er of the barbarism in which these various races were
involved may be best learnt from the description given of one of them,
the Massagetae, with but few differences, by Herodotus and Strabo.
According to this description, the Massagetse were nomads, who moved
about in wagons or carts, accompanied by their flocks and herds, on
whose milk they chiefly sustained themselves. Each man had only one
wife, but all the wives were held in common. They were good riders and
excellent archers, but fought both on horseback and on foot, and used,
besides their bows and arrows, lances, knives, and battle-axes. They had
little or no iron, but made their spear and arrow-heads, and their other
weapons, of bronze. They had also bronze breast-plates; but otherwise
the metal with which they adorned and protected their own persons,
and the heads of their horses, was gold. To a certain extent they were
cannibals. It was their custom not to let the aged among them die a
natural death, but, when life seemed approaching its natural term, to
offer them up in sacrifice,--and then boil the flesh and feast on it.
This mode of ending life was regarded as the best and most honorable;
such as died of disease were not eaten but buried, and their friends
bewailed their misfortune.

It may be added to this that we have sufficient reason to believe that
the Massagetse and the other nomads of these parts regarded the use
of poisoned arrows as legitimate in warfare, and employed the venom of
serpents, and the corrupted blood of man, to make the wounds which they
inflicted more deadly.

Thus, what was threatened was not merely the conquest of one race by
another cognate to it, like that of the Medes by the Persians, or of
the Greeks by Rome, but the obliteration of such art, civilization,
and refinement as Western Asia had attained to in course of ages by
the successive efforts of Babylonians, Assyrians, Medes, Persians, and
Greeks--the spread over some of the fairest regions of the earth of a
low type of savagery--a type which in religion went no further than the
worship of the sun; in art knew but the easier forms of metallurgy and
the construction of carts; in manners and customs, included cannibalism,
the use of poisoned weapons, and a relation between the sexes
destructive alike of all delicacy and of all family affection. The
Parthians were, no doubt, rude and coarse in their character as compared
with the Persians; but they had been civilized to a cer