Monumenta Vetera

[Michael Kerr]

Magister Militum Flavius Aetius wrote:

Then, a long distance away, is a peninsula inhabited by the Sindi, people of low birth, who after the disaster to their masters in Asia got possession of their wives and property.

Ammianus is obviously looking at older sources for all this material The snippet above seems to me on first reading as one of many numerous alternative versions of the old tale of the Amazons. Loosely based on Herodotus where a group of Scythian men went on an organised raid into Media (called a balc) leaving their wives to run the herds & supervise the work of their slaves (technically maybe not slaves but men without horses tied to their land - tenant farmers I suppose, but looked down upon by your average Scythian warrior) according to Herodotus the Scythians stayed in Media for 28 years, although some think they were there for 8 years, (an alternate version of the story says the men were invited to a feast by the treacherous Median king & poisoned, drugged, murdered or killed by trickery whereby the widows took up arms & remarried and moved west, although this seems a common theme amongst a lot of peoples where the warriors are murdered by their opponents at a feast.) But if a Scythian husband does not return from a balc after 7 years then a Scythian woman can consider him technically dead & claim his property (livestock,wagons etc.) & be free to choose another husband & a lot of these widows chose their farmer tenants (to be honest after a few years a lot of these wives would have had relationships & children to these men anyway) & had families with these men, supposedly the ancestors of the Sarmatians which was alright until a lot of their original husbands returned, so I suppose a lot of these families moved west to avoid conflict. Maybe originally these farmers or tenants were known as Sindi, or it could be an old tribal legend or explanation of their origin amongst them a lot like the origins of the Sarmatians. I dont know, just a thought. (I got info from ‘The Golden Deer of Eurasia: Perspectives on the Steppe Nomads of the Ancient World').
EDIT: the passage doesn't say they came from Asia, only that their masters struck disaster in Asia.
As to the tribe or people Ammianus mentioned the Aremphaei, I can find no reference to them but if we are talking Thrace, maybe due to scribal errors on the copy he was working from, or memory lapse he might have mixed up the name. There is an early Sarmatian tribe mentioned by Pliny called the Areatae or Arraei who seem to have been one of the few early Sarmatian tribes settled south of the Danube but no other source mentions this. Maybe a bit of a stretch on my part but who knows? :? If not Thrace but further north then you have to look at Olbia as there is a region southeast of there called the Tendra which in ancient times was called ‘the racecourse of Achilles' there was a bit of a cult for Achilles there and they used to hold games there so that sounds like the last region you are decribing. Tyras is Dniester River & Dnieper is Borysthenes. Basically Sarmatian (Roxolani) or Bastarnae country, at least 1st or 2nd century, before the Goths.
Regards
Michael Kerr