Their equipment and style of fighting were consonant to this mode of
life; the inhabitants of these steppes fought in great measure on
horseback and always in loose array, equipped with helmet and coat
of mail of leather and leather-covered shield, armed with sword,
lance, and bow--the ancestors of the modern Cossacks. The Scythians
originally settled there, who seem to have been of Mongolian race
and akin in their habits and physical appearance to the present
inhabitants of Siberia, had been followed up by Sarmatian tribes
advancing from east to west,--Sauromatae, Roxolani, Jazyges,--who are
commonly reckoned of Slavonian descent, although the proper names, which
we are entitled to ascribe to them, show more affinity with Median
and Persian names and those peoples perhaps belonged rather to the
great Zend stock. Thracian tribes moved in the opposite direction,
particularly the Getae, who reached as far as the Dniester. Between
the two there intruded themselves--probably as offsets of the great
Germanic migration, the main body of which seems not to have touched
the Black Sea--the Celts, as they were called, on the Dnieper, the
Bastarnae in the same quarter, and the Peucini at the mouth of the
Danube. A state, in the proper sense, was nowhere formed; every
tribe lived by itself under its princes and elders.

Hellenism in That Quarter

In sharp contrast to all these barbarians stood the Hellenic
settlements, which at the time of the mighty impetus given to Greek
commerce had been founded chiefly by the efforts of Miletus on these
coasts, partly as trading-marts, partly as stations for prosecuting
important fisheries and even for agriculture, for which, as we have
already said, the north-western shores of the Black Sea presented in
antiquity conditions less unfavourable than at the present day.
For the use of the soil the Hellenes paid here, like the Phoenicians
in Libya, tax and ground-rent to the native rulers. The most important
of these settlements were the free city of Chersonesus (not far from
Sebastopol), built on the territory of the Scythians in the Tauric
peninsula (Crimea), and maintaining itself in moderate prosperity,
under circumstances far from favourable, by virtue of its good
constitution and the public spirit of its citizens; and Panticapaeum
(Kertch) at the opposite side of the peninsula on the straits leading
from the Black Sea to the Sea of Azov, governed since the year 457
by hereditary burg