3

Scythians and the Great King of Persia

On the southern steppes of Ukraine today, near the Don River, Darius, Great King of Persia at the head of the mightiest army yet assembled, pondered the meaning of a curious message sent to him by the Scythian king Idanthyrsus. The envoy delivered a bird, mouse, frog, and five arrows, and then departed without explanation. Darius immediately interpreted the message as submission by the Scythians. But Gobryas, Darius’s senior adviser and brother-in-law, discerned the meaning. “Unless you Persians turn into birds and fly up in the air or into mice and burrow in the ground or into frogs and leap into lakes, you will never get home again but stay here in this country, only to be shot by Scythian arrows.”1 The exchange captures the strategic limitations of waging war against the elusive nomadic horse archers on the Eurasian steppes. Darius failed to bring the Scythian nomads to decisive battle, and so, in the autumn of 512 BC, he declared victory and withdrew.2 Six months earlier, Darius had marched an army of seven hundred thousand from Asia into Europe, crossing the Bosporus on a bridge of ships. He then crossed the Danube and invaded the steppes. The Scythians rallied against the invader. They laid waste to the land, poisoned the wells, and harassed the Persians at a distance. Darius could not overcome famine and thirst even though his fleet conveyed supplies from the Mediterranean world.

Yet King Darius was not the first Persian king to wage war against the Scythians. Darius strove to emulate and avenge his illustrious predecessor Cyrus the Great, the architect of the Persian Empire, and lauded by Greek writers as the greatest conqueror until Alexander the Great. Fifteen years earlier, Cyrus attacked nomads in their homeland, the Massagetae, who were a Scythian tribe dwelling on the central Eurasian steppes just north of the Jaxartes River (Syr Darya), which was the northeastern frontier of the Persian Empire.3

This is the first report of a preemptive strike against nomads in their own homeland. It is also our first report of a nomadic warrior princess, Queen Tomyris, who led her people to victory over an invader. She thwarted the strategy of King Cyrus, who intended to break the power of the Scythians because Cyrus feared that the Scythians, if left unchecked, would raid and settle in the Upper Satrapies of Sogdiana and Bactria (Transoxiana). Initially, King Cyrus sought a diplomatic solution, proposing a marriage alliance to Queen Tomyris of the Massagetae. But she spurned Cyrus’s offer of marriage whereby she would join the royal harem and her people would grace royal reliefs of Cyrus’s palace as submissive subjects rendering tribute. Instead, she sternly warned off Cyrus, but should he attack, she proudly offered battle either on the Persian or Scythian side of the Jaxartes River. Cyrus must have been enraged by the defiant barbarian queen, for in Cyrus’s world, the Persians had adopted the Near Eastern practice of secluding royal women in the harem. Cyrus arrogantly chose war. Yet Cyrus erred in perceiving the Scythians as inconsequential barbarians. The Persians shared with these nomads a common origin going back to the Indo-Iranian speakers who had first settled on the Central Eurasian steppes. Persians and Scythians alike valued the same martial virtues, and the same way of war. The Persians (and their predecessors and kinsmen the Medes) had built the first Near Eastern empire based on the power of cavalry.4 Herodotus reports that every Persian boy was taught to ride, shoot the bow, and always tell the truth, and he adds, would that the Greeks be as good. These were the virtues of the Persians’ nomadic ancestors, and so Cyrus should have known better and avoided fighting his Scythian foes on the Eurasian steppes. Then again, Cyrus failed to realize that the Massagetae also knew well their Persian foe.

Cyrus lured his foe into a clever stratagem worthy of Genghis Khan. He abandoned his camp, laden with supplies and luxuries, and guarded by a small detachment. Then Cyrus feigned a withdrawal and concealed his main force in ambush. The Massagetae quickly overran the camp, plundered the stores, and drank themselves into a stupor. Cyrus thereupon burst upon the Massagetae and slaughtered them while still asleep. Cyrus defeated only an advance detachment of the Massagetae, but he captured the queen’s son and heir Spargapises. Spargapises duped Cyrus into granting him liberty of the king’s tent, and promptly committed suicide. Without a royal hostage, Cyrus was compelled to cross the Jaxartes and seek battle. Herodotus, who likely spoke to Persian eyewitnesses, marveled at the length and savagery of the fighting.5 Persian and Massagetae horsemen harassed each other from afar by successive barrages of arrows. When both sides exhausted their arrows, they finally closed in a deadly melee. The Massagetae outmaneuvered and outfought the Persians. The slaughter was dreadful, and Cyrus fell in battle. Tomyris ordered Cyrus’s body beheaded, and fulfilled her vow of avenging her son by plunging the head into a skin sack of blood and contemptuously telling the tyrant to drink his bloody fill. Later Greek historians invented more dignified deaths for Cyrus, but they could not cover up the defeat and humiliation.

