A Scyth drinks his first victim’s blood. He takes the heads of enemies to the king, for otherwise he will have no share in the booty. He then cuts around the ears and, gripping the scalp, shakes out the rest of the head. After cleaning it with a bone scraper, he works the skin by hand till supple and makes a kerchief of it. This he attaches to his horse’s reins. The best man is the one with most trophies. Some even sew these scalps into coats. Others make quiver-covers from the skin of enemies’ hands: human skin being brightest and finest for such use. Yet others flay the whole body and carry the skin splayed out on a wooden frame. Regarding their worst enemies: those able to afford it have the skull sheathed in leather and the inside gilded for use as a drinking cup. This may also be done with a kinsman slain in a feud. If visited by guests he will serve them with these heads as a token of honour. This they call courage!39
Blood was drunk in brotherhood rituals: ‘They bleed those involved, mixing blood with wine in a large pottery bowl into which is dipped a sword, axe, spear and arrows. Then, after solemn oaths, they and the witnesses drink.’40
Their source of wine was of course the Pontic cities. The Sarmatians’ national drink was koumis, a fermentation of mare’s milk. Hemp (in Greek kannabis) is native to the steppe. Sets of inhaling equipment, consisting of bronze cauldrons, trays to contain hot stones, clusters of short tentpoles four feet high, with leather seed bags and charred hemp seeds, were found in the Scythian tombs. Such was the apparatus rendered obsolete by the invention of pipe and cigarette. Herodotus describes hemp as a fumigant as well as an intoxicant, even a source of clothing.
They have cannabis in their country, like flax except thicker and taller. It is both wild and cultivated. The Thracians make cloth from it, hemp being very like linen. The Scyths take the hempseed and, crouching under blankets, throw it onto hot stones. The seed smoulders and gives off steam at which they emit cries of pleasure. This serves instead of bathing, for seldom do they wash in water.41
The practice of ritual divination is mentioned by more than one author. As Herodotus put it, ‘there are many fortune-tellers, who divine by means of willow wands’.42 The wand is still of course associated with magic, but here the method was to drop a bunch of osiers to the ground and consult the pattern which they formed. In this matter it can hardly be maintained that Roman practice was superior, for the latter included the examination of animal entrails, observations of birds and other ‘omens from the sky’,43 such as lightning, the shape and movement of clouds and all natural or accidental occurrences, reading into them what they hoped or feared, ‘constantly peering into the intestines of sacrificial victims and watching the flight of birds. Agonizing over vague and equivocal predictions’.44 It has rightly been said that epoch-making Roman decisions hung on a chicken’s innards.
The steppe had its own answer to diviners whose prophecies misdirected royal policy. ‘Such fortune-tellers are bound and gagged inside a waggon laden with kindling wood, to which two oxen are harnessed. The wood is then fired and the terrified animals stampeded. Sometimes the oxen are roasted with the fortune-teller, sometimes the pole is burned through and they escape.’45 Regarding religion, there are Euripides’ references to the Crimea of the Scythian period, with its cult of Artemis.46 We have only a single, specifically Sarmatian image, though a powerful one: worship of a naked sword thrust into the ground.47 ‘In their country is neither temple nor shrine, nor even thatched hut; only a naked sword stuck into the soil, which they worship with due reverence. Such is the war god who presides over the lands on which they wander.’48
The above quotations mention the absence of huts and presence of wagons. The latter were the standard dwelling of the Sarmatian tribes and an essential part of nomad equipment. Where might timber for these carts be found? Though the steppe was generally treeless, its river bottoms were often wooded. The so-called Iron Age was a period of major advance in wood working, not least in the construction of vehicles with strong, spoked wheels. Clay models, probably toys, from Scythian tombs show these as covered wagons, with skins stretched over (or bark nailed onto) hooped frames. Sometimes only the rearward half was enclosed, leaving an open-fronted driving compartment. Occasionally the covering was pyramidical, a sort of wigwam erected on the wagon’s stern. The classic shape, however, resembled the American or Afrikaner covered wagon and was possibly a distant ancestor of the gypsy caravan.
The 4th-century historian Ammianus Marcellinus of Antioch has this to say about Sarmatian nomadism:
Midway along the Black Sea’s northern coast are numerous Sarmatian tribes whose lands have no known limit. They roam over vast solitudes: places ignorant of plough or seeds and knowing only disuse and frost. Here they forage like animals. Their families, homes and chattels they load onto bark-roofed wagons; and when the mood is on them they move off, without a second thought, rolling on toward the place which takes their fancy next.49
This is the means by which they and others like them had travelled along that great and grassy road whose beginning and end none knew. When they halted, the wagons would be formed into a laager or defensive ring. Though the able-bodied lived in the saddle, vehicles were essential for child-rearing and winter shelter.
