The Cimmerians thus belong partly to legend partly to history; but the Scythians formed for several centuries an important section of the Grecian contemporary world. Their name, unnoticed by Homer, occurs for the first time in the Hesiodic poems. When the Homeric Zeus in the Iliad turns his eye away from Troy towards Thrace, he sees, besides the Thracians and Mysians, other tribes, whose names cannot be made out, but whom the poet knows as milk-eaters and mare-milkers;[448] and the same characteristic attributes, coupled with that of “having wagons for their dwelling-houses,” appear in Hesiod connected with the name of the Scythians.[449] The navigation of the Greeks into the Euxine, gradually became more and more frequent, and during the last half of the seventh century B. C. their first settlements on its coasts were established. The foundation of Byzantium, as well as of the Pontic Herakleia, at a short distance to the east of the Thracian Bosphorus, by the Megarians, is assigned to the 30th Olympiad, or 658 B. C.;[450] and the succession of colonies founded by the enterprise of Milesian citizens on the western coast of the Euxine, seem to fall not very long after this date,—at least within the following century. Istria, Tyras, and Olbia, or Borysthenes, were planted respectively near the mouths of the three great rivers Danube, Dniester, and Bog: Kruni, Odêssus, Tomi, Kallatis, and Apollonia, were also planted on the south-western or Thracian coast, northward of the dangerous land of Salmydessus, so frequent in wrecks, but south of the Danube.[451] According to the turn of Grecian religious faith, the colonists took out with them the worship of the hero Achilles (from whom, perhaps, the œkist and some of the expatriating chiefs professed to be descended), which they established with great solemnity both in the various towns and on the small adjoining islands: and the earliest proof which we find of Scythia, as a territory familiar to Grecian ideas and feeling, is found in a fragment of the poet Alkæus (about B. C. 600), wherein he addresses Achilles[452] as “sovereign of Scythia.” There were, besides, several other Milesian foundations on or near the Tauric Chersonese (Crimea) which brought the Greeks into conjunction with the Scythians,—Herakleia, Chersonêsus, and Theodosia, on the southern coast and south-western corner of the peninsula,—Pantikapæum and the Teian colony of Phanagoria (these two on the European and Asiatic sides of the Cimmerian Bosphorus respectively), and Kêpi, Hermônassa, etc. not far from Phanagoria, on the Asiatic coast of the Euxine: last of all, there was, even at the extremity of the Palus Mæotis (Sea of Azof), the Grecian settlement of Tanais.[453] All or most of these seem to have been founded during the course of the sixth century B. C., though the precise dates of most of them cannot be named; probably several of them anterior to the time of the mystic poet Aristeas of Prokonnêsus, about 540 B. C.