Not long ago, a magnificent gold signet ring was picked up near the old Greek colony of Istria, at the mouth of the Danube. It carried the image of an unknown goddess with a diadem on her pony-tailed hair, looking at herself in a mirror, and it was engraved with the name skyleo.
This was one of those rare moments in archaeology when something lost and found could be traced to its owner. Scyles, or Scylos, is the man at the centre of a story told by Herodotus. This story is about a different and more ominous kind of aporia, about the invisible frontier between ways of life and the inaccessibility of one culture to another.
Scyles was a Scythian prince who became dazzled by the Greek city of Olbia. He became two people. Outside the city walls he was a steppe ruler who commanded a complex traditional society with its wagons and herds and rituals. But within the city walls he became a Greek. Scyles kept a Greek wife in Olbia, and on entering the gates would change his nomad dress for loose Hellenic robes. According to Herodotus, he built an elaborate palace in the town (although no such palace has been found: the private houses of Olbia, as opposed to the huge municipal buildings and temples, are modest one-story structures without much decoration).
One day, a group of Scythians contrived to peer over the walls into Olbia at the time of the festival of Dionysian mysteries. There they saw Scyles dressed in the regalia of the Dionysian order, reeling through the streets at the head of the sacred procession. To them, or rather to Herodotus reconstructing their reactions, this sight meant that Scyles had crossed an uncrossable frontier: by consenting to become a Dionysian initiate, he had betrayed Scythian identity and become a Greek. When they brought the news home, Scyles' brother assumed power in his place, and Scyles took flight. Heading south-west, he sought asylum with the Thracians who lived on the other bank of the Danube, where it formed a border with the Scythian domains. But the Scythians already held a Thracian prince as hostage, and the Thracians agreed to hand back Scyles in exchange. On the banks of the river, near Istria, Scyles was put to death by his own brother.
The golden ring pretty certainly belonged to Scyles. But it was a stray find. Whether he gave it away before his death, or whether it was wrenched off the fingers of his corpse at the time of his execution or robbed much later from his grave, is not to be known.
Scyles perished because he tried, and failed, to inhabit two separate worlds simultaneously and refused to choose between them. He might have survived if he had openly declared himself a Hellene and stayed in Olbia, or if he had led a Scythian army through the city's gates to burn and plunder it, or if he had merely absorbed Greek ideas in order to 'modernise' Scythia. In that third case, he would have been a candidate for heroic status, precisely in the sense of H. M. Chadwick's theory put forward eighty years ago in The Heroic Age.
Chadwick thought that the contact between a 'high civilisation' and a 'tribal' society (or between 'centre' and 'periphery') often produced a mutation in the less advanced culture. The traditional chieftain, exposed to 'increased opportunities of trade, travel and the gathering of wealth', might be tempted to escape from the restraining web of traditional custom and obligation and make himself into a new type of leader: a lawless, ruthless voyaging soldier and conqueror who mounted military expeditions with his own band of warrior-companions. Finn MacCumhal with his Fenians, or a Nordic hero with his loyal spear-gang, was for Chadwick an example of this heroic mutation at the periphery which substituted 'bonds of allegiance' for bonds of kinship and custom. And yet Scyles, offered all those 'increased opportunities' at exactly such a moment of cultural contact, displayed not the slightest impulse to take to the road as a muscular gang-leader. Chadwick's theory, taken crudely, might predict that Scyles' inner barbaric nature would hurl itself towards the new horizons opened to him in Olbia. But Scyles, shown two contrasting modes of life, wanted them both to continue as they were and to participate entirely in both of them. Scyles is a hostile witness both against ancient theories of 'barbarism' and against more modern theories about the subservience of 'peripheries' to 'centres'. He resembles, quite closely, certain Highland chieftains of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scotland who lived double lives: polished gentlemen in Edinburgh and (later) London, and at the same time traditional leaders of a customary Gaelic society at home. Macleod of Raasay and 'young Coll' Maclean, encountered by Samuel Johnson and James Boswell on their Hebridean tour in 1773, seemed to have achieved this equipoise in dualism.
But the Scottish Gaeltacht was already in the early stages of dissolution, and within a few decades such a balance was becoming impossible to maintain as the traditional leaders of Highland society surrendered to the temptations and pressures of the central culture and began to exploit their dependents as a source of cash. Only half a century after Dr Johnson's tour to the Hebrides, the Clearances had begun to remove the Highland tenantry and replace them with sheep; by 1820, few clan chiefs retained a command of fluent Gaelic, and their use of Highland clothing and custom amounted to little more than fancy dress. Scythia, on the other hand, survived for nearly five hundred years after the fate of Scyles.
