The Turks call it Kara Deniz (Black Sea) in contrast to the Mediterranean, Ak Deniz (Blue Sea) and for good reason. Emerging from a Bosphorus bright with lawns and palaces, the very act of entering seems to induce a mood change, appropriate to the sea’s name in all languages except Greek and Latin. The Greeks called it Pontos Euxinos, the Hospitable Sea and the Romans followed their lead. But this was a publicity stunt, rather as Eric the Red was to change Whiteshirt Land to Greenland, ‘so that people will go there’. Indeed, with the bluntness of men whose business was to sail rather than sell, Greek mariners had called it Axenos, the Inhospitable. What influenced the change?
In the absence of later arrivals (Turks, Slavs and Bulgars), the Greek lands were adjacent to the Black Sea’s western end and Greek ships could penetrate its eastern. This is at longitude forty-two degrees, somewhat further east than present-day Moscow. So the Black Sea brought Greece to Inner Asia’s doorstep. Not surprisingly the twin seas, Black and Aegean, though wedded by water, were culturally divorced. The Greek view of this alien world is evoked by the Golden Fleece legend, in which fear and fascination mingle. Here was a sombre sea surrounded by savages, lacking the comfort of harbours and islands, yet tempting boldness with a rich reward. The picture is darkened by Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, with death on a barbaric altar as the price of shipwreck. Eastward loomed grim mountains: Virgil’s ‘rugged, rock-bristling Caucasus’2 where Prometheus endured eternal torment. Doubtless the origins of the Fleece legend may be sought in Caucasian gold, swept down in the freezing torrents, to be panned by prospectors and filtered through wool. But there were other prizes, which in the end proved richer. Where Jason led businessmen followed, pursuing, if not gold, then a golden rule: that whenever unlike peoples meet, money is to be made. Such convergences are eternal settings for commerce, since each side has something the other lacks.
To exploit this opportunity, the Greeks required anchorages, warehouses, interpreters, homes, defences; in short, the infrastructure of safe and stable business, repeated every hundred miles round this profitable shore. And to promote the exchange of goods, an exchange of adjectives, from inhospitable to hospitable, from hostile to welcoming, would encourage the colonists bound for these Pontic cities. At least five centuries before Rome’s arrival, two dozen trading stations had been established. Some were at the mouths of the rivers which drain down from the immensity of what we now call Russia: the Dniestr, Bug, Dniepr and Don. Others were on the Crimean peninsula and the Sea of Asov. Yet more lay in Georgia and along the northern coast of Asia Minor. Especially active as founder of these outposts was Miletus, on the Aegean coast of today’s Turkey, ‘mother of more than ninety cities’,3 though herself a daughter of Athens. Tomis was a Milesian foundation. It is a process still familiar to maritime nations, whose emporia, such as the depots along the Gold and Ivory Coasts, Singapore, Shanghai, Calcutta and many more, were so placed that they could be established, defended and, if necessary, evacuated by sea. However, in these modern instances, technology and strength favoured the incomer. By contrast, the Greeks were without particular advantage and faced impossible odds, surviving because the local peoples wanted them to.
There is ample evidence of the store set by barbarian societies upon trade and the goods it brought. Strabo speaks of ‘the Caucasian people taking produce to market by sliding down the snowy slopes on sledges made of animal skins’.4 The eastern Black Sea was reputedly the terminus of a caravan route from somewhere so distant that no one knew its origin. Pliny tells us that Dioscurias (Sukhumi) was ‘the common emporium of seventy tribes … all speaking different languages’;5 and that ‘dealings were done by our businessmen, aided by a staff of 130 interpreters’.6 Similarly Strabo on Tanais, at the Don mouth: ‘It is a market for both Asiatic and European nomads … who bring slaves, hides and such things as they produce; the Greeks giving in exchange clothing, wine and other commodities associated with civilized life’.7 Nevertheless, though normally tenable, and though there were also Greek colonies in unfriendly parts of the Mediterranean, the Pontic were the most precarious.
