The Scythians were nomadic, horse-centered peoples who dominated large parts of the Eurasian steppe for centuries. To settled neighbors—Greeks along the Black Sea and Persians to the south—they represented a terrifying kind of warfare: fast, mobile, and difficult to trap. They could appear out of nowhere, strike hard, and vanish across distances that infantry-based armies couldn’t easily match. But their power wasn’t only tactical. It was psychological. Greek authors, especially Herodotus, descr