Cyrus’s defeat at the hands of the Scythians fixed the northeastern Persian frontier on the Jaxartes River; Darius’s defeat put the empire at risk. His Greek subjects, the Ionians living on the shores of Western Asia Minor, could only read Darius’s withdrawal as a sign of weakness. They furnished the squadrons that guarded the bridge of ships over the Bosporus and the lifeline of Darius’s army on the Russian steppes. While Darius chased the Scythians across the steppes of southern Russia, Scythian envoys appeared at the camp of the Ionian Greeks, whose fleet was guarding the bridge of ships across the Bosporus.6 They urged the Greek commanders to destroy the bridge and sail home. Darius and his army would have been trapped on the steppes to face a Russian winter. Miltiades, a leading Athenian noble and tyrant of the Greek cities of the Thracian Chersonesus (today Gallipoli), urged accepting the advice. The Ionians could rid themselves of the Persian despot and regain their freedom and autonomy—the cherished political notions of every city-state.7 But the wily Histiaeus, tyrant of Miletus, convinced his fellow tyrants to remain steadfast to Darius, whose favor assured their personal rule over their resentful citizens. Freedom and autonomy of their citizens were not what Greek tyrants wanted. Miltiades was proved correct, and he later led the Athenians to victory over the Persians at Marathon. Histiaeus proved too clever for Darius, who suspected the ambitious Milesian tyrant might plot rebellion and carried Histiaeus off to gilded captivity at Persepolis.8 Histiaeus, however, obtained his revenge, and release, by fomenting the great rebellion of the Ionian cities in 499 BC.9 By a clever ruse, Histiaeus sent his slave from Susa to his son-in-law Aristogoras, the reigning tyrant in Miletus, with instructions to incite rebellion among the Ionians. The message had been tattooed on the head of the slave to avoid detection by Persian guards along the Royal Road. The Ionians rose in rebellion, launching fleets that they had ironically constructed on Darius’s orders for his Scythian expedition. Failure on the steppes delivered to Darius a dangerous revolt among his Greek subjects. During the rebellion, the Scythians sought to exploit Darius’s difficulty, for in ca. 495 BC, they crossed the Danube in force, ravaged the lands to the shores of the Sea of Marmara, and contacted the Spartans to join in an alliance to invade Persian Asia Minor.10 It took six years for Darius’s generals to put down the rebellion. This Ionian rebellion led to an even more disastrous war to punish the Greek city-states that supported the Ionian rebels. This Greco-Persian War climaxed in the failed invasion by his son Xerxes to conquer Greece in 480 BC. Thereafter, the Great King of Persia, struggling to control his western satrapies, never again challenged the Scythians.

Herodotus, the Father of History, recognized the pivotal geopolitical role of the Scythian nomads in his day, because he devoted one of the nine books in his history to just the Scythians. For Herodotus, the Scythians achieved the unimaginable, defeating, twice, the Great King of Persia who ruled the mightiest Near Eastern empire to date. The Great King ruled from his ritual capital of Persepolis over forty million subjects residing in the lands between the lower Danube and Indus Rivers.11 In the course of two centuries, Persian kings repeatedly mobilized military expeditions numbering between two hundred fifty thousand and seven hundred fifty thousand combatants. The cavalry forces alone ranged between thirty-five thousand and fifty thousand. Royal officers imposed harsh discipline upon the diverse subject peoples called up for military service. Persian logistics and engineering were of the highest order.12 No state in the Western tradition ever again mobilized such large field armies until Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. In comparison, Royal Scythians, dwelling between the lower Danube and Volga Rivers, dominated a nomadic confederacy comprising diverse subject tribes pursuing both pastoral and agricultural ways of life. At most, the population on the western steppes might have numbered between five hundred thousand to one million souls. Farther east, from the northern shores of the Caspian Sea to the western slopes of the Altai Mountains, dwelled their kinsmen the Sauromatae, Dahae, Massagetae, and Sacae, who at most only nominally recognized the high king of the Royal Scythians. Given the disparity in numbers and wealth between the two combatants, Herodotus was correct to praise the Scythian victory over King Darius.

