The gold caught fire.

There was a plough, a yoke, a battle-axe and a shallow cup, all of gold. They fell from the sky onto a land where no one yet lived. The eldest brother walked up to take them, and the gold began to burn, so he drew back. The second brother walked up, and the gold burned again.

The youngest walked up, and the fire went out.

That is what the Scythians told me about their own beginnings.

I. Where Darius Was Going

Let me be clear about why I stop here.

After Darius took Babylon, he marched in person against the Scythians. He had an old score to settle. Long before, the Scythians, chasing the Cimmerians, had burst into Asia, beaten the Medes, and ruled upper Asia for twenty-eight years.

When a king sets out across the world to punish a people, I owe you an account of who that people are and where they came from.

That is exactly the trouble. The Scythians have one story. The Greeks who live around the Black Sea have another. Greeks and foreigners alike tell a third. A poet from Proconnesus left a fourth in his verses. The answers do not agree.

I will take them one at a time, and when I come to one I believe, or one I do not, I will say so.

II. Gold From the Sky

The Scythians say they are the youngest of all nations.

In the beginning, they say, this land was empty. Then the first man appeared, and his name was Targitaus. His parents, according to them, were Zeus and a daughter of the river Borysthenes. I do not believe this, but it is what they say.

Targitaus had three sons: Lipoxais, Arpoxais, and the youngest, Colaxais.

It was while the three brothers ruled that the four golden things fell from the sky into Scythia.

The eldest saw them first and went to take them, and the gold burned. When he had backed away, the second went forward, and the gold burned just the same. Both elder brothers were driven back by the fire. When the youngest came near, it went out, and he carried the gold home to his own house.

Seeing this, the two elder brothers agreed together and handed the whole kingship to the youngest.

III. A Thousand Years, No More and No Less

The Scythians also told me how their tribes divided.

From Lipoxais, the eldest, came the clan called the Auchatae. From Arpoxais, the middle brother, came the Catiari and the Traspians. From the youngest, the one who became king, came the Paralatae.

All of them together call themselves Skolotoi, after a king's name. "Scythians" is the name we Greeks gave them.

They have counted the years. From Targitaus, their first king, to the day Darius crossed into their land, was a thousand years in all, they say, no more and no less.

The Scythian kings still guard that sacred gold with the greatest care, and every year they offer great sacrifices to appease it. At the festival, the Scythians say, anyone who falls asleep in the open air with the sacred gold will not live out the year. And for that reason he is given as much land as he can ride around on horseback in a single day.

Colaxais later divided his huge country into three kingdoms for his sons, and made the largest of them the one where the gold is kept.

They also say that farther north, beyond their neighbors, no one can see or travel any more, because the earth and the air are full of falling feathers that block the view.

About those feathers I have my own opinion. North of that country it snows all the time, less in summer than in winter. Anyone who has seen thick snow falling close by knows what I mean: snow looks like feathers. I think the Scythians and their neighbors speak of feathers when what they mean is snow.

IV. Heracles Loses His Horses

The Greeks who live on the Black Sea tell something else entirely.

They say Heracles, driving the cattle of Geryon, came to this land. It was empty then; now the Scythians live in it.

Geryon lived far outside the Black Sea, on the island the Greeks call Erythea, near Gadira, beyond the Pillars of Heracles, on the shore of Ocean.

As for Ocean, the Greeks say it rises where the sun rises and flows around the whole earth, but they cannot prove it.

In any case, they say Heracles came from there to the country now called Scythia. Winter and frost caught him there. He pulled his lion skin over himself and fell asleep, and while he slept, his mares, which were grazing in harness, vanished by some chance of the gods.

V. The Snake-Woman in the Cave

When Heracles woke, he looked for them. He went through the whole land and came at last to a place called the Woodland.

There, in a cave, he found a creature of double form: half maiden, half serpent. Above the buttocks she was a woman; below, a snake.

He was astonished, but he asked her whether she had seen some stray mares.

She said she had them. But she would not give them back until he lay with her.

Heracles agreed, for the sake of the horses.

