Histories

When he had spent a month or more like this, he would put on Scythian dress and leave the city. He did this often; and he built a house in +Dnepr (river), Europe Borysthenes, and married a wife of the people of the country and brought her there.

But when things had to turn out badly for him, they did so for this reason: he conceived a desire to be initiated into the rites of the Bacchic Dionysus; and when he was about to begin the sacred mysteries, he saw the greatest vision.

He had in the city of the Borysthenites a spacious house, grand and costly (the same house I just mentioned), all surrounded by sphinxes and griffins worked in white marble; this house was struck by a thunderbolt. And though the house burnt to the ground, Scyles none the less performed the rite to the end.