The Scythians, the first nomads known to us by name, spoke related Eastern Iranian dialects. Soviet, Russian, and Ukrainian scientists have tested the DNA of the human remains recovered from kurgans, the monumental Scythian tombs.13 Members of the ruling class, at least among the leading tribes in southern Russia and the Kuban, were European in features, quite tall (often six feet or slightly taller), and with fair complexions, gray eyes, and reddish hair. The physician Galen of Pergamum and the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, writing in the imperial Roman age, similarly described the features of the Sarmatians, who were the latter-day Scythians in all but name.14 In appearance, the Scythians and their successors, the Sarmatians, differed little from the Tocharians represented by the Tarim Mummies of the Bronze Age and later depictions in paintings of Tang China. Both nomadic peoples likely shared a common ancestry from the Indo-European speakers of the Yamnaya culture. Yet Scythian kings ruled over subjects of diverse genetic origins and appearance. The cluster of Scythian burials near the western foothills of the Altai Mountains reveals mixed Europid and Mongolid populations who had long intermarried with each other. Language, religious practices, customs, and the nomadic way defined the Scythians’ ethnic sense of themselves far more than genetic similarities.

The Scythians perfected the saddles and composite bow that revolutionized warfare on the Eurasian steppes. Scythian bowmen, clad in leather trousers and felt caps, were a favorite subject for Greek sculptors and vase painters. The Athenian tyrant Peisistratus hired Scythian bowmen when he invaded Attica and seized the city for the third time in 526 BC. He and his sons retained Scythian bowmen as their bodyguards. The Athenians, once they overthrew the tyrants, retained the Scythians as the police force of the democracy because the formidable, loyal foreigners could keep the unruly voters in order during boisterous meetings of the assembly. The finest archers and horsemen of their day, the Scythians gained the respect of Greeks and Persians alike.

The monarchs of the Royal Scythians prospered off the trade with the Greek colonies on the eastern and northern shores of the Black Sea and clustered along the southern littoral of the Crimea, known as the Tauric Chersonesus in Classical sources. They also exacted tribute in grain from the subject agriculturalists cultivating the rich arable lands of the southern Ukraine. Greek merchants eagerly sought out grain, salted meats, leather, flax, honey, and slaves to sustain the growing cities of the Aegean world. In turn, Greek merchants brought wine, scented oils, dried fruits, textiles, finely wrought cauldrons and rhytons, and drinking vessels in the shape of a ram that functioned as an ornate funnel used in ceremonial drinking bouts. All these goods proved vital to any nomad’s survival on the steppes. The Scythians also protected and promoted the transit trade between the lands of the Baltic, the source of amber so prized in the Classical world, across the rivers of Russia, to the Greek ports on the Euxine shores. From trade and tribute, Scythian kings amassed fancy gifts that they distributed to buy the loyalty of their vassal rulers.

We know so much about the habits and beliefs of the Scythians thanks to Herodotus, who perceptively described Scythian customs, thereby providing a model for subsequent Classical accounts of nomads. Herodotus’s observations were based on eyewitness reports from Greeks who traded and intermarried with the Scythians.15 The Scythians themselves have left us no writing, but the stunning gold objects, jewelry, and weapons from their monumental tombs, kurgans, attest to the sophisticated tastes of Scythian elites between the seventh and third centuries BC.16 They also confirm Herodotus’s view that the Scythian kings were worthy foes of the Great King, because they could expend their wealth in grand displays of their power by erecting and stocking with costly objects their kurgans.

Herodotus reports the ceremony of honoring a deceased Scythian high king who would have been called a kaghan by later Turks and Mongols. The body was embalmed with aromatics, laid out on a magnificent funeral bier, and then conveyed in an ornately decorated cart or gers throughout the realm. One such gers has been reconstructed because, afterward, it was broken up and deposited in a burial at Pazirik near the foothills of the Altai Mountains. Mourners of every rank offered up cut locks of their hair or their blood from self-inflicted wounds. The ceremonial procession lasted for months, and climaxed with the interment of the deceased king in a monumental subterranean grave or kurgan and celebrated with feasting and heavy drinking of wine and qumis, fermented mare’s milk. Only after the ritual meal was the tumulus raised over the burial. But a final ceremonial farewell at the king’s kurgan came even later:

