SCYTHIA. 99

after their fate, but Alexander conciliated the com- mander with hush-money and the hand of his sister in marriage. The royal family of Macedonia were of Argive origin, according to Herodotus ; otherwise, he says, they would not have been allowed to contend at the Olympic games. This Greek descent was used subsequently by Philip of Macedon as a plea for his intervention in the affairs of Greece. A casual notice of the founding of Gyrene leads Herodotus into Libya, whither we have no space to follow him. He touches on the known North African tribes, arid glances at the unknown, relating many marvellous stories ; in fact, his love for anthropology and geography makes him seize any excuse for im- parting information. He wellnigh exhausts the world as known to the ancients, and might have wept, as Alexander did that he had no more worlds to con- quer, that he had no more to describe. Of one remote and apocryphal region he confesses he knew nothing. He was not sure that the islands called the Cassiter- ides ("Tin-Islands") had any real existence; but he had been told that tin came "from the ends of the earth." Such is the sole notice which the great tra- veller has left of us or our ancestors ; for it is probable that the Cassiterides were the coast of Cornwall.