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He gained a number of victories over the Scythic hordes; and effectually checked their direct progress towards the south, throwing them thereby upon the east and the south-east. Danger to Parthia from the Scyths seems after his reign to have passed away.
Elam had been occupied by the Persians, the Scyths, whom classical writers have confounded with the Medes, had overrun and ravaged Assyria and Mesopotamia, while Palestine and Syria had fallen to the share of Egypt.
If he did not in the course of his long reign advance the Parthian frontier, at any rate he was not obliged to retract it. Apparently, he ceded nothing to the Scyths as the price of their assistance. He maintained the Parthian supremacy over Northern Media. He lost no inch of territory to the Romans.
Subsequently, in the time of the Antonines, the theory was started that the Parthians were Scyths, whom Sesostris, on his return from his Scythian expedition, brought into Asia and settled in the mountain-tract lying east of the Caspian. It can scarcely be thought that these notices have very much historical value.
It is evidently not improbable that the sufferings endured at the hands of the Scyths may have disposed the nations east of the river to adopt the same remedy and that, so soon as Media had proved her strength, first by shaking herself free of the Scythic invaders and then conquering Assyria. the tribes of these parts accepted her as at once their mistress and their deliverer.
The Medes, in their strong upland country, abounding in rocky hills, and running up in places into mountain-chains, had probably suffered much less from the ravages of the Scyths than the Assyrians in their comparatively defenceless plains.
It is possible that the reduction of these countries under the Median yoke was not so much a conquest as a voluntary submission of the inhabitants to the power which alone seemed strong enough to save them from the hated domination of the Scyths. According to Strabo, Armenia and Cappadocia were the regions where the Scythic ravages had been most severely felt.
It was probably as early as B.C. 627, five years after the Scyths crossed the Caucasus, according to Herodotus, that Cyaxares, having sufficiently re-established his power in Media, began once more to aspire after foreign conquests.
And then he began a discourse about the Phoenicians, the Scyths or Goths, the Tuath de Danans, Tacitus, and King MacNeil; which was, to say the truth, the very first news I had heard of those personages.
East of that sea also was a vast steppe-region rolling plains of sand or grass the home of nomadic hordes similar in character to those who drank the waters of the Don and Wolga. The Sacse, Massagetse, and Dahse of this country, who dwelt about the Caspian, the Aral, and the Lower Jaxartes, were an enemy scarcely less formidable than the Sarmatians and the Scyths of the West.
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