Cities like Tomis, on the Black Sea’s northern shore, faced a particular problem in that the world on whose edge they were precariously poised was itself precarious; for they were liable, after a long investment in bribes and trust building, to be confronted by new and even fiercer arrivals. This can be understood by seeing geography more widely, particularly that of the former Soviet Union whose zones of natural vegetation run crosswise in broad and even bands: tundra, pine, deciduous woodland, woodland mixed with grass, and finally grassland. The last, too dry for tree growth, was known as the grassy steppe: a strip barely 150 miles deep and running the entire length of the Black Sea’s northern shore. Today it is largely the southern Ukraine where, with the aid of irrigation from those mighty rivers, the landscape is one of waving wheat and heavy-headed sunflowers; ideal for mechanized farming, though the dense and matted sod remained unbroken till the late 18th century, when Russia’s southward expansion transformed the steppe way of life.
Steppe is Russian for prairie or pampa. This grassy or Pontic steppe is so flat that the Greeks called part of it the Racecourse of Achilles. Though generally more undulating, the short-grass prairie of the American high-plains states, which can still be seen in the National Grasslands of Nebraska and the Dakotas, is essentially the same. Virgin steppe, now rare in the Ukraine, survives at nature reserves like Askanya Nova; in spring melodic with lark song and vivid with wild tulip. Huge flocks of birds rest in mid journey between Northern Russia and the Middle East. Here too the Przewalski horses, pinkish-beige and white-maned, drum the dry plain. Introduced from Mongolia, these are possible descendants of the sturdy ponies of steppe prehistory.
Early summer is more spectacular still: the plain sprouting fescue, needlegrass and feathergrass; whirring with grasshoppers and bobbing with marmots. Hyacinth, lavender, sage, mint, vetch, milkweed and, most typical of all, the pungent wormwood,8 with its grey-green leaf and yellow flower, colonizing ground made bald by lightning-kindled grass fires. Hawks hang in the bare blue and everywhere is an endless horizontality, broken only by the bumps of kurgans (burial mounds or round barrows) scattered widely over the vivid, green grassland.
Late summer and autumn are less rewarding, the bronze and silver steppe a sea in which the walker wades, waist-high, through tinkling grass and crackling weed, legs pricked by stalks, socks stiff with burrs and bootfuls of sharp seeds. Here unmounted man makes little headway. Winter is more savage still. Big blizzards scour the plain, reminding us that, though we may be at the latitude of northern Italy, this, after all, is close to Russia.
Such was the hinterland of Tomis and her sister colonies along the Black Sea’s northern shore. The ultimate factor, however, is not the steppe’s natural history, but its extent. Although narrow in a north-south sense, from west to east it is one of the longest features on earth, extending some 5,000 miles from eastern Europe to Manchuria, where the grassy strip widens to 600 miles. All told, the area is immense, perhaps 5 per cent of former Soviet territory. While the American plains run north-south, from Manitoba to Texas, the steppe, almost three times as long, lies crosswise, traversing 100 degrees of longitude, well over half the width of the Eurasian landmass. Though its central portion is interrupted by mountains, these are crossable. As this grassy path marches eastwards it becomes higher, drier and more thinly peopled. However, the normal direction of march is westwards; for with each day’s journey the winter grows minutely milder, the climate infinitesimally moister and the pasture fractionally richer. If sheep led shepherd – as doubtless they often did – greener grass would draw them gently toward Europe.
It is easy to see how these accidents of climate and geography made the steppe a feature of long-term danger for the West. Not only did it offer the Asian herd folk a corridor toward the Balkans, it brought that most irksome enemy, the mounted nomad; for such vast distances, and the tangle of summer herbage, decreed that horsemen wo
uld dominate the steppe, as cowboys would one day rule the American prairie and gauchos the Argentinian pampa. This is why steppe migration awaited the taming of the horse and did not begin until about 2000 BC. At least a futher twelve centuries then elapsed before a distinctive, mounted warrior emerged, using armour and weapons largely copied from Iran.
