Ovid in Ex Ponto:
“And lately when I was telling of your loyalty
(since I’ve learnt how to speak Getic and Sarmatian)
it chanced that an old man, standing in the circle,
replied in this way to what I said:
‘Good stranger, we too know the name of friendship, we
who live by the Black Sea and the Danube, far from you.
There’s a place in Scythia, our ancestors called Tauris,
that’s not so far away from the Getic lands.
I was born in that land (I’m not ashamed of my country):
its people worship a goddess, Diana, sister of Apollo.
Her temple still stands, supported on giant columns,
and you enter it by a flight of forty steps.
The story goes that it once held a statue of the deity,
and the base, lacking its goddess, is there to quell your doubts:
and the altar, which was white from the colour of the stone,
is darkened, reddened by the stains of spilt blood.
A woman, unknown to the marriage torches, noblest
of the daughters of Scythia by birth, performs the rites.
The nature of the sacrifice, as our ancestors decreed,
is that a stranger be slain by this virgin’s blade.
Thoas ruled the kingdom, famous in Maeotia,
no other was better known, by Euxine waters.
They say that while he was king a certain Iphigenia
made her way there through the clear air…”
Also in Tristia (The Tristia (“Sorrows” or “Lamentations”) is a collection of letters written in elegiac couplets by Ovid during his exile from Rome):
“The frozen shores of the Euxine, the ‘hospitable’, Sea
hold me: called Axenus, ‘inhospitable’, by men of old,
since its waters are troubled by immoderate winds,
and there are no quiet harbours for foreign ships.
There are tribes round it, seeking plunder and mayhem,
and the land’s no less fearful than the hostile sea.
Those you hear of, men delighting in human blood,
live almost beneath the same starry sky as myself,
and not far away from here is the dread Tauric altar
of Diana, goddess of the bow, stained with murder.
They say this was once the kingdom of Thoas,
not envied by the evil, nor desired by the good.
Here virgin Iphigenia, for whom a deer was substituted,
cared for the offerings, of whatever nature, to her goddess.
Later, Orestes came here, either in piety or wickedness,
driven by the Furies, his own conscience,
and Pylades came, his friend, an example of true love:
and they were a single mind in two bodies.
They were brought straight to the sad altar
that stood, blood-stained, before the double doors.
yet neither of them feared death, but each
grieved for the death that came to the other.
The priestess had already taken her place, knife drawn,
her Greek hair bound with barbarous sacred ribbons,
when she recognised her brother by his speech,
and Iphigenia gave him her embrace, not his death.”
< Artemis Cult originated in Taurica
The “Royal Scythia, Greece, Kyiv Rus” book has more insight into the topic
