Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/270

 254 HISTORY OF .Jh'EECE. king Kyaxares, called away from the siege of Nineveh to oppose them, was totally defeated ; and the Scythians became full mas- ters of the country. They spread themselves over the whole of Upper Asia, as far as Palestine and the borders of P^gypt, where Psammetichus the Egyptian king met them, and only redeemed his kingdom from invasion by prayers and costly presents. In their return, a detachment of them sacked the temple of Aphrodite at Askalon ; an act of sacrilege which the goddess avenged both upon the plunderers and their descendants, to the third and fourth generation. Twenty-eight years did their dominion in Upper Asia continue, 1 with intolerable cruelty and oppression ; until, at length, Kyaxares and the Medes found means to entrap the chiefs into a banquet, and slew them in the hour of intoxication. The Scyth- ian host once expelled, the Medes resumed their empire. He- rodotus tells us that these Scythians returned to the Tauric Cher- sonese, where they found that, during their long absence, their wives had intermarried with the slaves, while the new offspring which had grown up refused to readmit them. A deep trench had been drawn across a line 2 over which their march lay, and the new-grown youth defended it with bravery, until at length, so the story runs, the returning masters took up their whips instead of arms, and scourged the rebellious slaves into sub- mission. Little as we know about the particulars of these Cimmerian and Scythian inroads, they deserve notice as the first at least the first historically known among the numerous invasions of cultivated Asia and Europe by the nomades of Tartar)". Huns, Avars, Bulgarians, Magyars, Turks, Mongols, Tartars, etc., aro 1 Herodot. i, 105. The account given by Herodotus of the punishment inflicted by the offended Aphrodite on the Scythian plunderers, and on their children's children down to his time, becomes especially interesting when we combine it with the statement of Ilippokrates respecting the peculiar inca- pacities which were so apt to affect the Scythians, and the religious interpre- tation put upon them by the sufferers (De Acre, Locis, ct Aquis, c. vi, s. 106-109). 3 See, in reference to the direction of this ditch, Volckcr, in the work above referred to on the Scythia of Herodotus (Mythische Geographic, ch. vii, p. 177). That the ilitch existed, there can be no reasonable doubt; though the talc tjiven by Herodotus is highly improbable.