The story of the Arimaspeia begins, in Herodotus's account, with a reported death that became a disappearance. Aristeas was a man of Proconnesus, an island in the Sea of Marmara close to routes connecting the Aegean and the Black Sea. Herodotus says that local people told him how the poet entered a fuller's shop and died there. The fuller shut the shop and went to inform the family, but a traveller arriving from Cyzicus contradicted the news, saying that he had recently met and spoken with Aristeas on the road. When the shop was opened, no body could be found. Herodotus records what the communities said about their poet; his report does not establish that a dead man physically returned to life. The tale gives Aristeas the unusual status of someone who could disappear from ordinary human observation.

Seven years later, according to the same tradition, Aristeas appeared again in Proconnesus, composed the poem known as the Arimaspeia and disappeared once more. The surviving account does not say that he had stopped ageing or returned unchanged in appearance. Herodotus then relates a story from Metapontum in southern Italy, which he places two hundred and forty years after the second disappearance. There Aristeas reportedly told the inhabitants to build an altar to Apollo and set up a statue bearing his own name. He said that he had previously accompanied the god in the form of a crow. The Metapontines consulted Delphi and carried out the instructions. These stories attach the poet to Apollo and to different communities across the Greek world, but their miraculous intervals should not be used as a secure chronology of a historical lifetime. The date of the poem's composition remains uncertain within the Archaic Greek period.

The poem was a hexameter account of a journey presented under the influence of Apollo, the god of prophecy and music. Aristeas claimed to have reached the Issedones. Herodotus is explicit that information about the lands beyond them came from what the Issedones were said to report, not from the poet's own observation of every northern people. Beyond them were the Arimaspians, often called Arimaspi in ancient and modern discussions, who were described as having a single eye. Further beyond were the griffins that guarded gold, followed by the Hyperboreans, whose country extended to the sea. Herodotus summarises a chain of conflict and displacement: the Arimaspians pressed upon the Issedones, the Issedones upon the Scythians, and the Scythians upon the Cimmerians. The Hyperboreans stood apart from this warfare. The resulting geography joins real ancient peoples with fabulous beings, making it important to distinguish a report preserved in a poem from an independently verified map.

The surrounding traditions are striking, but the loss of the complete poem limits how much of them can confidently be assigned to it. Herodotus elsewhere describes a reported Issedonian funeral custom involving the consumption of a dead father's flesh. That is an ancient ethnographic claim, not proof of what all Issedones actually did, and its appearance in the Histories does not by itself preserve a passage of the Arimaspeia. Likewise, fuller images of the Hyperboreans as a blessed people favoured by Apollo belong to a wider body of Greek religious storytelling. The surviving evidence supports a poem about distant peoples, gold and divine inspiration, but not a complete reconstruction of its episodes. The griffins' function as guardians and the horsemen's struggle for gold became especially durable elements of the tradition. They gave distant resources an imagined setting in which the marvellous and the geographical were difficult to separate.

Herodotus preserves the main account of Aristeas and the poem in Book 4 of his Histories. Elsewhere he expresses doubt that human beings could really be born with one eye, showing that an ancient writer could transmit a tradition without endorsing its literal truth. Prometheus Bound, traditionally attributed to Aeschylus, also places griffins and one-eyed horsemen in the distant landscape described to Io. This resemblance belongs to the same northern imaginative world, but it does not prove that every detail was borrowed directly from the lost poem. Greek art gave the conflict its own life. Images of a griffin fighting an Arimasp survive independently of the text, including a later bronze statuette in the Getty collection. The poem is therefore approached through several kinds of evidence: ancient notices, brief fragments conventionally associated with it, and a broader visual and literary tradition whose relationship to the original cannot always be traced.

In modern scholarship, the Arimaspeia has also been discussed in relation to religious journeys and altered states of experience. Karl Meuli's Scythica and E. R. Dodds's The Greeks and the Irrational are influential treatments of such questions. These discussions connect the stories about Aristeas with ideas of a travelling soul and possible contacts between Greek and northern religious traditions. Such comparisons are interpretations, not direct evidence that the poet travelled outside his body or that one religious system explains every feature of the tale. The gaps left by a lost text invite reconstruction, but they also set its limits. Aristeas remains a figure at the meeting point of poetry, reported travel and religious legend, while the Arimaspeia remains an attested work whose full shape can no longer be recovered from the surviving evidence alone.