Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/260

244 HISTORY OF GREECE. tablished a colony of Pontic Greeks, intermixed with natives, and called Geloni ; these latter inhabited a spacious town, built entirely of wood. Beyond the Budini eastward dwelt the Thys According to his own statement, it would seem that they ought to be near to the Neuri (iv, 105), and so in fact Ptolemy places them (v, 9) near about Volhynia and the sources of the Dniester. Mannert (Geographic der Griech. und Romer, Der Norden der Erde, v, iv, p. 138) conceives the budini to be a Teutonic tribe; but Paul Joseph Schafarik (Slavische AlterthQmer, i, 10, pp. 185-195) has shown more plau- sible grounds for believing both them and the neuri to be of Slavic family. It seems that the names budini and neuri are traceable to Slavic roots ; that the wooden town described by Herodotus in the midst of the budini is an exact parallel of the primitive Slavic towns, down even to the twelfth cen- tury ; and that the description of the country around, with its woods and marshes containing beavers, otters, etc. harmonizes better with southern Poland and Russia than with the neighborhood of the Ural mountains. From the color ascribed to the budini, no certain inference can be drawn : y7.avK.ov TE nuv 7i>pu? IOTI Kal irvpfiov (iv, 108). Mannert construes it in favor of Teutonic family, Schafarik in favor of Slavic ; and it is to be remarked, that Hippokrates talks of the Scythians generally as extremely Trvppoi (De Ae"re, Locis et Aquis, c. vi : compare Aristot. Prob. xxxviii, 2). These reasonings are plausible ; yet we can hardly venture to ulter the position of the budini as Herodotus describes it, eastward of the Tanais. For he states in the most explicit manner that the route as far as the Argip- psei is thorougftly known, traversed both by Scythian and by Grecian '.raders, and all the nations in the way to it known (iv, 24) : pexP 1 ^ v TOVTUV 7roA/l^ 1% x^pilS ^orl Kal TUV l//7rpoai?ev t&veuv /cat yap ZKV&EUV rtvef ef airot)f, TUV ov ^aAeTrov evTi irv&ia'&ai, Kal 'E^Arjvuv TUV in e TE efnropiov Kal TUV uA.'kuv HOVTLKUV f/uTtopiuv. These Greek and Scythian traders, in their journey from the Pontic seaports into the inte- rior, employed seven different languages and as many interpreters. Volcker thinks that Herodotus or his informants confounded the Don with the Volga (Mythische Geographic, sect. 24, p. 190), supposing that die higher parts of the latter belonged to the former ; a mistake not unnatural, since the two rivers approach pretty near to each other at one particular point, and since the lower parts of the Volga, together with the northern shor of the Caspian, where its embouchure is situated, appear to have been little visited and almost unknown in antiquity. There cannot be a more striking evidence how unknown these regions were, than the persuasion, so general in antiquity, that the Caspian sea was a gulf of the ocean, to which Herodotus, Aristotle, and Ptolemy arc almost the only exceptions. Alex- ander von Humboldt has some valuable remarks on the tract laid down by Herodotus from the Tanais to the Argipprci (Asie Ccntrale, vol. i, pp 390-400).