Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/249

THE SCYTHIANS. 233 It was after this peace with Alyattes, as far as we can make out the series of events in Herodotus, that Kyaxares collected all his forces and laid siege to Nineveh, but was obliged to desist by the unexpected inroad of the Scythians. Nearly at the same time that Upper Asia was desolated by these formidable nomads, Asia Minor too was overrun by other nomads, the Cimmeri- ans, Ardys being then king of Lydia; and the two invasions, both spreading extreme disaster, are presented to us as indirectly connected together in the way of cause and effect. The name Cimmerians appears in the Odyssey, the fable describes them as dwelling beyond the ocean-stream, immersed in darkness and unblessed by the rays of Helios. Of this people as existent we can render no account, for they had passed away, or lost their identity and become subject, previous to the commence- ment of trustworthy authorities : but they seem to have been the chief occupants of the Tauric Chersonesus (Crimea) and of the territory between that peninsula and the river Tyras (Dniester), at the time when the Greeks first commenced their permanent settlements on those coasts in the seventh century B. c. The eclipse for the 30th September 610 B. c., and exclude all those other eclipses which have been named. Recent and more trustworthy calculations made by Oltmanns, from the newest astronomical tables, have shown that the eclipse of 610 B. c. fulfils the conditions required, and that the other eclipses named do not. For a place situated in 40 N. lat. and 36 E. long, this eclipse was nearly total, only one-eightieth of the sun's disc remaining luminous : the darkness thus occasioned would be sufficient to cause great terror. (Ideler, Handbuch, I. c.) Since the publication of my first edition, I have been apprized that the late Mr. Francis Baily had already settled the date of this eclipse to the 30th of September CIO B. c., in his first contribution to the Transactions of the Royal Society as long ago as 1811, much before the date of the publica- tion of Ideler's Handbuch der Chronologie. Sir John Herschel (in his Memoir of Mr. Francis Baily, in the Transactions of the Royal Astronom- ical Society, vol. xv, p. 311), after completely approving Mr. Baily's calcula- tions, and stating that he had been the first to solve the disputed question, expresses his surprise that various French and German astronomers, writing on the same subject afterwards, have taken no notice of " that remarkable paper." Though a fellow-countryman of Mr. Baily, I am sorry that I have to plead guilty to a similar ignorance, until the point was specially brought to my notice by a friend. Had I been aware of the paper and the Memoir, it would have been unnecessary to cite any other authority than that of Mr Ba'Jy and Sir John Herschcl.