven four implements of gold a plough, a yoke, a battle-axe, and a goblet. The eldest approached to take them, when they broke out into flames, and he durst not touch them. The second was rejected in like manner. The youngest fared better: he was able to handle the gold and to carry it off. This was a sign that he should be the king.^[1] From the three brothers sprang the three Scythian tribes—the "Royal" Scythians from the youngest. According to the other legend, which emanated from a Greek source, Hercules, when he was carrying off the cattle of Geryon (who lived on an island near Cadiz in Spain), came to Scythia, and being overcome by frost and fatigue, wrapt himself in his lion's skin, and fell asleep. When he awoke his team of mares had disappeared. He wandered in quest of them till he came to a country called the Bush. Here he found in a cave a strange being, half woman, half serpent, who detained him with her by holding out hopes of his recovering his mares, which she had caught and hidden.^[2] Three sons were the result of this strange intimacy—one called Agathyrsus, the other Gelonus, the other Scythes. Hercules, on his departure, left with the mother a bow, and a belt with a goblet attached to it. The son who could bend the bow was to inherit the land, the others to emigrate. Scythes, the youngest, bent the bow, and remained to be the father of the kings of Scythia, which accounted for the Scythian custom of wearing a goblet attached to the girdle.

In describing the geography of Scythia, of which Herodotus probably knew no more than he may have heard at the Greek factory at Olbia (near the site of the modern Kinburn), he is carried away by the interest of his subject, and launches out into a geographical digression, chiefly entertaining as a record of ancient notions, and as showing how facts become altered in passing from mouth to mouth. The "Scythia" of Herodotus seems to embrace "the basins of the Don, Dnieper, Dniester, and Boug, and the northern half of that of the Lower Danube"^[3]—i.e., a great portion of Russia, Bessarabia, Wallachia, and Moldavia. He tells strange stories of the tribes who dwelt around Scythia, as far as the uttermost parts of Europe. The Issedonians and the Androphagi were given to cannibalism; the former, like the Callatian Indians, feasting on their fathers, and keeping their skulls set in gold as heirlooms. This custom was, however, balanced with another, which would place them, as some might think now, in the van of progress—they gave women equal rights with men. The Neuri were said to change into wolves periodically; a tradition which still survives in the "wehr-wolf" of the Germans, and the "loup-garon" of the French. Livingstone relates that there were men in the country above the Zambesi who were supposed to become lions for a term, and that the souls of great captains were thought to pass into the king of beasts. But perhaps the story rose out of the fact that the Neuri wore wolf-skins in winter. There were people in the extreme north who slept six months in the year (Herodotus's informant may have said that there was night for six months), and who had goat's feet—that is, they may have worn moccasins. These may have suggested the Satyrs of the Greeks. A common superstition also placed a wonderfully good and happy people behind the region of the north wind, called Hyperboreans. So the "blameless" Ethiopians were supposed to inhabit the extreme South. The Greeks believed in goodness when a very long way from home. Our author mentions slightly, and with some disdain, the legend (known also to other writers) of one of these Hyperboreans, Abaris, who was said to have been even a greater traveller than himself who "walked round the world with an arrow, without once eating." But whatever may be thought of the latter part of the story, it seems highly probable that in Abaris's "arrow" we have a dim tradition of the magnetic needle. Its properties were certainly known to the Chinese long before Herodotus's date, and some rumour of the marvel might have reached Europe. The story tempts Herodotus into speculative cosmography. He is dissatisfied with the map of Hecatæus, who divided the habitable world into two equal portions, Europe and Asia, making it like a medal, with the great river of Ocean for a rim; not that he himself at all suspected the world of being a sphere, like some of the later ancients, but that he thought the distribution of the continents manifestly unsound.

If Herodotus had been in the habit of rejecting every tale that he did not believe, like some later writers, we should have lost the valuable passage which seems to prove that Africa was circumnavigated twenty-one centuries before the time of Diaz and Vasco de Gama. Pharaoh Necbo, after giving up the Suez canal as hopeless, sent a fleet of Phœnician ships down the Red Sea, ordering them to return to Egypt by the pillars of Hercules—that is, by the Strait of Gibraltar. As these were their orders, it is to be presumed that the route was already known. They spent three years in accomplishing their task, as they had to sow grain on the way, and wait for the harvest. Herodotus pronounces their voyage apocryphal, because they reported they had the sunrise on their right hand as they sailed round Libya, but which proves indeed that they had doubled the Cape of Good Hope. Sataspes, a Persian, tried to sail round Africa in the other direction, but failed. He had got beyond Cape Soloeis (Spartel) to a country inhabited by a dwarfish people, who dressed in palm-leaves; and there, as he declared, the ship stopped, and would go no further. He had evidently fallen in with the southerly trade-wind, and was not aware that, in order to proceed, he ought to have pushed across towards the South American continent. He met with a fate worse even than that of some later discoverers: he was not only disbelieved, but put to death on his return. Darius appears to have taken a great interest in such discoveries, and it was he who sent Scylax the Carian down the Indus to explore the Indian Ocean.^[4]

Amongst the strange customs which Herodotus records of the Scythians was their manner of keeping the anniversary of the burial of their kings. They slew fifty young men and fifty choice horses, stuffed the bodies of both, and set them up round the tomb in a circle, the men mounted on the horses, a ghastly body-guard for the royal ghost. Their great deity was the god of war, whom they worshipped under the shape of a scimitar. The Russian or Turkish vapour-bath would appear to have been another of their institutions; but Herodotus seems to confuse it with the process of intoxication by hemp-seed, which was known in early times. They were also distinguished by drunkenness and dislike of foreigners, like some of their supposed descendants, who are not yet cured of these weaknesses.