Afterward, though, she kept putting off returning them. She wanted Heracles with her as long as possible, and all he wanted was to take the horses and go.

At last she gave them back and said: "These mares came here, and I kept them safe for you, and you have paid me for it: I have three sons by you. Tell me what to do with them when they are grown. Shall I settle them here, since this land is mine to rule, or send them to you?"

VI. A Bow and a Belt

Heracles answered, so they say:

"When you see that the boys have become men, do this and you will not go wrong. Whichever of them you see draw this bow like this, and fasten this belt like this, let him live in this land. Whoever falls short of what I ask, send him out of the country. Do this, and you will be content yourself, and you will have done what I told you."

Until then Heracles had always carried two bows. He drew one of them, showed her how the belt was fastened, and gave her the bow and the belt. At the end of the belt's clasp hung a golden cup.

Having given them, he left.

The three sons grew up. Their mother named them: the eldest Agathyrsus, the next Gelonus, and the youngest Scythes. She remembered Heracles' instructions and carried them out.

The two elder sons could not manage the task, and their mother drove them out of the land. Scythes, the youngest, succeeded and stayed.

From Scythes son of Heracles, say the Black Sea Greeks, comes the whole line of Scythian kings. And because of that golden cup, Scythians still wear cups hanging from their belts to this day.

You may have noticed. In both stories the land begins empty, there are three sons, the youngest inherits the throne, and there is gold. Yet one makes the founder a grandson of Zeus, and the other makes him a son of Heracles.

VII. The Story I Prefer

There is a third account. It is the one most often told, and it is the one I myself lean toward.

There is no gold from the sky in it, and no snake-woman.

Once, the Scythians were nomads living in Asia. They were hard pressed in war by the Massagetae, so they crossed the river Araxes and fled into the land of the Cimmerians. The country the Scythians hold now is said to have belonged to the Cimmerians in ancient times.

The Scythians came on in force. Seeing a great army approaching, the Cimmerians met to decide what to do.

They split into two camps, and both held firm.

The common people thought the thing to do was leave. There was no sense in staying to risk their lives for so little.

Their kings said they should stay and fight the invaders for the land.

Neither side could persuade the other. The people could not move the kings, and the kings could not move the people.

VIII. The Grave by the Tyras

The people resolved to go without fighting and hand the land over to the invaders.

The kings resolved to die and lie in their own land rather than flee with the people. They reckoned up how much good they had enjoyed there, and how many evils would likely await them as exiles from their homeland.

Once they had decided, the kings divided into two equal bands and fought each other until every one of them had died at the others' hands.

The Cimmerian people buried them beside the river Tyras. The grave can still be seen.

When the burial was done, the people left the country. The Scythians arrived to find it empty and took it.

IX. People Who Survive in Place-Names

The Cimmerians left, but their name stayed.

To this day there are Cimmerian walls in Scythia, and a Cimmerian ferry, and a region called Cimmeria, and a strait called the Cimmerian Bosporus.

And it is plain that the Cimmerians, fleeing the Scythians, went into Asia and settled on the peninsula where the Greek city of Sinope now stands. The Scythians, pursuing them, lost the way and burst into Media. The Cimmerians kept to the coast as they fled, while the Scythians kept the Caucasus on their right until they turned inland and entered the Median country.

What followed I have told already, when I spoke of Lydia and Media. The Cimmerians came into Asia and took Sardis, all but the citadel. The Scythians entered Media, beat the Medes, and ruled Asia for twenty-eight years. That is the score Darius set out to settle, so many years later.

This third story is told by Greeks and foreigners alike.

X. A Poet's Far North

There is a fourth account, and it comes from a poem.

The poet was Aristeas son of Caystrobius, a man of Proconnesus. In his verses he said that, seized by Apollo, he travelled as far as the Issedones.

Beyond the Issedones, he said, live the one-eyed Arimaspians; beyond them, the griffins that guard gold; beyond them, the Hyperboreans, whose land runs down to the sea.

"Arimaspian" is a Scythian word. In Scythian, "arima" means one, and "spou" means eye.

