created natural conditions unmitigated and unparalleled in severity,
she ordained that this race of toilers should be patient and submissive
under austerities; that their pulse should be set to a slow, even
rhythm, in harmony with the low key in which Nature spoke to them.

It is impossible to say when an Asiatic stream began to pour into
Europe over the arid steppes north of the Caspian. But we know that as
early as the fifth century B. C. the Greeks had established trading
stations on the northern shores of the Black Sea, and that these in the
fourth century had become flourishing colonies through their trade with
the motley races of barbarians that swarmed about that region, who by
the Greeks were indiscriminately designated by the common name of
Scythians.

The Greek colonists, who always carried with them their religion, their
Homer, their love of beauty, and the arts of their mother cities,
established themselves on and about the promontory of the Crimea, and
built their city of Chersonesos where now is Sebastopol. They first
entered into wars and then alliances with these Scythians, who served
them as middle-men in trade with the tribes beyond, and in time a
Graeco-Scythian state of the Bosphorus came into existence.

Herodotus in the fifth century wrote much about these so-called
Scythians, whom he divides into the agricultural Scythians, presumably
of the Black Lands, and the nomad Scythians, of the Barren Steppes.
His extravagant and fanciful pictures of those barbarians have long
been studied by the curious; but light from an unexpected source has
been thrown upon the subject, and Greek genius has rescued for us the
type of humanity first known in Russia.