Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

the scythians as others saw them
sian army deeper and deeper into the deserted land, always staying one day’s march
ahead. Eventually, when the Persians were dangerously far from the Danube, the
Scythians began harrying the army with surprise attacks while sending ambassadors
to the Ionians, who had been left to guard the Danube crossing, with the intention of
trying to persuade them to defect, thus cutting off the Persians’ retreat. Herodotus,
whose narrative we have been following, adds an intriguing detail at this point. The
Scythian horsemen, he says, were at a disadvantage because their horses were frightened
by the braying of the asses and the appearance of the mules accompanying the
Persians. They were totally unused to such creatures.
The stand-off continued until at last a confrontation of the two armies seemed
about to happen, but before the armies could engage a hare started up between them
and the Scythian cavalry rushed off in pursuit leaving the Persians astonished and
frustrated. According to Herodotus, Darius turned to one of his officers and said,
‘These men do indeed despise us utterly.’ An amusing anecdote which may even be
true, it nicely characterizes the stark cultural differences between the two forces, the
one stolid, controlled, and over-trained, the other whose whole being was mobility
and spontaneity.
It was at this point that Darius decided to abandon the campaign and to retreat
under cover of darkness, leaving his sick and wounded and his braying asses and
mules to deceive the Scythian scouts. When the Scythians realized what had happened
they divided their force, the main part tracking the retreating Persians while
the other group sped to the Danube crossing in a last attempt to persuade the Ionians
to destroy the bridge and to pull back leaving the Persians stranded. In the event, this
did not happen and Darius and his dispirited army crossed safely from Scythia to the
comparative safety of Thrace.
Twenty years later, in 492, the Persian armies entered Thrace and Macedonia again,
this time intent on breaking the power of Athens, but their failure at Marathon in 490
and at Salamis and Plataea in 480–479 brought the Persian adventure in Europe to an
end.
The sixth century bc was a time when the steppe nomads came increasingly in
touch with the sedentary, urban world of Greece and Persia. For the Central Asian
nomads it was contact with the Persians that made the greatest impression but it
was a diffuse encounter enacted over the limitless desert and desert steppe. Those
occupying the Pontic steppe, on the other hand, faced the Greek world across a confined
coastal interface, their interaction carefully articulated through the port colonies.
The brief Persian intrusion into the region in 513/512, though it generated stories
rich in character and incident, can have had little, if any, lasting effect. The rhythms
of coexistence driven by commerce provided a steadying influence. And so it was
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