According to Aristeas, all these peoples except the Hyperboreans are forever attacking their neighbors, the Arimaspians first of all. The Arimaspians pushed the Issedones out of their country, the Issedones pushed out the Scythians, and the Cimmerians, who lived by the southern sea, were pressed by the Scythians until they left their land.

So even his account does not agree with what the Scythians say.

XI. The Empty Room in the Fuller's Shop

I have said where Aristeas came from. About the man himself I heard a story in Proconnesus and Cyzicus, and I will tell it too.

They say Aristeas was as well born as any man in his city. One day he went into a fuller's shop in Proconnesus and died there. The fuller locked the shop and went to tell the dead man's family.

The news of Aristeas' death was already all over town when a man of Cyzicus, just come from the town of Artace, stood up to dispute it. He said he had met Aristeas on the road heading toward Cyzicus, and had spoken with him.

He argued hard. Meanwhile the family arrived at the fuller's shop with everything needed to take up the body. The door was opened. There was no Aristeas there, dead or alive.

In the seventh year after that, Aristeas appeared again in Proconnesus and composed the poem the Greeks now call the Arimaspea. Having made it, he vanished a second time.

That is what those two cities say. What follows is something I know.

XII. The Statue Among the Laurels

Two hundred and forty years after Aristeas vanished the second time, something happened to the Metapontines in Italy. I worked out that number by comparing what I learned in Proconnesus and in Metapontum.

The Metapontines say Aristeas appeared in their country and told them to build an altar to Apollo and to set beside it a statue bearing the name of Aristeas of Proconnesus.

He told them that of all the Greeks of Italy, theirs was the only land Apollo had come to, and that he had come with the god. Now he was Aristeas; then, when he followed the god, he had been a crow.

When he had said this, he vanished.

The Metapontines sent to Delphi to ask the god what the apparition meant. The Pythia told them to do as it said; if they obeyed, it would go better for them. So they did.

And now, beside the image of Apollo, there stands a statue bearing the name of Aristeas, with laurel trees around it. The image stands in the marketplace.

That is enough about Aristeas.

XIII. No One Has Seen It

There they are, all four stories.

The Scythians say they descend from Zeus and received the gold from heaven a thousand years ago. The Black Sea Greeks say they descend from a son of Heracles and a snake-woman. The third account, told by Greeks and foreigners both, says they were nomads driven out of Asia by the Massagetae who took the land the Cimmerians gave up, and that is the one I believe most. Aristeas says they were pushed here by one people after another from the far north.

As for what lies north of Scythia, no one knows for certain. I can find no one who claims to have seen it with his own eyes.

Even Aristeas, the poet, did not claim in his own verses to have gone beyond the Issedones. What lay farther he knew by hearsay; the Issedones told him, he said.

What I can do is tell everything that report allowed us to reach, as far and as accurately as it would go.

The Scythian kings still guard that gold and sacrifice to it every year. At the festival, whoever falls asleep in the open air with it, they say, will not live out the year. In their story, the throne belongs to the one for whom the fire goes out.

I set myself a rule in this book: I must record what people say, but I am not bound to believe all of it.

