Then one nation more entered into the arena; the Scythians, or, as they were called in Iran and India, the Sacae, broke off from their ancestral settlements on the Jaxartes and crossed the mountains southward. The Bactrian province came at least in great part into their power, and at some time in the last century of the Roman republic they must have established themselves in the modern Afghanistan and Beloochistan. On that account in the early imperial period the coast on both sides of the mouth of the Indus about Minnagara is called Scythian, and in the interior the district of the Drangae lying to the west of Candahar bears subsequently the name “land of the Sacae,” Sacastane, the modern Seistân. This immigration of the Scythians into the provinces of the Bactro-Indian empire doubtless restricted and injured it, somewhat as the Roman empire was affected by the first migrations of the Germans, but did not destroy it; under Vespasian there still subsisted a probably independent Bactrian state.[16] [Sidenote: Partho-Indian empire.] Under the Julian and Claudian emperors the Parthians seem to have been the leading power at the mouth of the Indus. A trustworthy reporter from the Augustan age specifies that same Sacastane among the Parthian provinces, and calls the king of the Saco-Scythians an under-king of the Arsacids; as the last Parthian province towards the east he designates Arachosia with the capital Alexandropolis, probably Candahar. Soon afterwards, indeed, in Vespasian’s time, Parthian princes rule in Minnagara. This, however, was for the empire on the river Indus more a change of dynasty than an annexation proper to the state of Ctesiphon. The Parthian prince Gondopharus, whom the Christian legend connects with St. Thomas, the apostle of the Parthians and Indians,[17] certainly ruled from Minnagara as far up as Peshawur and Cabul; but these rulers use, like their superiors in the Indian empire, the Indian language alongside of the Greek, and name themselves great-kings like those of Ctesiphon; they appear to have been not the less rivals to the Arsacids, on account of their belonging to the same princely house.[18] [Sidenote: Empire of the Sacae on the Indus.]