Nomads have been described as those whose animals eat grass faster than it grows. Though we are used to thinking of the pastoralist as peaceful, this may simply be conditioning. Our cultural heritage is shepherd-friendly. The bucolic9 vein runs deep in Western art: through Virgil’s Eclogues, Dresden shepherdesses and Beethoven’s Sixth. Its theme is the unattainable: either an innocent past in one’s own place, or an innocent present in some legendary place. It elevates the shepherd to an ornamental role in societies whose real business is now the drudgery of agriculture. Christianity strengthens the tradition by emphasis on the good shepherd.10 And yet, as the Old Testament reminds us, there is also the bad shepherd: ‘And so it was, when Israel had sown, that the Midianites came, and the Amalekites, and the children of the east [ … ] they came as grasshoppers for multitude [ … ] and they entered into the land to destroy it.’11 These ‘children of the east’ were of course bedouin from the dry lands beyond Jordan, recalling the Arabian adage, ‘raids are the bedouins’ agriculture’. The nomad has always sought to rob the granaries of settled lands. Alas, the shepherds soon to be encountered by Ovid would bear little resemblance to those decorous products of Graeco-Roman pastoralism with which he and his colleagues had so blithely supplied their readers.
Whether squabbling over grazing and watering rights or harrying the farmers along its edges, aggression was a fact of steppe life. Though nomad populations were thinly spread, raiding parties could be mustered quickly. Doubtless they would as quickly dissolve, for lacking logistical capacity, there was little likelihood of prolonged campaigns. However, limitation was compensated by performance. These were the world’s best horsemen. All adults were warriors. The steppe drew little distinction between military and civilian, man and woman. Accordingly the Pontic region supplied the ancient world with two of its abiding images: the amazon, a woman who could outfight a man; and the centaur, in which rider and horse merge into a powerful killing machine.
Seen more widely then, the Pontic steppe was part of an invasion path of long standing. This is not to say that mounted hordes were continually pouring out of Mongolia, intent on the West’s destruction. Their view was local and their progress slow. Nor did they necessarily stay the course. Sometimes their wanderings ceased for centuries. Some tribes left the path midway, while others entered it. In particular the wide gaps between Caspian and Aral, Aral and Lake Balkhash, invited the northward movement of refugees from the droughts of northern Iran and Afghanistan, who joined the steppe in its central or Kirghiz portion. This was the probable origin of the Scythian and Sarmatian peoples, whose appearance in the Pontic region coincides with Greek commercial expansion. Nor did this pastoral corridor end at the Black Sea. Its natural termini were more ominous still: the Wallachian Plain, that part of the lower Danube where Bucharest now stands; or, branching north round the Carpathians, the Hungarian Plain and the middle Danube.
Foundation of the Pontic cities had coincided with a long lull in steppe migration caused by the settling of the Scyths, a people of sufficient power to command agricultural produce from the moister zone to the north and trade goods from the Greeks to the south. In the mid-1970s an exhibition from the Soviet Union called Scythian Gold caused surprise and excitement. Here were objects recovered by Soviet archaeologists from the kurgans. Of finest Greek workmanship and commissioned by Scythian notables, some depicted scenes from steppe life. The excavation reports are more sensational still. They describe burials of opulent barbarity, sickeningly brutal in their accompaniment of human and equine sacrificial massacre. Such findings provided a striking confirmation of Herodotus. In about 450 BC the ‘father of history’ visited Olbia, a Pontic city at the mouth of the Bug, three towns along from Tomis, leaving this description:
The death and burial of Scythian kings [ … ] A great, square pit is dug. The body is enclosed in wax, the stomach cavity stuffed with fragrant herbs and incense. The bearers mutilate themselves, slashing arms, scratching faces, cutting off ear lobes and piercing the left palm with an arrow. The body is placed on a couch, with spears planted all round it and roofed with hides. A concubine, the closest servants and their horses are then garrotted and buried with the body, plus various personal treasures. Then all build an earthen barrow, vying to make it as great as possible. A year later they strangle fifty more servants and horses. The horses’ bodies are propped up on posts and the men, mounted on top of them, secured with more stakes, as if riding round the king. Finally the whole grisly cavalcade is buried.12
The Scyths built palisaded settlements, usually within the protection of a river bend. The largest known has a perimeter of twenty miles, including grazing space for substantial flocks, wooden dwellings, smithies and leather workshops, plus a royal palace. Greek-style coins were minted, bearing the likeness of Scythian kings. Here was a developmental level not far behind that of Celtic Europe.