Sources, versions, and editorial boundaries

1. Core narrative: Herodotus, Histories 4.5 (the Scythians call themselves the youngest nation; Targitaus and the claim about his parents, with Herodotus' "I do not believe it"; the three brothers; plough, yoke, battle-axe and cup falling from the sky; the gold burning and going out; the kingship given to the youngest); 4.6 (the tribes descended from each brother; the name Skolotoi; "Scythians" as the Greek name); 4.7 (the thousand years; the sacred gold, the yearly sacrifice, the sleeper who will not live out the year and his day's ride of land; Colaxais' three kingdoms; the northern "feathers"); 4.8–10 (the Black Sea Greeks' story of Heracles: Geryon's cattle, Erythea, the unproven Ocean, the lion skin, the lost mares, the half-serpent maiden in a cave in the Woodland, the bow and belt, the three sons, Scythes, cups worn on belts); 4.11 (the third account and Herodotus' preference for it; the Massagetae and the Araxes; the dispute between the Cimmerian people and kings; the kings' mutual slaughter; the grave by the Tyras "still to be seen"); 4.12 (Cimmerian walls, ferry, region and strait; the Sinope peninsula; the Scythians entering Media with the Caucasus on their right; "told by Greeks and foreigners alike"); 4.13 (Aristeas' poem and the chain of northern peoples driving one another out); 4.14–15 (the fuller's shop; reappearance in the seventh year and the Arimaspea; the altar, the crow, the Delphic oracle and the statue among laurels in the Metapontine marketplace 240 years later); 4.16 (no eyewitness; Aristeas himself did not claim to go beyond the Issedones). Supplementary: 4.1 (Darius' motive; the Scythians' pursuit of the Cimmerians into Asia and twenty-eight years' rule of upper Asia), 4.27 (the meaning of "Arimaspian"), 4.31 (Herodotus reads the "feathers" as snow), 1.15 (Cimmerians driven into Asia by the Scythians take Sardis except the citadel), 1.103–106 (the Scythians pursue the Cimmerians into Media and rule for twenty-eight years), 7.152 ("record what is said, but not believe it all"). Read in A. D. Godley's public-domain 1920 translation (PerseusDL canonical-greekLit TEI file tlg0016.tlg001.perseus-eng2), with the Greek of 4.5–16, 4.27, 4.31 and 7.152 checked in the same repository (tlg0016.tlg001.perseus-grc2); key sentences of 4.5, 4.11, 4.13, 4.14 and 4.15 were also checked online in the Perseus Digital Library Greek text (Perseus:text:1999.01.0125).

2. The four accounts: the first is the Scythians' own (4.5, "the Scythians say"); the second belongs to the Black Sea Greeks (marked at the start of 4.8 and the end of 4.10); the third is the one Herodotus calls most told and leans toward, adding that Greeks and foreigners both tell it (4.11–12); the fourth comes from Aristeas' poem (4.13). The vanishing and reappearance of Aristeas is what Herodotus "heard" at Proconnesus and Cyzicus (4.14). In the Metapontum episode, the content is "what the Metapontines say"; what Herodotus says he "knows" is that it happened and the 240-year reckoning (4.15). The story keeps these distinctions and treats none of the accounts as established fact.

3. Herodotus' own judgments, with the Greek: on Targitaus' parents, "ἐμοὶ μὲν οὐ πιστὰ λέγοντες, λέγουσι δʼ ὦν" (4.5, not credible to me, but they say it); on Ocean, "λόγῳ μὲν λέγουσι … ἔργῳ δὲ οὐκ ἀποδεικνῦσι" (4.8); on the third account, "τῷ μάλιστα λεγομένῳ αὐτός πρόσκειμαι" (4.11). Godley renders this "to which account I myself especially incline"; the Greek can also be read "the account most commonly told, to which I myself incline," and the story keeps both senses. On the Cimmerian flight and the Scythian wrong turn, "φαίνονται" and "φανεροὶ δὲ εἰσὶ" (4.12, it is evident, it is plain); on Aristeas, "οὐδὲ οὗτος συμφέρεται … Σκύθῃσι" (4.13, not even he agrees with the Scythians); on the feathers, "τὰ ὦν πτερὰ εἰκάζοντας τὴν χιόνα … δοκέω λέγειν" (4.31); on the north, "οὐδεὶς οἶδε ἀτρεκέως" and "οὐδενὸς γὰρ δὴ αὐτόπτεω εἰδέναι φαμένου δύναμαι πυθέσθαι" (4.16).

