#81 Sat (9/10/22) - 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Arimaspi

 

 ARIMASPI, an ancient people in the extreme N.E. of Scythia (q.v.), probably the eastern Altai. All accounts of them go back to a poem by Aristeas of Proconnesus, from whom Herodotus (iii. 116, iv. 27) drew his information. They were supposed to be one-eyed (hence their Scythian name), and to steal gold from the griffins that guarded it. In art they are usually represented as richly dressed Asiatics, picturesquely grouped with their griffin foes; the subject is often described by poets from Aeschylus to Milton. They are so nearly mythical that it is impossible to insist on the usual identification with the ancestors of the Huns. Their gold was probably real, as gold still comes from the Altai. 

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Illustration from the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493)

 The Arimaspi were described by Aristeas of Proconnesus in his lost archaic poem Arimaspea. Proconnesus is a small island in the Sea of Marmora near the mouth of the Black Sea, well situated for hearing travellers' tales of regions far north of the Black Sea. Aristeas narrates in the course of his poem that he was "wrapt in Bacchic fury" when he travelled to the north and saw the Arimaspians, as reported by Herodotus:

This Aristeas, possessed by Phoibos, visited the Issedones; beyond these (he said) live the one-eyed Arimaspoi, beyond whom are the Grypes that guard gold, and beyond these again the Hyperboreoi, whose territory reaches to the sea. Except for the Hyperboreoi, all these nations (and first the Arimaspoi) are always at war with their neighbors.[2]

Arimaspi and griffins were historical images associated with the outlands of the north: the Aeschylan Prometheus Bound (ca 415 BC?), describing the wanderings of Io, notes that she is not to pass through the north, among the Arimaspi and griffins, but southward.[3] Herodotus, "Father of History", admits the fantastic allure of the edges of the known world: "The most outlying lands, though, as they enclose and wholly surround all the rest of the world, are likely to have those things which we think the finest and the rarest." (Histories iii.116.1) 

Ignoring the scepticism of Herodotus, Strabo and Pliny's Natural History perpetuated the stories about the northern people who had a single eye in the center of their foreheads and engaged in stealing gold from the griffins, causing disagreements between the two groups.

 

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