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δυσχείμερος. The Greeks naturally, from contrast with their own, exaggerated the terrors of the Pontic winter (cf. our own use of ‘Siberian’). Hippocrates (De Aere, 19) makes it worse than H.: ‘cold winds always blow from the north from the Rhipaean Mountains; mist thickly covers the plains, so that it is always winter, and the summer lasts but a few days.’

θάλασσα. This is especially the case with the ‘limans’, the estuaries of the rivers; but the sea itself freezes in the Gulf of Odessa during January (Bonmariage, Russie d'Europe, 1903, pp. 125-6); cf. Strabo (307) for the freezing of the Bosporus, and Ovid, Tristia, iii. 10, 31 (of the Danube mouths): “Quaque rates ierant pedibus nunc itur, et undas
Frigore concretas ungula pulsat equi.

στρατεύονται, ‘pass in hordes.’ The ‘wagons’ imply peaceful communications; Strabo, 307, says that every winter ἁμαξεύεται διάπλους from Panticapaeum to Phanagoria.

The Sindi occupied the peninsula on the east side of the Bosporus and the adjoining coast to the south-east; cf. Σινδική, 86. 3.

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