Historical Tales [calibre 5.4.1]

Darius And The Scythians

The conquest of Asia Minor by Cyrus and his Persian army was the first step towards that invasion of Greece by the Persians which proved such a vital element in the history of the Hellenic people. The next step was taken in the reign of Darius, the first of Asiatic monarchs to invade Europe. This ambitious warrior attempted to win fame by conquering the country of the Scythian barbarians,—now Southern Russia,—and was taught such a lesson that for centuries thereafter the perilous enterprise was not repeated.

It was about the year 516 B.C. that the Persian king, with the ostensible purpose—invented to excuse his invasion—of punishing the Scythians for a raid into Asia a century before, but really moved only by the thirst for conquest, reached the Bosphorus, the strait that here divides Europe from Asia. He had with him an army said to have numbered seven hundred thousand men, and on the seas was a fleet of six hundred ships. A bridge of boats was thrown across this arm of the sea,—on which Constantinople now stands,—and the great Persian host reached European soil in the country of Thrace.

Happy was it for Greece that the ambitious Persian did not then seek its conquest, as Democedes, his physician, had suggested. The Athenians, then under the rule of the tyrant Pisistratus, were not the free and bold people they afterwards became, and had Darius sought their conquest at that time, the land of Greece would probably have become a part of the overgrown Persian empire. Fortunately, he was bent on conquering the barbarians of the north, and left Greece to grow in valor and patriotism.

While the army marched from Asia into Europe across its bridge of boats, the fleet was sent into the Euxine, or Black Sea, with orders to sail for two days up the Danube River, which empties into that sea, and build there also a bridge of boats. When Darius with his army reached the Danube, he found the bridge ready, and on its swaying length crossed what was then believed to be the greatest river on the earth. Reaching the northern bank, he marched onward into the unknown country of the barbarous Scythians, with visions of conquest and glory in his mind.

What happened to the great Persian army and its ambitious leader in Scythia we do not very well know. Two historians tell us the story, but probably their history is more imagination than fact. Ctesias tells the fairy-tale that Darius marched northward for fifteen days, that he then exchanged bows with the Scythian king, and that, finding the Scythian bow to be the largest, he fled back in terror to the bridge, which he hastily crossed, having left a tenth of his army as a sacrifice to his mad ambition.

The story told by Herodotus is probably as much a product of the imagination as that of Ctesias, though it reads more like actual history. He says that the Scythians retreated northward, sending their wives and children before them in wagons, and destroying the wells and ruining the harvests as they went, so that little was left for the invaders to eat and drink. On what the vast host lived we do not know, nor how they crossed the various rivers in their route. With such trifling considerations as these the historians of that day did not concern themselves. There were skirmishes and combats of horsemen, but the Scythian king took care to avoid any general battle. Darius sent him a herald and taunted him with cowardice, but King Idanthyrsus sent word back that if the Persians should come and destroy the tombs of the forefathers of the Scythians they would learn whether they were cowards or not.

Day by day the monster Persian army advanced, and day by day its difficulties increased, until its situation grew serious indeed. The Scythians declined battle still, but Idanthyrsus sent to his distressed foe the present of a bird, a mouse, a frog, and five arrows. This signified, according to the historian, "Unless you take to the air, like a bird; to the earth, like a mouse; or to the water, like a frog, you will become the victim of the Scythian arrows."

This warning frightened Darius. In truth, he was in a desperate strait. Leaving the sick and weak part of his army encamped with the asses he had brought,—animals unknown to the Scythians, who were alarmed by their braying,—he began a hasty retreat towards his bridge of boats. But rapidly as he could march, the swifter Scythians reached the bridge before him, and counselled with the Ionian Greeks, who had been left in charge, and who were conquered subjects of the Persian king, to break down the bridge and leave Darius and his army to their fate.