of the influence of climate on a foreign
colony.]

[Footnote 74: The Mingrelian ambassador arrived at Constantinople with
two hundred persons; but he ate (sold) them day by day, till his retinue
was diminished to a secretary and two valets, (Tavernier, tom. i. p.
365.) To purchase his mistress, a Mingrelian gentleman sold twelve
priests and his wife to the Turks, (Chardin, tom. i. p. 66.)]

[Footnote 75: Strabo, l. xi. p. 765. Lamberti, Relation de la Mingrelie.
Yet we must avoid the contrary extreme of Chardin, who allows no more
than 20,000 inhabitants to supply an annual exportation of 12,000
slaves; an absurdity unworthy of that judicious traveller.]

Chapter XLII: State Of The Barbaric World.--Part IV.

It was the boast of the Colchians, that their ancestors had checked
the victories of Sesostris; and the defeat of the Egyptian is less
incredible than his successful progress as far as the foot of Mount
Caucasus. They sunk without any memorable effort, under the arms of
Cyrus; followed in distant wars the standard of the great king, and
presented him every fifth year with one hundred boys, and as many
virgins, the fairest produce of the land. [76] Yet he accepted this gift
like the gold and ebony of India, the frankincense of the Arabs, or the
negroes and ivory of Aethiopia: the Colchians were not subject to the
dominion of a satrap, and they continued to enjoy the name as well as
substance of national independence. [77] After the fall of the Persian
empire, Mithridates, king of Pontus, added Colchos to the wide circle
of his dominions on the Euxine; and when the natives presumed to request
that his son might reign over them, he bound the ambitious youth in
chains of gold, and delegated a servant in his place. In pursuit of
Mithridates, the Romans advanced to the banks of the Phasis, and their
galleys ascended the river till they reached the camp of Pompey and his
legions. [78] But the senate, and afterwards the emperors, disdained to
reduce that distant and useless conquest into the form of a province.
The family of a Greek rhetorician was permitted to reign in Colchos and
the adjacent kingdoms from the time of Mark Antony to that of Nero; and
after the race of Polemo [79] was extinct, the eastern Pontus, which
preserved his name, extended no farther than the neighborhood of
Trebizond. Beyond these limits the fortifications of Hyssus, of Apsarus,
of the Phasis, of Dioscurias or Sebastopolis, and of Pityu