At the end of the year another ceremony takes place: they take fifty of the best of the king’s remaining servants, strangle and gut them, stuff their bodies with chaff, and sew them up again—these servants are native Scythians, for the king has bought no slaves, but chooses people to serve him from amongst his subjects. Fifty of the finest horses are then subjected to the same treatment. The next step is to cut a number of wheels in half and to fix them in pairs, rim downwards, to stakes driven into the ground; two stakes to each half-wheel; then stout poles are driven lengthwise through the horses from tail to neck, and by means of these the horses are mounted on the wheels, in such a way that the front pairs support the shoulders and the rear pairs the belly between the thighs. All four legs are left dangling clear of the ground. Each horse is bitted and bridled, the bridle being led forward and pegged down. The bodies of the men are dealt with in a similar way: straight poles are driven up through the neck, parallel with the spine, and the lower protruding ends fitted into sockets in the stakes which run through the horses; thus each horse is provided with one of the young servants to ride him. When horses and riders are all in place around the tomb, they are left there, and the mourners go away.17

The details of the tomb’s construction and funerary rites described by Herodotus are borne out by Soviet, Ukrainian, and Russian archaeologists who have excavated numerous kurgans in the lower Dnieper valley, Kuban, and the steppes immediately west of the Altai Mountains. Across the Eurasian steppes, the Scythians set the standard for burial practices for all later nomads.18 The Scythians sank a deep and wide burial chamber into the virgin soil of the steppes. Above the burial chamber, they then constructed a dwelling (replicating the felt tent) with massive wooden pillars to support a gabled roof. Upon interment, they covered the entire complex with a massive tumulus. The tumulus over the kurgan at Tsarzky measures fifty-five feet (seventeen meters) high with a circumference of 820 feet (260 meters).19 Within the burial chamber, the deceased, either male or female, was provided with rich goods, including costly gold objects obtained from the Greek world or Near East. In the kurgan at Chertomlyk, dating from the fourth century BC, the tableware, ceramics, and weapons were carefully selected to provide the ruler with appropriately matched objects in his next life.20 The walls of the burial chamber were fitted with hooks so that an entire wardrobe could be hung. Servants and wives (in the case of male burials) were either poisoned or strangled, and then neatly positioned around the deceased. Above the burial chamber, at ground level, horses caparisoned in their finest harnesses and saddles were dispatched by a single blow to the head. They too were arranged in neat pairs or groups. In 1897, renowned Russian archaeologist Nikolai Ivanovich Veselovsky excavated one of the best-preserved graves on the Kuban steppes, at Kostromskaya, dating from the seventh century BC.21 The deceased was accompanied by thirteen servants and twenty-two horses, fit and magnificent beasts, although poorer warriors were sometimes accorded older or injured horses. The number of horses sacrificed varies from ten to four hundred. Royal burials were spectacular theater involving the slaying of many expensive horses, servants, and wives to accompany their master into the other world. Such ceremonies exalted not only the deceased but also the prestige and power of his dynasty. Even more telling, nearly one-third of excavated kurgans in the Kuban were of females, equipped with weapons. Hence, Herodotus placed the land of the legendary Amazons in Scythia, beyond the Caucasus Mountains.22

Today, Scythian objects take pride of place in Russian and Ukrainian art museums, while traveling exhibitions have dazzled millions who marvel at the intricate workmanship of Scythian jewelry, weapons, and rhytons. All visitors leave deeply impressed, in the words of King Pyrrhus, that these objects are not of the manner of barbarians.23 For Scythians, the great burials were the single greatest communal undertaking after war. Construction of kurgans and rites involved thousands over many months. The kurgans, once completed, dominated the steppes, and acted as a focal point for memorial rites. The tumuli thus represented the most visible sacred space of the ancestors on the steppes. All nomads revered their ancestors, whose presence was never far from the living. Divination by shamans invariably involved their questioning of the ancestors. Sacrifices and rites to the deceased were performed each year under the eternal blue sky, whether conceived as the Indo-European god Dyeus (the progenitor of Classical Zeus and Jupiter) or Tengri of the Turks and Mongols. Kurgans and burial practices, while personal in purpose, were communal in impact.