4. Names and words: the golden objects are "ἄροτρόν τε καὶ ζυγόν καὶ σάγαριν καὶ φιάλην" (4.5). Godley gives plough, yoke, sword and flask; σάγαρις usually means the battle-axe used by the Scythians and their neighbors, and φιάλη is a shallow libation cup, so the story follows the Greek with "battle-axe" and "shallow cup." The belt's ornament is likewise "φιάλην χρυσέην" (4.10), a golden cup. The snake-woman is "μιξοπάρθενον τινά, ἔχιδναν διφυέα" (4.9), a half-maiden, a serpent of double form; ἔχιδνα here is the ordinary word for a snake, and the story does not identify her with the Echidna of the Theogony. "This land is mine to rule" follows "χώρης γὰρ τῆσδε ἔχω τὸ κράτος αὕτη" (4.9). The Woodland is Ὑλαίη (4.9). The Cimmerian people's "risk their lives for so little" follows "μηδὲ πρὸ σποδοῦ μένοντας κινδυνεύειν" (4.11), literally "for dust," which Godley gives as "for the dust of the earth"; it is an idiom for something worthless. The Cimmerian "kings" are βασιλέες (4.11), Godley's "princes," their royal leaders. "Seized by Apollo" follows "φοιβόλαμπτος" (4.13). The name Skolotoi is "τοῦ βασιλέος ἐπωνυμίην" (4.6); the text does not say which king, so the story says "a king's name." "Arima" and "spou" are from 4.27. Elsewhere the story paraphrases and abridges the English rather than translating word for word.

5. Time: the Histories give no year for any of the four accounts. The map uses two time entries. "5th century BCE" marks the time when Herodotus heard and wrote down these accounts and described the Tyras grave as "still to be seen" and the Metapontine statue as "now" standing (Herodotus lived c. 484 to c. 425 BCE, per the English Wikipedia article "Herodotus"). "Circa 513 BCE" is the conventional date of Darius' crossing into Scythia, the end point of the Scythians' "thousand years" (4.7); the year is taken from the English Wikipedia article "Cimmerians," which dates the Persian invasion of Scythia to 513 BC, and is not given by the Histories. The absolute dates of Targitaus "a thousand years" earlier, of Aristeas' two disappearances, and of the Metapontine episode "240 years" later are not converted and are left unresolved. Modern scholars, using Assyrian records, place the earliest known mention of the Cimmerians in western Asia around 714 BC (same article); this is background only and is not used to date Herodotus' stories.

6. Geography: the Tyras is the present-day Dniester; coordinates from the English Wikipedia "Dniester" article (46.35 N, 30.2333 E, near the mouth) stand only for the lower river region, since the exact site of the Cimmerian kings' grave is unknown. Proconnesus is present-day Marmara Island, Türkiye (English Wikipedia "Marmara Island," 40.62 N, 27.63 E). The ruins of Metapontum are at Metaponto, Basilicata, Italy (English Wikipedia "Metapontum," 40.3833 N, 16.8244 E). The Borysthenes (Dnieper), the Woodland, the Araxes, Erythea, Gadira, Sinope, Cyzicus, Artace, and the lands of the Issedones, Arimaspians and Hyperboreans are not mapped; Godley's note already calls Herodotus' idea of the Araxes uncertain.

7. Fact and literary boundaries: all speech has a matching passage in the Histories (the exchange between Heracles and the snake-woman in 4.9; the Cyzicene's objection in 4.14 is given as reported speech), paraphrased from the English with the Greek checked. No weather, facial expressions, unsupported thoughts or new dialogue are added. The opening "The gold caught fire" follows 4.5. "Let me be clear about why I stop here" and the first section's "the answers do not agree" summarize the structure of 4.1–16; at the end of 4.4 Herodotus says Darius gathered an army to punish the Scythians, and then turns to their origins. The comparison at the end of section VI (three sons, the youngest inheriting, gold in both stories) is the narrator's observation; Herodotus does not set the two side by side. "What followed I have told already" in section IX rests on 1.15 and 1.103–106. "The throne belongs to the one for whom the fire goes out" summarizes the story in 4.5 and is not a Scythian saying. The last line follows 7.152, "ἐγὼ δὲ ὀφείλω λέγειν τὰ λεγόμενα, πείθεσθαί γε μὲν οὐ παντάπασι ὀφείλω," which Herodotus says applies to his whole work. The Metapontine statue is ἀνδριάς, with no material stated, so the story says only "statue."

8. Rights: the ancient work and Godley's 1920 translation are in the public domain; the Greek was checked in short ranges against the open PerseusDL TEI text and the Perseus Digital Library. The Chinese and English stories are original contemporary retellings by Clio Walker. Wikipedia pages are used only for coordinates and conventional dates.