Against this nation Darius is said by Herodotus to have moved a vast army, bridging over the Thracian Bosphorus and the Danube with boats, and taking with him the Ionian fleet, to the custody of whose commanders he committed the bridge over the river, while he passed on into the northern wildernesses. The Scythians retreated before him towards the Tanais or Don. Then they led him such a long chase that at last his patience was worn out, and he sent to their king to demand that, as a man of honour, he should either stand and fight, or deliver earth and water in token of submission. The Scythian replied that he would soon send him some presents more to the purpose. These arrived in due course of time—a bird, a mouse, a frog, and five arrows. Darius at first thought that this signified a tender of homage; but Gobryas, one of the Seven, who had an older head, read the hieroglyphic letter as follows: "Unless you can fly like a bird, or burrow like a mouse, or swim like a frog, you will not escape the Scythian arrows." Darius took the hint and retreated. But Scythian horsemen had reached his bridge before him, and tried to prevail on the Ionians to destroy it. Miltiades the Athenian, now tyrant of the Chersonese (of whom we shall hear again), called upon his fellow-Greeks to strike, once for all, a blow for freedom; to cut the bridge, and leave their Persian masters to perish. But he was overruled in the interest of Darius by Histiæus of Miletus, and the Persian army returned without irretrievable loss from its military promenade in pursuit of the impalpable Scythians. Megabazus remained behind to reduce the Thracian tribes in the neighbourhood of the Hellespont.

This leads our author to discuss the ethnology of Thrace. It appeared to him that if its numerous tribes had been only united, they would have been a match for any existing nation. His Thrace must nearly have comprehended the present limits of Roumelia, Bulgaria, Servia, Moldavia, and Wallachia. The Getæ or Goths, who were subdued by Darius on his way to Scythia, believed that when they died they went to a good spirit named Zalmoxis, to whom they sent a messenger every five years; that is, they sacrificed a man by tossing him in the air and catching him on points of lances. Another tribe, when a child was born, sat round him, bewailing the miseries he would have to undergo; while in a case of death they made a jubilee of the funeral, believing the departed to have attained everlasting happiness. The same belief was connected with a custom in another tribe corresponding to the "Suttee" of the Hindoos. When a man died there was a sharp contention amongst his widows which was the worthiest to be slain over his grave, and the surviving wives considered themselves as in disgrace. They marked high birth by tattooing, like the South Sea Islanders; and thought idleness, war, and plunder honourable, but agriculture mean. The nation in general worshipped only the gods of battle, of wine, and of the chase. But the kings paid especial honour to a god corresponding to Hermes or Mercury, or the German Woden. Less was known of the tribes north of the Danube. The Sigynnæ wore a dress like that of the Medes, and possessed a breed of active, hardy, shaggy ponies, the description of which answers to those of the Shetland Islands. Or possibly some vague rumour of the harnessed dogs of Kamskatka may have reached the ears of our author. He does not think that the Thracians could have been correct in saying that a tract of country beyond the Danube was so infested with bees as to be uninhabitable, as bees cannot bear much cold. They may have meant mosquitoes.

Megabazus was now commissioned to transport bodily to Persia the whole tribe of the Pæonians, who lived to the north of Macedonia, of whose industry Darius had conceived an exaggerated notion, by seeing one of their women at Sardis bearing a pitcher on her head, leading a horse, and spinning flax all at the same time. He effected this task with no great difficulty; but other tribes resisted his arms with success, and especially those who inhabited the Lake Prasias. These must have been a relic of the most ancient population of Europe. Their habits were precisely the same as those of the singular people whose whole manner of life has been brought to light by the discovery of ancient piles in the lakes of Zurich in Switzerland, and who appear to have inhabited nearly all the comparatively shallow lakes that have hitherto been examined. This pile-city of Prasias is thus described:—

"Platforms supported on tall piles were fixed in the midst of the lake, approached from the land by a single narrow bridge. Originally all the citizens in common drove the piles for the platform, but afterwards every man drove three piles for every wife he married, and they had each several wives. Each man had his own hut on the platform, and his trap-door opening through the scaffolding on the lake below. They tied the little children by the leg to prevent their rolling into the water." (The proportionate number of children's bones found in the Swiss lakes would argue that this custom was but negligently observed in those regions.) "They fed their horses and other cattle upon fish, of which there was such an abundance that they had only to let down a basket through the trapdoor into the water, and draw it up full."

