Roxolani = Russians?

[Michael Kerr]

Although no reference to Roxolani in it I saw an entry in Wikipedia article on Scythians & how Byzantine sources wrongly referred to the Rus as Tauroscythians in 9th Century AD. I had to post separately to last one as I couldn't edit previous one. With regards to Roxolani I think in late Roman/Byzantine that all steppe people got lumped together as Scythians as they were the prime example of "savage & bloodthirsty barbarians" until the Huns came along & took that title off them. I read where Flavius Aetius was of Scythian descent but he could have been Sarmatian or Alan. But he must have been reminded constantly of his ancestry by stuck up Romans

In Late Antiquity, the notion of a Scythian ethnicity grew more vague and outsiders might dub any people inhabiting the Pontic-Caspian steppe as "Scythians", regardless of their language. Thus, Priscus, a Byzantine emissary to Attila, repeatedly referred to the latter's followers as "Scythians". But Eunapius, Claudius Cladianus and Olympiodorus usually mean "Goths" when they write "Scythians".

Byzantine sources also refer to the Rus raiders who attacked Constantinople around 860 AD in contemporary accounts as "Tauroscythians", because of their geographical origin, and despite their lack of any ethnic relation to Scythians. Patriarch Photius may have first applied the term to them during the Siege of Constantinople (860).

In the 17th and 18th centuries, foreigners regarded the Russians as descendants of Scythians. It became conventional to refer to Russians as Scythians in 18th-century poetry, and Alexander Blok drew on this tradition sarcastically in his last major poem, The Scythians (1920)

Regards
Michael Kerr