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28.
All the aforesaid country is exceedingly cold: for eight months of every year there is unbearable frost, and during these you do not make mud by pouring out water but by lighting a fire; the sea freezes, as does all the Cimmerian Bosporus; and the Scythians living on this side of the trench lead armies over the ice, and drive their wagons across to the land of the Sindi.
[2]
So it is winter for eight months, and cold in that country for the four that remain. Here, there is a different sort of winter than the winters in other lands: for in the season for rain scarcely any falls, but all summer it rains unceasingly;
[3]
and when there are thunderstorms in other lands, here there are none, but in summer there are plenty of them; if there is a thunderstorm in winter they are apt to wonder at it as at a portent. And so, too, if there is an earthquake summer or winter, it is considered a portent in Scythia.
[4]
Horses have the endurance to bear the Scythian winter; mules and asses cannot bear it at all; and yet in other lands, while asses and mules can endure frost, horses that stand in it are frostbitten.
Herodotus, with an English translation by A. D. Godley. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 1920.
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References (31 total)
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- T. G. Tucker, Commentary on Thucydides: Book 8, 8.72
- C.E. Graves, Commentary on Thucydides: Book 4, CHAPTER LXXVII
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