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. 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. 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. 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 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 Pityus, were
guarded by sufficient detachments of horse and foot; and six princes
of Colchos received their diadems from the lieutenants of Caesar. One of
these lieutenants, the eloquent and philosophic Arrian, surveyed,
and has described, the Euxine coast, under the reign of Hadrian. The
garrison which he reviewed at the mouth of the Phasis consisted of
four hundred chosen legionaries; the brick walls and towers, the double
ditch, and the military engines on the rampart, rendered this place
inaccessible to the Barbarians: but the new suburbs which had been built
by the merchants and veterans, required, in the opinion of Arrian, some
external defence. As the strength of the empire was gradually impaired,
the Romans stationed on the Phasis were neither withdrawn nor expelled;
and the tribe of the Lazi, whose posterity speak a foreign dialect, and
inhabit the sea coast of Trebiz