Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

the scythians as others saw them
out on his journeys and spent some years in Athens, where he gained a reputation as
a skilled philosopher and was sufficiently revered to be given Athenian citizenship.
Among the many wise utterances ascribed to him two will give some flavour of his
widely reported wit: ‘Laws are spiders’ webs which catch little flies but cannot hold
big ones’ and, about democracy, ‘Wise men speak, fools decide’. For such wisdom he
is seen as a forerunner of the Cynics. Brought up in the cosmopolitan world of Olbia
where he acquired a level of Greek culture, he was readily accepted in Athens, but
when he returned home he was felled by an arrow shot by his brother. Herodotus
used the story to illustrate his contention that ‘the Scythians have an extreme hatred
of all foreign customs particularly those in use among the Greeks’. While this may
have been true in the sixth century, over the years the frontier communities learnt to
appreciate each other’s values.
The Athenian acceptance of educated Scythians like Anacharsis raises the question
of how many more Scythians were living in Athens other than the much-mocked
police force. Scythians were certainly in evidence in the Kerameikos, the graveyard
just outside the city. In the grave precinct of Dionysios of Kollytos two statues of
Scythian archers were discovered not far from a deposit containing eighty bronze
arrowheads. It is possible that the precinct contained the burial of a deceased Scythian,
perhaps a valued retainer in the service of his master Dionysios. The burial is a
reminder that Athens may have had a Scythian community active across the social
spectrum.
Later Encounters
During the fourth century bc the kingdom of Macedonia, beyond the northern border
of Greece, grew to be a polity of considerable strength. Under King Philip II (r.
360–336 bc) its armies advanced northwards through Thrace, reaching as far as the
River Danube, where they encountered Scythians under the leadership of King Ateas
(c.429–339 bc). In his early life Ateas had fallen out of favour with the Royal Scythians
but had established a powerful kingdom of his own in the Pontic coastal zone
between the Danube and the Dniester. Like Philip, he too was interested in the region
to the south of the Danube, and in the late 340s the two kings were cooperating in
campaigning against the Histriani of Thrace. But in 339 the relationship soured when
Ateas refused to send Philip help to support his advance on Byzantium. Finally the
two former allies confronted each other in battle on the Danube estuary. The Macedonians
emerged triumphant: Ateas, who was 90 if tradition is correct, was killed
and Philip wounded. As reparations the Macedonians returned home with 20,000
Scythian women captives and a large number of horses. Three years later, in 336, in
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