Note 187 — ARRIAN ON COURSING.
William Dansey translation
Hippolyt. Act. i. 71.
Ἔνθα τὰ πεδία εὐήλατα. The Homeric scholar will remember the Nomade tribes of this champaign region, on whom Jupiter cast his eyes in looking from Mount Ida towards Thrace. The Mysians were of the number:
Iliad. νʹ. 3.
——αὐτὸς δὲ πάλιν τρέπεν ὄσσε φαεινὼ, νόσφιν ἐφ’ ἱπποπόλων Θρῃκῶν καθορώμενος αἶαν, Μυσῶν τ’ ἀγχιμάχων, καὶ ἀγαυῶν Ἱππημολγῶν, &c.
De iv. Consul. Honorii.
Seneca speaks of the “Vacuisque vagus Sarmata campis,”—Claudian, of the “gens exercita campo,”—and an earlier poet, the exiled Ovid, in one of his mournful elegies, commemorates the Scythian’s skill in horsemanship:
Tristium L. iii. El. x.
Protinùs æquato siccis aquilonibus Istro, Invehitur celeri barbarus hostis equo: Hostis equo pollens longèque volante sagittâ Vicinam latè depopulatur humum.
Strabo notices the hunting propensities of the inhabitants of the Scythian and Sarmatian plains Hist. of Rome. vol. iv. c. xxvi.(L. xvii.); and the eloquent historian of the Decline and Fall enlarges on the vigour and patience both of the men and horses in the continual exercise of the chase. From the way in which these pastoral tribes of the Scythian plains are introduced by Arrian in connexion with the Celtic coursing, we may conclude that they were Celto-Scythians.