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People get to like the darkness of the extreme north in course of time. The painted Britons, the Cimmerians, the Hyperboreans, are content never to see the sun at all, which is your god. Here your own god reigns; why quarrel with him?” “The sun of Greece is light,” answered Callista; “the sun of Africa is fire. I am no fire-worshipper.”
Meanwhile, the petty but warlike monarchy founded by Gyges had preserved the Asiatic Greeks from dangers yet more formidable than its own ambition. From a remote period, savage and ferocious tribes, among which are pre-eminent the Treres and Cimmerians, had often ravaged the inland plains now for plunder, now for settlement.
First he must go to the land of the dead to consult the shade of Teiresias, the blind old prophet, who would help him. Following the goddess' instructions, they sailed to the land of the Cimmerians on the confines of the earth. There Odysseus dug a trench into which he poured the blood of slain victims which he did not allow the dead spirits to touch till Teiresias appeared.
One element in it seems to have been of the same blood as a strong pastoral population which was then ranging the steppes of southern Russia and west central Asia, and would come to be known vaguely to the earliest Greeks as Cimmerians, and scarcely less precisely to their descendants, as Scyths. Its name would be a household word in the East before long.
He now sent a second time to Asshur-bani-pal, and told him that since his submission he had been able to defeat the Cimmerians, who had formerly ravaged his land with impunity; and he begged his acceptance of two Cimmerian chiefs, whom he had taken in battle, together with other presents, which Asshur-bani-pal regarded as a "tribute."
The Scythians were the ancestors of the modern Cossacks, and even in those remote days they were famous for their horsemanship. The Cimmerians, hard pressed by the Scythians, crossed from Europe into Asia and conquered the land of the Hittites.
Yet should a fly presume to settle on the silken folds of their gilded umbrellas; should a sunbeam penetrate through some unguarded and imperceptible chink, they deplore their intolerable hardships, and lament, in affected language, that they were not born in the land of the Cimmerians, the regions of eternal darkness.
But others say that the Cimmerians, with whom the ancient Greeks were first acquainted, were no large portion of the whole nation, but merely a tribe or faction that was driven out by the Scythians and passed into Asia from the Lake Mæotis, under the command of Lygdamis: they further say that the chief part of the Scythian nation and the most warlike part lived at the very verge of the continent, on the coast of the external sea, in a tract shaded, woody, and totally sunless, owing to the extent and closeness of the forests, which reach into the interior as far as the Hercynii ; and with respect to the heavens, their position was in that region where the pole , having a great elevation owing to the inclination of the parallels, appears to be only a short distance from the spectator's zenith, and the days and nights are of equal length and share the year between them, which furnished Homer with the occasion for his story of Ulysses visiting the ghosts.
The Cimmerians fled before this more warlike race, abandoned their country on the northern coast of the Euxine, and invaded Asia Minor. They occupied Sardis, and threatened Ephesus, and finally were overwhelmed in the mountainous regions of Cilicia. Some, however, effected a settlement in the territory where the Greek city of Sinope was afterward built.
There was a moment when the great Semitic Empire founded by the Sargonides touched even the Ægæan, for Gyges, king of Lydia, finding himself menaced by the Cimmerians, did homage to Assurbanipal, and sued for help against those foes to all civilization. Assurbanipal at the chase. Kouyundjik. British Museum. Like their ancestors, these great soldiers were also great builders.
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