Road station
Hale
Hale, of which only the first letters and faint traces remain, may be the Hylaea, a wooded country amid the open Scythian steppe near Olbia, though it might also be the name of a people. Herodotus tells two stories of that land. Here Heracles, searching for his stolen horses, met a snake-woman in a cave and fathered three sons, among them Scythes, ancestor of the Scythian kings. And here the Scythian Anacharsis secretly celebrated the mysteries of Cybele, for which his own brother, King Saulius, killed him.