The many expensive imported objects interred in kurgans attest to the uneasy symbiosis between nomadic Scythians and their Greek and Persian neighbors. Scythian rulers depended upon gifts obtained in trading or raiding to cement their power over a confederacy of tribes. Greek craftsmen responded to the demands of Scythian customers. For example, they exported from their shops rhytons and cauldrons decorated to native tastes for use in ritual drinking.24 The material comforts of Hellenic civilization were alluring to some Scythians, who quit their traditional life for that of the Greek cities. In the third century BC, a Hellenized family of Scythian dynasts, the Spartocids, imposed their rule over the Greek colonies of the Crimea and the Taman peninsula.25 The later Scythian dynasts of the Bosporus (today the Straits of Kerch) ruled over these Greek cities into the fourth century AD. As friends of Rome, they minted superb gold coins bearing the portraits of a Scythian monarch in the guise of a Cossack hetman, while the reverse carried the portrait of the Roman emperor.26

Yet many more Scythians adapted useful technology and products from the Greeks, but adhered to their ancestral ways. Over the next two millennia, successive nomadic peoples confronted the same dilemma of coming to terms with the far more numerous neighbors of the urban civilizations. Herodotus preserves two anecdotes that reflect the same concerns of Bilğe Kaghan of the Eastern Turks a thousand years later when he warned against too much contact with the Chinese. Anacharsis, who was later enrolled among the sages of Greece, ran afoul of his tribesmen by practicing the rites of Dionysus, which he had learned during his sojourn at Cyzicus, a Greek city on the southern shores of the Sea of Marmara.27 He was slain for neglecting the ancestral gods in favor of a foreign deity. The Greeks hailed Anacharsis a philosopher, and credited him with writing treatises and laws. He reputedly warned the Athenian lawgiver Solon that his constitution was like a spider’s web that ensnared the weak, but was easily ripped up by the rich.28 To the Greeks, Anacharsis was a forerunner of the Cynics, but to the Scythians, he was an impious traitor. It was acceptable to respect the gods of other peoples, and their holy ones, but it was not acceptable to embrace them in preference to ancestral gods. The Scythian king Scylas faced rebellion among his subjects led by his own brother, because he came to favor Greek customs and rites.29 He had long led a dual life, donning Greek clothing and speaking Greek whenever he visited one of the cities, while back on the steppes, he comported himself as a Scythian lord. Eventually, his addiction to Greek goods, wine, and poetry grew too much for his subjects. He fled to King Sitalces of the Thracians, but his host was intimidated to turn over Scylas to his brother Octamasades. Scylas was beheaded, and his skull, suitably bejeweled and gilded, joined the royal tableware. It was passed around at ceremonial toasts as a warning for future Scythian warriors to remain true to their code of valor.

The Royal Scythians, after defeating King Darius, dominated the western and central Eurasian steppes for the next two hundred fifty years. For the later Persian kings, the Scythians remained a constant threat along the northern frontier. During the fourth century BC, Ateas was respected by Greeks and Persians alike as the greatest high king of the Scythians.30 His Scythians habitually raided across the Caucasus Mountains into the Persian satrapy of Armenia. To the east, other Scythians crossed the Jaxartes River and ravaged the hinterlands of the cities of the Upper Satrapies of Sogdiana and Bactria (Transoxiana). Along these northern frontiers of the Persian Empire, later Great Kings preferred diplomacy and rich gifts rather than warfare to cope with recalcitrant Scythians on the borders. Persian kings sought to direct trade between their subjects and nomads to border towns, and to regulate, rather than block, the movement of nomads across the frontiers. Many Scythians were permitted to settle within the domains of the Great King so that intermarriage and cultural exchange between newcomers and indigenous inhabitants nurtured a distinct frontier society.

