( vii )
accurately informed about their peculiar differences and diftinctions. Even a long time after these rude nations had begun to prefs upon the empire, and had made the Romans dread their valour, ftill their writers con- tinued to have fo confufed and indiftinct a knowledge of their different defcent and character, as to confound both the Celts and Goths with the Sarmatians, whom all writers allow to have been a diftinct nation from them both[1]: Thus Zosimus, an historian of the third century, includes them all under the common name of Scythians[2]; and this, at a time when, after their long and frequent intercourfe with the Romans, their hiftorians ought to have been taught to diftinguifh them better.
However, the Greek and Roman authors were not all equally indiftinct and confufed on this fub- ject. It will be fhewn below, that fome of their beft and moft difcerning writers, when they had an oppor- tunity of being well informed, knew how to diftin- guifh them accurately enough: So that both Cluverius and Pelloutier have found themfelves much puzzled how to reconcile fuch ftubborn paffages with their own favourite hypothefes, and have been entangled in great. difficulties in endeavouring to get over the objections thefe occafion. Even with regard to the more early hiftorians, they appear to have been fometimes more precife and accurate in their defcriptions. There is a remarkable paffage of this kind in Strabo ; in which he informs us that, although the old Greek authors gave all the northern nations the common name of Scythians or Celtoscythians, yet that writers still more ancient[3], divided all “the nations who lived beyond the Euxine, the Danube and the Adriatic Sea, into the Hyperboreans, the Sauromatæ, and
† Strabo, lib. xi. Απανίας μεν δη τους Προσφόρους κλίνως οι παλαιοί την Ελληνων συγγραφείς, Σκύθαι και Κελτοσκύθαι σκαλουν, &c. Vid, Cluv. lib. i. p. 22. Pellout. vol. I. p. 2.
§. Οι δε ΕΤΙ ΠΡΟΤΕΡΟΝ διαλογίες, &c.