Indeed they are without even hovels and cannot be bothered with ploughshares, living on meat and milk, dwelling in wagons roofed with rounded canopies of bark and driving them over the wide solitudes. When they come to good grazing they arrange their carts in a circle, then gorge like beasts. And when foraging is finished they load their cities, so to speak, and off they go. In these same wagons the men lie with the women and the children are born and brought up. Such are their houses; and at whatever place they chance to arrive, that to them is home.50
The Greeks were amazed and amused by the nomad diet, calling the steppe peoples hippemolgi (horse milkers) and galactophagi (milk eaters). ‘They live on meat, including horse meat; and mare’s milk, the latter (prepared in a certain way) being especially enjoyed. Hence the poet51 calls all the nomads galactophagi.’52
Other food products were nevertheless available, both from the north and the Crimea. The latter, in climate a mini-Mediterranean, had been famous for its grain from the late Bronze Age.53 There is also evidence for millet cultivation in valleys on the steppe itself; and the Pontic cities had surrounded themselves with fields. All this the Sarmatian peoples regarded as their own. Having conquered the entire western steppe from the Scyths they believed it their right to charge for its use: ‘They turn over their land to anyone who wishes to till it, requiring only that in return they receive the rent they have put on it.’54
Even so there were shortages. The trading colonies did not consider it their role to feed the Sarmatians but rather, with their help, to acquire grain for shipment to Greece in return for luxury goods. This could be a recipe for trouble. In winter the pasture disappeared under snow and the undernourished herds produced little milk. The Pontic colonies then faced starving tribes to their front and frozen seas at their back; for the freshwater of the great rivers reduced the freezing point of the coastal waters and induced the formation of fringe ice which in turn blocked the harbours and completed their isolation. As if this were not enough, the Danube and other rivers also froze, allowing easy passage for raiding parties. Even wagon columns could now cross. Herodotus’ claim that the Sea of Asov freezes for eight months in the year was doubtless an exaggeration. It does, however, share the same January isotherm as the Gulf of Finland, though 850 miles further south. ‘For eight months every year there is frost unbearable [ … ] the sea freezes [ … ] and the Scythians drive their wagons across to the land of the Sindi.’55 Pliny the Younger adds that: ‘When the Danube banks are joined by ice and it can carry great preparations for war upon its back, then its fierce tribes have both their arms and the cold to fight for them…’56
Did the Sarmatians incline to villainy only when pushed to starvation’s brink, or were they habitual robbers and raiders? Though winter was the time of greatest danger,
sources are unanimous in branding them as bad for all seasons. Ammian calls them ‘a tribe highly experienced in brigandage’57 and ‘a people better suited to theft than war’.58 Tacitus admitted their quality as fighters, though only when mounted: ‘While they are useless on foot, on horseback it is another matter. The line of battle which can stand up to them hardly exists.’59 He describes an incursion by one of their tribes into imperial territory higher up the Danube in AD 69 when the intruders were intercepted by Roman infantry on ground unfavourable to cavalry: ‘The Rhoxolans, a Sarmatian tribe [ … ] 9,000 rampaging horsemen, seeking booty rather than battle [ … ] had scattered for plunder and [returning] loot-laden were unable, because of the slippery paths, to benefit from their horses’ speed. They were delivered as lambs to the slaughter.’60
But once out on the open steppe there was little likelihood of catching them. ‘Pursuing or pursued, they gallop great distances on fast horses, leading one or even two more so that by alternating mounts they can maintain speed.’61
Herodotus touched upon a universal military problem when he wrote: ‘They who are without permanent towns or fortifications and live not by agriculture but by stock-raising, carrying dwellings in wagons: surely such people will be uncatchable and therefore unconquerable.’62 The underlying point is that strength alone does not determine the outcome of war. Rome had often defeated the strong, whose weakness was that they possessed roads which could be marched on, granaries which could be commandeered and towns which could be knocked out. What of that other kind of enemy whose territory was trackless and townless, whose soil had never been ploughed? Conflict with backward peoples would prove less and less rewarding as Rome advanced and the Mediterranean fell behind.
