The name Cimmerians appears in the Odyssey,—the fable describes them as dwelling beyond the ocean-stream, immersed in darkness and unblessed by the rays of Helios. Of this people as existent we can render no account, for they had passed away, or lost their identity and become subject, previous to the commencement of trustworthy authorities: but they seem to have been the chief occupants of the Tauric Chersonesus (Crimea) and of the territory between that peninsula and the river Tyras (Dniester), at the time when the Greeks first commenced their permanent settlements on those coasts in the seventh century B. C. The numerous localities which bore their name, even in the time of Herodotus,[446] after they had ceased to exist as a nation,—as well as the tombs of the Cimmerian kings then shown near the Tyras,—sufficiently attest this fact; and there is reason to believe that they were—like their conquerors and successors the Scythians—a nomadic people, mare-milkers, moving about with their tents and herds, suitably to the nature of those unbroken steppes which their territory presented, and which offered little except herbage in profusion. Strabo tells us[447]—on what authority we do not know—that they, as well as the Trêres and other Thracians, had desolated Asia Minor more than once before the time of Ardys, and even earlier than Homer. [446] Herodot. iv, 11-12. Hekatæus also spoke of a town Κιμμερίς (Strabo, vii, p. 294). Respecting the Cimmerians, consult Ukert, Skythien, p. 360, _seqq._ [447] Strabo, i, pp. 6, 59, 61.