What was the ultimate fate of this amphibious colony we do not learn; but very many of the corresponding settlements in central Europe bear traces of having been destroyed by fire. For the present these lake-people were impregnable, and Megabazus turned his attention to Macedonia, sending first to the court of King Amyntas an embassy of seven noble Persians to demand earth and water. Amyntas entertained them at a feast; but when their attentions to the ladies of the court began to be offensive, his son Alexander, indignant at the insult, dressed up some Macedonian youths to personate the ladies, whom he had managed to withdraw under promise of their return, and assassinated the Persian envoys when heavy with wine. An expedition was afterwards sent to inquire after their fate, but Alexander conciliated the commander with hush-money and the hand of his sister in marriage. The royal family of Macedonia were of Argive origin, according to Herodotus; otherwise, he says, they would not have been allowed to contend at the Olympic games. This Greek descent was used subsequently by Philip of Macedon as a plea for his intervention in the affairs of Greece.

A casual notice of the founding of Cyrene leads Herodotus into Libya, whither we have no space to follow him. He touches on the known North African tribes, arid glances at the unknown, relating many marvellous stories; in fact, his love for anthropology and geography makes him seize any excuse for imparting information. He wellnigh exhausts the world as known to the ancients, and might have wept, as Alexander did that he had no more worlds to conquer, that he had no more to describe. Of one remote and apocryphal region he confesses he knew nothing. He was not sure that the islands called the Cassiterides ("Tin-Islands") had any real existence; but he had been told that tin came "from the ends of the earth." Such is the sole notice which the great traveller has left of us or our ancestors; for it is probable that the Cassiterides were the coast of Cornwall.

1. A somewhat similar story was told to Speke by Rumanika, king of Karaguè.
   "Before their old father Dagara died, he had unwittingly said to the mother of Rogero, although he was the youngest born, 'what a fine king he would make;' and the mother in consequence tutored him to expect to succeed, although primogeniture is the law of the land, subject to the proviso, which was also the rule with the ancient Persians, that the heir must have been born after his father's accession, which condition was here fulfilled in the case of all three brothers. . . . Rumanika maintained that Rogero was entirely in the wrong, not only because the law was against him, but the judgment of heaven also. On the death of the father, the three sons, who only could pretend to the crown, had a small mystic drum placed before them by the officers of state. It was only feather-weight in reality, but being loaded with charms, became too heavy for those not entitled to the crown to move. Neither of the other brothers could move it an inch, while Rumanika easily lifted it with his little finger. . . . He (Rumanika) moreover said that a new test had been invented in his case besides the ordeal of lifting the drum. The supposed rightful heir had to plant himself on a certain spot, when the land on which he stood would rise up like a telescope drawn out till it reached the skies. If he was entitled to the throne, it would then let him down again without harm; but if otherwise, collapse and dash him to pieces. Of course as he survived the trial, it was successful. On another occasion a piece of iron was found in the ground, about the shape and size of a carrot. This iron could not be extracted by any one but Rumanika himself, who pulled it up with the greatest ease."—'Lake Victoria;' a compilation from the Memoirs of Captains Speke and Grant.
2. These legends of serpent-women are not uncommon in German mythology. The following adventure is related by the brothers Grimm: "One Leonhard, who was a stammerer, but a good fellow, and of irreproachable morals, lost his way one day as he was visiting some underground vaults of the nature of catacombs. All at once he found himself in a delicious meadow, in the midst of which was playing a young girl, half concealed by the herbage. She invited him to come and rest by her side. Leonhard, out of pure politeness, obeyed her eagerly, and then became aware of a fact which the long grass had at first prevented his observing,—that the damsel, the upper part of whose body was white and beautiful, terminated below in a scaly and serpent-like tail. He wished to fly, but his legs were immediately caught and embraced by her tail. Thus forced to listen, he now heard the poor creature's history. She was born a princess, and was enjoying court society, when a malicious enchanter charmed her into her present state, from which she could only be released on one condition, and that was, that she could prevail on some fair young man, who must be perfectly innocent, to give her three kisses. The youth must not be older than twenty-two. There was time for Leonhard to have fulfilled the conditions, for he would be twenty-three on that very day in two hours more. But, unfortunately, he stammered, and the two hours were almost gone before he had made the necessary preliminary statement as to his birth. Then he gave her the first kiss. Upon that she was seized with violent convulsions, and rolled so wildly on the grass that he fled in alarm. He was, however, recalled by her supplications and promises, and gave her the second kiss. The effect of this was still more electric than that of the first. Her eyes burned like fire, she sprang up, her face glowed and her cheeks seemed bursting; she whirled about like a demoniac, and hissed, shrieked, and yelled like a very Melusina. Frightened out of his wits, the youth rushed away through the meadow and catacombs till the hideous object was out of sight; but after a time, reflecting that he might have made his fortune and married a princess, he turned to go back once more. It was too late; for, to his unspeakable chagrin, he just then heard a village clock strike twelve, which made him twenty-three years of age.—X. R. Saintine, 'La Mythologie du Rhin' (free translation).
3. Heeren.
4. This Scylax, or more probably a later writer who traded on his name, brought home some remarkable travellers' stories. He described an Indian tribe whose feet were so large that they used them as parasols, and another whose ears were so capacious that they slept in them.—See Rawlinson, I. p. 50, note.