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The extremes of form and color are certainly separated, but without regard to the races, which can not be included in any of these classes, and which have been alternately termed Scythian and Allophyllic.
Asia beheld with astonishment and awe the uninterrupted progress of a hero, the sweep of whose conquests was as wide and rapid as that of her own barbaric kings, or the Scythian or Chaldaean hordes; but, far unlike the transient whirlwinds of Asiatic warfare, the advance of the Macedonian leader was no less deliberate than rapid; at every step the Greek power took root, and the language and the civilization of Greece were planted from the shores of the AEgean to the banks of the Indus, from the Caspian and the great Hyrcanian plain to the cataracts of the Nile; to exist actually for nearly a thousand years, and in their effects to endure for ever."
In all their invasions of the civilized empires of the South, the Scythian shepherds have been uniformly actuated by a savage and destructive spirit.
Against her trade the exasperated infidel had closed the Egyptian ports, but she did not scruple to coax the barbarous prince of the Scythian Tartars, newly descended upon the shores of the Black Sea; and having secured his friendship, she proceeded, without imparting her design to her Latin allies at Constantinople, to plant a commercial colony at the mouth of the Don, where the city of Azof stands.
The civil came to predominate over the military character; and the standing armies of Rome gradually degenerated into a corrupt, neglected, and undisciplined militia, incapable of resisting the attack of the German and Scythian militias, which soon afterwards invaded the western empire.
If you wonder at this, wonder rather at the tails of the Scythian rams, which weighed above thirty pounds each; and of the Surian sheep, who need, if Tenaud say true, a little cart at their heels to bear up their tail, it is so long and heavy. You female lechers in the plain countries have no such tails.
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.
In the execution of this cruel and ignominious treaty the imperial officers were forced to massacre several loyal and noble deserters who refused to devote themselves to certain death; and the Romans forfeited all reasonable claims to the friendship of any Scythian people, by this public confession, that they were destitute either of faith or power to protect the suppliant who had embraced the throne of Theodosius.
Various names are given to the people with whom Persia waged her wars during this period. They are called Turks, Huns, sometimes even Chinese, but these terms seem, to be used in a vague way, as "Scythian" was by the ancients; and the special ethnic designation of the people appears to be quite a different name from any of them.
There is every reason to believe that swarms of these nations made their way into distant parts of the earth, at periods long before the date of the Scythian invasion of Asia, which is the earliest inroad of the nomadic race that history records.
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