Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

the scythians as others saw them
seem curious but the explanation may be that it was unthinkable for a Greek to lay
hands on another Greek. When restraint was necessary a magistrate would resort to
ordering specially designated slaves to perform the distasteful task for him.
In Greek drama the Scythian archer police are depicted as figures of fun. Lysistrata
resists arrest, requiring additional Scythian archers to attempt to restrain her.
Women join in to support her and in the melee which ensues Lysistrata has to call off
her friends to protect the demoralized police, who are now cowering on the ground.
In another of his plays, Thesmophoriazusae, Aristophanes has his Scythian policeman
distracted from his duty by a dancing girl and mocks him mercilessly for his otherness—his
unusual appearance and his almost incoherent Greek. While a lumbering,
stupid police force is always an easy target for a playwright (witness Gilbert and Sullivan),
Aristophanes is deliberately ridiculing the Scythian archers because they are
foreign barbarians.
Another stereotype of the Scythian is as a drunkard. That Scythians preferred to
drink their wine undiluted was, to the Greeks, uncivilized behaviour. The point is
explicitly made in a poem by Anacreon:
Let’s not fall
Into riot and disorder
With our wine like the Scythians
But let us drink in moderation
Listening to lovely hymns.
In Lysistrata, when the leader of the Scythian policemen tells one of his men to pay
attention and stop looking for a tavern, the Athenian audience will have recognized
the joke. Drunkenness was not solely the weakness of the Scythians. In the Graeco-
Roman world the Celts’ love of wine was legendary and the Germans were also noted
for their lack of moderation. Drunkenness was part of the caricature of the barbarian.
That ‘Scythians’ carried with it an element of contempt was evident when, in the
fourth century, Aeschines tried to denigrate his political opponent Demosthenes by
saying that he was descended from a Scythian. Demosthenes’ maternal grandÂfather,
Gylon, had been exiled to the Crimea and there had married a Scythian woman.
Their child, Kleoboule, who married a Greek, was Demosthenes’ mother. The fact
that Aeschines believed this to be a valid cause for insult is an interesting reflection
on Greek values.
But this is not to say that all Scythians were derided in Athens, as the case of the
philosopher Anacharsis demonstrates. Anacharsis grew up in, or in the vicinity of,
the Greek colony of Olbia. His father Gnurus was a Scythian and his mother was
Greek; he was probably a member of the royal house. In the late sixth century he set
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