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TANAIS is a river of Scythia, formerly called the Amazonian river, because the Amazons bathed themselves therein; but it altered its name upon this occasion. Tanais, the son of Berossus and Lysippe, one of the Amazons, became a vehement hater of the female sex, and looking upon marriage as ignominious and dishonorable, applied himself wholly to martial affairs. This so offended Venus, that she caused him to fall passionately in love with his own mother. True it is, at first he withstood the force of his passion; but finding he could not vanquish the fatal necessity of yielding to divine impulse, and yet desirous to preserve his respect and piety towards his mother, he flung himself into the Amazonian river, which was afterwards called Tanais, from the name of the young man.
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In this river grows a plant which is called halinda, resembling a colewort; which the inhabitants bruising, and anointing their bodies with the juice of it, find themselves in a condition better able to endure the extremity of the cold; and for that reason, in their own language they call it Berossus’s oil.
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In this river grows a stone not unlike to crystal, resembling the shape of a man with a crown upon his head. Whoever finds the stone when the king dies, and has it ready against the time that the people meet upon the banks of the river to choose a new sovereign, is presently elected king, and receives the sceptre of the deceased prince;—as Ctesiphon relates in his Third Book of Plants; and Aristobulus gives us the same account in his First Book of Stones.