For uncertain reasons, in the closing decades of the fourth century BC, the Scythian confederacy of Herodotus’s day began to fragment. Vassal tribes on the Kuban and the steppes to the north and east of the Caspian Sea asserted themselves. By the opening of the third century BC, many of these tribes had migrated westward in search of new homes.31 These latter-day Scythians were collectively dubbed Sarmatians, and they have sometimes been credited with first perfecting mounted, heavily armed lancers (cataphracti). If so, they might have initially gained a tactical advantage over Scythian tribes still depending solely on light cavalry, but innovations in war were the most fleeting of secrets on the steppes.32 In speech and way of life, the Sarmatians differed little from their former Scythian masters. Yet no charismatic ruler arose to weld the Sarmatians into a new confederation. In part, each aspiring high king faced too many competitors. None of them ever gained a monopoly over trade and amassed the wealth to buy the loyalty of vassal tribes or to construct the magnificent kurgans to awe subjects and vassals. In the second and first centuries BC, Sarmatian and Scythian princes both furnished mercenary cavalry and bowmen to the Hellenistic kings who fought Rome. The celebrated poison king, Mithridates VI Eupator (121–63 BC), king of Pontus in northeastern Asia Minor, hired Scythian horsemen for his three wars against Rome. The Romans respected Mithridates as their deadliest foe since Hannibal, and the greatest king after Alexander the Great.33 When the redoubtable king was driven from his realm in 63 BC, he fled to the Greek cities of the Crimea. There he urged the Scythians to join him in a grand invasion against Rome. The Scythians demurred; his Greek subjects rebelled.34 The king committed suicide to avoid an ignominious fate of gracing a Roman triumph. A faithful Gallic officer dispatched Mithridates by the sword, after several futile attempts by the king to poison himself. For Mithridates had acquired immunity by taking antidotes all his life.

It was also significant that Scythian imperial power had passed when the Roman Republic was uniting the Mediterranean world. Imperial Rome was expert in sowing dissension among barbarian tribes beyond her frontiers. In the words of the Roman historian Tacitus, “Long, I pray, may foreign nations persist, if not in loving us, at least in hating one another; for destiny is driving our empire upon its appointed path, and fortune can bestow on us no better gift than discord among our foes.”35 Scythian and Sarmatian tribes needed little encouragement from Rome to war among themselves. Hence, imperial Rome long faced no existential threat from the nomads of the Eurasian steppes.

In the early first century AD, two Sarmatian tribes, the Jazyges and the Roxolani, quit their homes on the south Russian steppes and, with Roman permission, settled as allies on the grasslands of Transylvania and Wallachia, respectively.36 As a matter of policy, members of these tribes were allowed to settle on Roman territory, but Roman governors took the precaution of scattering the barbarian colonists in small settlements lest they settle a well-armed, and potentially hostile, tribe on imperial soil. As dutiful allies of Rome, the Sarmatians were paid to patrol the steppes opposite the Roman frontier along the middle and lower Danube. On three occasions in the late first and second century, these Sarmatians deserted their Roman alliance and joined Rome’s enemies, Dacians or the Germanic Marcomanni and Quadi.37 Imperial Rome quickly reimposed treaties on these Sarmatians, and recruited their cavalry into the imperial army. The Sarmatian recruits replenished the ranks of the imperial army and assured the loyalty of their tribes. In 175, the emperor Marcus Aurelius drafted into the imperial army 7,200 Sarmatian horsemen who likely represented half the warriors of the Jazyges. Six thousand of these were sent to Britain, where they patrolled the Scottish Lowlands immediately north of Hadrian’s Wall.38 The Sarmatians, who fought for Rome under their inflated leather dragons learned from the Chinese, introduced the fabulous dragon to their Roman officers. Classical authors, however, turned the benign, protective dragon of China into the fire-breathing monster of Western literature. Roman success in dealing with the Sarmatian tribes of Eastern Europe would leave Rome ill-prepared to meet a truly deadly nomadic foe, the Huns.

The Alans, kinsmen of the Roxolani and Jazyges, dwelled to the east, on the Kuban steppes north of the Caucasus. Their modern descendants, the Ossetians, still dwell there and preserve their distinct Iranian language and traditions. The Alans frequently raided across the Caucasus into Roman Asia Minor or Parthian Mesopotamia and Iran. Flavius Josephus, the perceptive Jewish historian, described one such horrifying raid by these newest “Scythians” in 72 AD.39 Veteran Roman governors perfected tactics to counter such raiders. The Roman senator Arrian (Lucius Flavius Arrianus), governor of the Roman province of Cappadocia in Asia Minor, penned a manual on tactics based on his experience of fighting Alan cavalry in 135 AD.40 He advises how a commander should draw up his battle line of legionaries, archers, and cavalry, backed up by field artillery, to counter nomadic horse archers. Arrian drew on both his own experience and lessons he had learned from reading the exploits of Alexander the Great. For Arrian wrote the definitive military history of the Macedonian conqueror who was the first commander ever to best nomads on the steppes.41