On the other hand, steppe brigandage becomes more understandable, perhaps more excusable, as the empire takes shape. It has already been noted how the Sarmatian tribes migrated as far as the Black Sea and then stopped. Whatever the earlier reasons, by Ovid’s time one is dominant: the growing presence of Roman arms in the Balkans. Like westbound wanderers generally, their path was now blocked. Particularly it meant they had ceased to be true nomads, exchanging the carefree, open-ended steppe for confinement to one area, with other tribes behind and the unattainable wealth and security of the Roman provinces in front. An obvious solution was to settle and practise farming. Like the American Indian, however, Sarmatian development had not attained this level. Nor did the north Pontic region, with its summerlong drought63 and winterlong freeze, invite it. Even in the late Roman period offshoots of this same group of tribes would still be hanging around in the lower Danube region with nowhere to go. In the 4th century of our era, when Tomis had risen to respectability as the seat of the Bishop of Scythia, a Greek cleric called Grigoris was out on the steppe, preaching to the Sarmatian tribes. He admonished them to mend their ways, abandon rapine and follow the path of Jesus. When he concluded there was a puzzled silence. Then their leader spoke, asking the question which evidently troubled them all: ‘But suppose we do as you say and obey the law of the Church; suppose we cease to rob and plunder the goods of others: on what then shall we live?’64
Returning to the subject of winter: this was the season Ovid most dreaded. The Dobruja is in fact transitional, between Russian and Mediterranean climates. Mamaia and the other beach resorts remind us that this is Romania’s playground, where winter can be mild. But when the wind backs toward Russia, Ovid’s comments become credible. Ancient geography had little understanding of the influence of landmass on climate. Cold was attributed to latitude and altitude, but not to distance from the ocean or the direction of its currents. That is why Ovid imagined himself much further north than he really was, locating Tomis as ‘close to the shivering pole’! In fact Constantsa lies on the O°C January isotherm, which also runs through New York and across the northern United States. In his tendency to dwell on the cold, Ovid may be compared with a Southern Californian writing home from Chicago. One must therefore allow for exaggeration and the expectations of a warm-climate readership. Shocking descriptions of cold were a literary convention. In the Poems of Exile, however, cold is inseparable from the dangers it provoked:
While summer lasts the Danube is our friend:
His war-preventing water between us
And them. But when the spiteful season shows
His sordid face and grim frost grips the ground,
Then are those savage peoples by the quaking cold
Driven toward the limit of endurance.65
Now comes the ill-wind from the steppe: the mounted raider and the singing arrow. These Getans, like their Sarmatian parent tribe and the Scyths before them, wore scale armour: overlapping plates of horn or iron, sewn onto a leather jerkin. Helmets were cone-shaped. They flew tubular standards, like wind socks, painted to resemble dragons or snakes.66 From Scythian tombs we also know of brightly coloured saddles and embroidered horse trappings. As well as the shortbow, they used sword or axe, plus a vicious weapon of their own: the fighting whip, multi-thonged with a small, metal weight on each tip, used against the enemy’s face to inflict blindness. Accoutrement and ornament depended on social status. Burials suggest wide differences, not only in finery but in horse size and even human stature. To have defeated the lavishly equipped Scyths, the Sarmatians must have had an aristocratic, heavy cavalry, perhaps using horses of Ferghana (Uzbek) origin. Their underlings, more lightly and crudely outfitted, rode the usual steppe pony, controlled, as was normal in the ancient world, by means of the knees and bit alone. The upper mane was shortened to prevent fouling the bow, the withers left long for hanging onto.
We may suspect that the raiders described by Ovid were of the lower social order: a rabble, acting in defiance of their own chieftains; for it is doubtful whether Tomis could have withstood an organized attack by heavy cavalry. Even so, these ruffians would possess the usual skills of steppe horsemen: capable of wheeling with the oneness of a flock of starlings; brilliant archers, able to shoot backwards, in Parthian fashion; employing clever ruses, including the celebrated feigned retreat, which enticed the enemy to break ranks or abandon a defensive position.67
On the other side of the picture we have the treatise, by an anonymous physician, known as Airs, Waters and Places, once attributed to Hippocrates. He visited the Pontic region around the same time as Herodotus, examining a number of Scythian men and women. It portrays the steppe warrior as far from fit or strong. Hip and spinal problems are given as the commonest ailments, wages of a life on horseback. The men are described as short, with skin pink and clammy; the women as ugly and loathsomely fat. At any rate, so they seemed to a sophisticated Greek. The Sarmatians looked fit enough to Ovid. He writes of their forays, in the danger zone outside the walls, where the small city was obliged to support itself by farming:
When bitter Boreas cements both stream and sea,
When Danube by the north wind has been frozen flat:
Then comes the enemy, riding to attack,
Savaging the surroundings far and wide.
Some flee, abandoning to plunder what little
The country and the wretched peasant has.
Others, dragged off with pinioned arms,
Gaze helplessly behind toward families and farms.
Yet others, shot with barbed shaft, fall writhing:
For poison rides aboard the flying steel.
The barbarian will break all things he cannot take,
His hungry flame devouring harmless home.
Even when peace returns the land is paralysed.
Fallow and fruitless the fields. Frightful the
Foe, in prospect as in presence.68
Barbarian portraits are common on Roman soldiers’ tombstones; especially of cavalry troopers, who are shown overleaping sprawling enemies. Prisoners are featured on triumphal arches: usually tousled and muscular, dressed (when not naked) in shaggy skins and often trousers. Were they always of strapping build, or was this so that Roman courage would seem greater? To the Medite
rranean nations, trousers were as much a symbol of savagery as today’s clichés of war-paint or bones through noses. In fact they were simply the invention of horseriding peoples and a practical part of their lives.
With stitched trousers and sewn skins covering all
But face, the savage grapples with grim winter.
Ice hangs from hoary hair and sparkling beard,
Wine stands moulded to the vessel’s shape,
Streams stop dead. Ice is dug as drinking water.
The very Danube (no less narrow than the Nile
And mingling with the deep through many mouths)
Stiffens under freezing wind and gropes its
Seaward way beneath the ice. Now will men
Walk where ships once sailed and ice becomes
A drum for horses’ hooves. Across the new-formed
Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge Page 7