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Updated: May 21, 2025
The people we are speaking of are happily ignorant of such enjoyment of money, for they know no other use of it than that of promoting mirth and good humour; for which end they generously bring their gains into a common stock, whereby they whose gains are small have an equal enjoyment with those whose profits are larger, excepting only that a mark of ignominy is affixed on those who do not contribute to the common stock proportionably to their abilities, and the opportunities they have of gain; and this is the source of their uninterrupted happiness; for by this means they have no griping usurer to grind them, lordly possessor to trample on them, nor any envyings to torment them; they have no settled habitations, but, like the Scythians of old, remove from place to place, as often as their conveniency or pleasure requires it, which renders their life a perpetual scene of the greatest variety.
Herodotus in the fifth century wrote much about these so-called Scythians, whom he divides into the agricultural Scythians, presumably of the Black Lands, and the nomad Scythians, of the Barren Steppes.
It is at this point in their conflict with the Scythians that the devotion of the friends is best illustrated: the painter makes each of them disregard his own enemies, and ward off his friend's assailants, seeking to intercept the arrows before they can reach him, and counting lightly of death, if he can save his friend, and receive in his own person the wounds that are meant for the other.
As soon as Darius had passed the river, the Scythians sent embassadors to all their people, proposing to them to form a general alliance against the invader. "We ought to make common cause against him," said they; "for if he subdues one nation, it will only open the way for an attack upon the rest.
The religious arts of Attila were not less skillfully adapted to the character of his age and country. It was natural enough that the Scythians should adore, with peculiar devotion, the god of war; but as they were incapable of forming either an abstract idea, or a corporeal representation, they worshipped their tutelar deity under the symbol of an iron cimeter.
The term Scythians seems to have been a generic designation, applied indiscriminately to vast hordes of half-savage tribes occupying those wild and inhospitable regions of the north, that extended along the shores of the Black and Caspian Seas, and the banks of the Danube.
"They do indeed despise us," said Darius, "since, on the eve of a battle, they can lose all thoughts of us and of their danger, and abandon their posts to hunt a hare!" That evening a council of war was held. It was concluded that the Scythians must be very confident and strong in their position, and that, if a general battle were to be hazarded, it would be very doubtful what would be the result.
The mountain wall of Œta would hinder him no more. But the triumph had been bought with a price which made Mardonius and every other general in the king’s host shake his head. “Lord,” reported Hystaspes, commander of the Scythians, “one man in every seven of my band is slain, and those the bravest.”
This invasion brought on a kind of forced truce, but when the Medes had compelled the Scythians to retreat to their deserts by the bold stroke which Herodotus admires so much, they quickly resumed the offensive . We cannot follow all the fluctuations of the conflict; the information left by the early historians is vague and contradictory, and we have no cuneiform inscriptions to help us out.
The Scythians came to destroy his bridge across the Danube while his forces were still beyond the river, and, had it not been for the very extraordinary fidelity and zeal of Histiæus, who had been left to guard the post, they would have succeeded in doing it.
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