previous next


Anacharsis is killed by the father of Idanthyrsus, who is king (c. 120) circ. 512 B. C.; H. puts his death in the middle of the sixth century; there is therefore nothing impossible in the story (which is very late) that he was a friend of Solon. He was reckoned among the ‘Seven Sages’ and credited with inventing the potter's wheel, which Strabo (303) rightly says is absurd. The figure of this travelled half-caste—his mother was a Greek (Diog. Laert. i. 101)—in the sixth century B. C. is very interesting. The ‘noble savage’ theory of Rousseau gave him a new lease of fame in the eighteenth century (cf. ‘Anacharsis’ Klootz, Carlyle, F. R. passim, and the once famous Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis by Barthélemy, 1788).

Cyzicus was famous for the worship of Cybele which was said to have been introduced by the Argonauts.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: