Category Archives: Taurians (subset of Scythians)

Egyptians, Taurians, and Celts: Cicero’s Philus engages in ethnographic discourses for philosophical aims (mid-first century BCE)

Egyptians: Juvenal on “demented Egypt,” animal worship, and the eating of raw human flesh (early second century CE)

Mediterranean peoples: Pomponius Mela on peoples of the known world (mid-first century CE)

Mediterranean peoples: Pseudo-Skylax (fourth century BCE)

Mediterranean peoples: Sextus Empiricus engages with ethnographic discourses for philosophical aims (second-third centuries CE)

Northern peoples: Inscriptions on barbarians as bandits (second-third centuries CE)

Persians, Celts, Thracians, and others: Polyainos on “tricky” barbarians (mid-second century CE)

Romans, Carthaginians, Celts, Scythians and others: Tertullian combats charges of human sacrifice and incest against Jesus adherents (early third century CE)

Romans, Egyptians, Persians, and others: Minucius Felix’s ethnographic defence of the Christian people (early third century CE)

Romans: Ammianus Marcellinus on the danger of decline into uncivilized lifestyles (late fourth century CE)

Scythians and other Pontic peoples: Herodotos on the “most ignorant peoples of all” (fifth century BCE)

Scythians: Adventures of Andrew and Matthias among the Man-eaters as ethnographic fiction (third-fifth centuries CE)

Taurians and Greeks: Clement of Alexandria [III] on human sacrifice (late second century CE)

Taurians and Kolchians: Diodoros on the origins of human sacrifice in the Black Sea area (mid-first century BCE)

Thracians and other Black Sea peoples: Ammianus Marcellinus on their “savage” character and on Roman control (late fourth century CE)