Two centuries after Herodotus’ visit, steppe traffic began to move again. The next arrivals were the Sarmatians. Numerous, ferocious and less advanced (except in war), they defeated the Scyths and confined them to the Crimea, where remnants survived for a time. The name ‘Scythia’ continued to be used by classical authors both for the north Pontic coast and, more loosely,13 for almost the entirety of the former Soviet Union. In fact the lands to the Black Sea’s north would remain inscrutable. Reportedly they were the abode of races subhuman and deformed: a conventional evasion by the ancient geographer when the limits of his knowledge were reached. Antiquity probably knew more about coastal India than the hinterlands of Dniepr and Don; as in the Age of Discovery, when continents would be circumnavigated long before they were investigated. Certainly the Greek colonists did not contemplate Livingstone-like marches into the interior. They preferred to placate the nearest tribes, addicting their leaders to outside products, especially wine, so inveigling them into a dependence through which the interior could be exploited indirectly. In this way a slave trade would be set in motion and grain drawn down from the forest-steppe zone around today’s Kiev, without the instigators leaving the safety of their coastal depots. The discovery of Greek objects far to the north tells of a web of trading relationships in partnership with the Scyths. Now the Sarmatians had blown the web away and a replacement must be sedulously spun.
The newcomers, however, were a trickier proposition. Though also of Iranian origin and speaking an Indo-European tongue, the Sarmatians were less likely to be influenced toward sedentary courses. The burial mounds of their chieftains are of a construction comparable to the Scythian, but less lavishly equipped. Many were opened by Soviet archaeologists in the pre-war and post-war years, mainly along the rivers and in the Kuban, yielding gold or bronze jewellery, weapons and iron chainmail; the latter confirming a formidable cavalry of knightly type. No sign of a steppe agriculture has been found. On the other hand, grave fields of two or three hundred burials imply prolonged stays. Here is something of a contradiction: a mobile people caught up in an indefinite pause. It is difficult to say whether trading and raiding among the Pontic cities provided incentives to stay. But stay they did: some eight or ten unruly subgroups, scattered along the Black Sea’s northern shore. Their vanguard, the Thracians, had reached as far as today’s Bulgaria. Closest, therefore, to Greece, the Thracians tended to side with the Greeks against their own Sarmatian cousins. Another group, the Dacians, had crossed the Carpathian passes, abandoned the ways of the nomad and settled in Transylvania. Yet another, the Getans, now occupied the steppe around Tomis. Nearby were the restless Rhoxolans and Iazyges; then the Sarmatian parent tribe itself, living east of Tomis; and the Alans, probably the rearguard: together a queue of troubles awaiting Rome’s eventual attention.
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Such was the Pontic steppe when Jesus was a boy in Nazareth, the elderly Augustus ruled a renascent Rome and the imperial army and navy were taking the lower Danube in hand. However, their approach was slow. The coastal region between the Bosphorus and the delta would not be formally annexed for at least forty years. The date of this event is unknown, but the first permanent stationing of an army unit is not attested by inscription until the AD 70s.
For the Greek cities, with Roman land forces still distant and only sporadic protection from the navy, the early 1st century was a time of unease; the Barbaricum unstable, shifting round them like the winter ice floes against the Black Sea shore. This was the mood at the time of Ovid’s arrival; and archaeology confirms his pessimism. Constantsa’s modern overlay makes Tomis less easy to dig, but Histria, the next city northwards, has provided considerable evidence. In the 2nd century BC its size had doubled. Temples had been built. There were stone houses with upper stories. Its own coinage was issued. A period of contraction then followed; and construction of a stronger town wall indicates the coming of the Sarmatians and disorder in the Pontic region generally.
Regarding the character of the Sarmatians and the flavour of life in an outpost among them, Ovid’s verse is our principal source. His Poems of Exile consist of two major compositions: Tristia (The Sorrows) and Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea), together some 7,000 lines, which have survived almost entire. As literature and the testament of a personal ordeal these are works of unique interest. As history they must be treated with caution. Ovid loathed this thraldom and his poems are a plea for deliverance. To whomever they were addressed, their real target was the emperor, or those who might influence him favourably. It was not in his interest to paint Tomis and the Black Sea region in cheerful colours. On the other hand, neither archaeology, modern climatic data, nor the views of other ancient witnesses entirely refute his impressions.
Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge Page 5