o deliver up the land to the invaders,
while the kings resolved to die and to be laid in their own land, and
not to flee with the mass of the people, considering the many goods of
fortune which they had enjoyed, and the many evils which it might be
supposed would come upon them, if they fled from their native land.
Having resolved upon this, they parted into two bodies, and making their
numbers equal they fought with one another: and when these had all been
killed by one another's hands, then the people of the Kimmerians buried
them by the bank of the river Tyras (where their burial-place is still
to be seen), and having buried them, then they made their way out
from the land, and the Scythians when they came upon it found the land
deserted of its inhabitants.

12. And there are at the present time in the land of Scythia Kimmerian
walls, and a Kimmerian ferry; and there is also a region which is called
Kimmeria, and the so-called Kimmerian Bosphorus. It is known moreover
that the Kimmerians, in their flight to Asia from the Scythians, also
made a settlement on that peninsula on which now stands the Hellenic
city of Sinope; and it is known too that the Scythians pursued them
and invaded the land of Media, having missed their way; for while the
Kimmerians kept ever along by the sea in their flight, the Scythians
pursued them keeping Caucasus on their right hand, until at last they
invaded Media, directing their course inland. This then which has been
told is another story, and it is common both to Hellenes and Barbarians.

13. Aristeas however the son of Caystrobios, a man of Proconnesos,
said in the verses which he composed, that he came to the land of the
Issedonians being possessed by Phoebus, and that beyond the Issedonians
dwelt Arimaspians, a one-eyed race, and beyond these the gold-guarding
griffins, and beyond them the Hyperboreans extending as far as the sea:
and all these except the Hyperboreans, beginning with the Arimaspians,
were continually making war on their neighbours, and the Issedonians
were gradually driven out of their country by the Arimaspians and the
Scythians by the Issedonians, and so the Kimmerians, who dwelt on the
Southern Sea, being pressed by the Scythians left their land. Thus
neither does he agree in regard to this land with the report of the
Scythians.

14. As to Aristeas who composed 15 this, I have said already whence
he was; and I will tell also the tale which I heard about him in
P