These reasonings are plausible; yet we can hardly venture to alter the position of the Budini as Herodotus describes it, eastward of the Tanais. For he states in the most explicit manner that the route as far as the Argippæi _is thoroughly known_, traversed both by Scythian and by Grecian traders, and all the nations in the way to it known (iv, 24): μέχρι μὲν τούτων πολλὴ περιφάνεια τῆς χώρης ἐστὶ καὶ τῶν ἔμπροσθεν ἐθνέων· καὶ γὰρ Σκυθέων τινες ἀπικνέονται ἐς αὐτοὺς, τῶν οὐ χαλεπόν ἐστὶ πυθέσθαι, καὶ Ἑλλήνων τῶν ἐκ Βορυσθένεός τε ἐμπορίου καὶ τῶν ἄλλων Ποντικῶν ἐμπορίων. These Greek and Scythian traders, in their journey from the Pontic seaports into the interior, employed seven different languages and as many interpreters. Völcker thinks that Herodotus or his informants confounded the Don with the Volga (Mythische Geographie, sect. 24, p. 190), supposing that the higher parts of the latter belonged to the former; a mistake not unnatural, since the two rivers approach pretty near to each other at one particular point, and since the lower parts of the Volga, together with the northern shore of the Caspian, where its embouchure is situated, appear to have been little visited and almost unknown in antiquity. There cannot be a more striking evidence how unknown these regions were, than the persuasion, so general in antiquity, that the Caspian sea was a gulf of the ocean, to which Herodotus, Aristotle, and Ptolemy are almost the only exceptions. Alexander von Humboldt has some valuable remarks on the tract laid down by Herodotus from the Tanais to the Argippæi (Asie Centrale, vol. i, pp. 390-400). [467] Herodot. iv, 80. But the best known of all is the situation of the Tauri (perhaps a remnant of the expelled Cimmerians), who dwelt in the southern portion of the Tauric Chersonesus (or Crimea), and who immolated human sacrifices to their native virgin goddess,—identified by the Greeks with Artemis, and serving as a basis for the affecting legend of Iphigeneia. The Tauri are distinguished by Herodotus from Scythians,[468] but their manners and state of civilization seem to have been very analogous. It appears also that the powerful and numerous Massagetæ, who dwelt in Asia on the plains eastward of the Caspian and southward of the Issêdones, were so analogous to the Scythians as to be reckoned as members of the same race by many of the contemporaries of Herodotus.[469] [468] Herodot. iv, 99-101. Dionysius Periêgêtês seems to identify Cimmerians and Tauri (v, 168: compare v, 680, where the Cimmerians are placed on the Asiatic side of the Cimmerian Bosphorus, adjacent to the Sindi). [469] Herodot. i, 202. Strabo compares the inroads of the Sakæ, which was the name applied by the Persians to the Scythians, to those of the Cimmerians and the Trêres (xi, pp. 511-512).