Anacharsis was a Scythian philosopher who travelled from his homeland on the northern shores of the Black Sea to Athens in the early 6th century BCE and made a great impression as a forthright, outspoken "Barbarian," apparently a forerunner of the Skeptics and Cynics, though none of his authentic works have survived.
Anacharsis was half Greek and the son of a Scythian chief, from a mixed Hellenistic culture, apparently in the region of the Cimmerian Bosporus. He cultivated the outsider's knack of seeing the illogic in familiar things. His conversation was droll and frank, and Solon and the Athenians took to him as a natural philosopher, not unlike the way the French took to Benjamin Franklin. His rough and free discourse became proverbial among Athenians as 'Scythian discourse'.
Arriving in Athens about 589 BCE, he came to the house of Solon the philosopher and lawgiver, and told Solon's slave that Anacharsis was come to visit, desired to see Solon, and wanted to enter into hospitable relations. The servant returned with Solon's quintessentially Greek answer, "Men generally limit such hospitality to their own countrymen." Thereupon the Scythian stepped significantly across the threshold, and said that, now that he was in Solon's country, it would be quite suitable.
Anacharis was the first stranger who received the privileges of Athenian citizenship. He was reckoned one of the Seven Sages of Athens, and it is said that he was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries of the Great Goddess, a privilege denied to those who did not speak fluent Greek.
His book paralleling the laws of the Scythians with the laws of the Greeks has been lost. It was he who compared laws to spiders' webs, which catch small flies and allow wasps and hornets to escape.
He exhorted moderation in everything, saying that the vine bears three clusters of grapes: the first wine, pleasure; the second, drunkenness, the third, disgust. So he became a kind of Emblem to the Athenians, who inscribed on his statues: 'Restrain your tongues, your appetites, your passions.' (Compare the philosophy of Epicurus.)
His famous Letter to Croesus, the proverbially rich king of Lydia, is apocryphal, but typical of his quality:
When he did return to the Scythians, he was killed, Herodotus (iv, 76) reported, by his own brother, for his Greek ways and especially for the impious attempt to sacrifice to the Mother Goddess Cybele, whose role was unwelcome among the patriarchal Scythians.
Strabo makes him the (probably legendary) inventor of the Anchor with two flukes.