The tale of Scyles is very much a Black Sea story. It is not only about the encounter with the new, but also about the distance between worlds. This distance may be cultural, a frontier in the mind, or it may be physical. The point is that a person cannot be two persons at once, but by traversing such a distance between cultures becomes at the end of the journey a different person. Anthony Pagden, in his book European Encounters with the New World, suggests that the very length of the sea journey from Europe to the Americas, the experience of months spent in fear and privation on the enormous water-desert of the Atlantic, gave to the first Spanish colonists a sense of having moved from one universe to an entirely 'other' one in which old expectations and moralities no longer applied. The return journey could be made, eventually, but the traveller could no longer disembark at Cadiz or Barcelona as the same individual who had departed years before. Antonio de Ulloa spoke of the eighteenth-century 'Indies' as 'another world'. William of Rubruck, a monk who made his way to the centre of the Mongol-Tatar empire in the thirteenth century, thought after his first encounter with Golden Horde nomads in the Don steppe that i was come into a new world'.
The Greeks who reached the northern shores of the Black Sea also felt that they had crossed between worlds. They probably made the voyage by daily stages, coasting between anchorages rather than heading straight across the open sea. But the Mediterranean had not prepared them for the ferocity of Black Sea weather, for its violent offshore squalls or blizzards or winter ice, and the Sea appeared to them as a hostile void — a black hole in time and space — in contrast to the familiar Aegean with its shoals of islands. And when they arrived and struggled ashore, they found themselves perched on the edge of another sea: the steppe.
Near the modern town of Kherson, on the lower Dnieper, there is a place called Askania Nova. 'Askania' is a fanciful nineteenth-century antiquarian's term for Prussia, and here, before the Russian Revolution, an aristocratic German landowner established a nature reserve to protect for future generations an enclosure of the ancient, unexploited steppe with its herbs and grasses and birds.
He was a wise baron. Today, almost nothing whatever remains of the old Ukrainian and south Russian steppe which was the world of the Scythians and Sarmatians and of all the pastoral nomads who followed them, and which survived intact in many regions into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Pontic Steppe, one of the formative environments of Eurasia, has been devoured by the tractor, leaving only a gigantic flatness of ploughland divided by lines of silver poplars which run beside the roads from horizon to horizon.
Even Askania Nova, the last remnant, is now in danger. Collective farms around its perimeter are putting sheep and pigs into it; a nearby canal is draining the water table; low-flying aircraft from a military base scare its creatures; there have been devastating fires. The orderly, tranquil days when a scientific staff looked after the reserv
e and welcomed school parties from Odessa and Kherson and Nikolaev are long gone. It is the story of Olbia over again: no more state money to pay wardens, no petrol for the coaches to bring visitors, no defence against spreading poverty and lawlessness in which each community grabs what it can.
What was the steppe like? Anton Chekhov grew up a few hundred miles from here, at Taganrog on the Sea of Azov, and as a boy he lay on his back on the wheat sacks aboard a chumak, an ox-drawn wagon, and sailed slowly for days and nights across this ocean. The 'ocean' image, somehow never a cliché, came to all travellers who wrote about their voyage as an obvious response to the infinite, apparently sterile and featureless horizon of coarse grassland, rising and falling a little as it approached a river, treeless and marked only by the hill-like kurgan burial mounds of vanished nomads. William of Rubruck remembered his journey so: 'We therefore went on towards the east, seeing nothing but heaven and earth, and sometimes the sea on our right hand ... and the sepulchres of the Comanians [Cumans] which appeared unto us two leagues off ...'
In the nineteenth century, Western tourists found the landscape oppressive, ugly and insulting to the progressive mind. Others, like Chekhov, were happy to be adrift in the summer steppe and to breathe in the scent of its herbs: tough, blue-green plants like thyme, rue and wormwood.
The term 'barbarian' began as an onomatopoeic Greek world about foreign language: the 'bar-bar babble' sound of an incomprehensible tongue. It occurs once in the Iliad, when the Carian army is described as 'barbarophonos' - barbar-speaking. What the word signifies, whether that the Carian troops actually spoke a foreign language or that they spoke Greek with some accent or intonation that struck other Greeks of the Homeric period as grotesque and alien, is endlessly disputed. But it is fairly clear that at the time of the Iliad and for long afterwards the Greeks did not lump all foreigners together under the linguistic definition 'barbarians'. Still less did they use the term as a catalogue of inferior 'otherness' comprising all that the Greeks were not. Victorian scholars in the age of empire misread the Iliad as an account of the triumph of civilisation over 'barbarous' and morally inferior Trojans. But there is nothing remotely like that in the text of the poem, in which the Greeks are if anything more cruel and treacherous — epithets later heaped into the tray of 'barbarism' — than the Trojans.
In her book Inventing the Barbarian^ Edith Hall argues that the great change came at the time of the Persian Wars. 'The story of the invention of the barbarian is the story of the Greeks' conflict with the Persians.' Before then, there had certainly been an 'other': the magical and monstrous half-humans and creatures supposed to inhabit the fringes of the world, like Cyclops or the harpies in the Odyssey^ the sirens and one-eyed Arimaspians. But in the fifth century BC Athens, above all the Athenian tragedians, constructed a single barbarian world, squeezing peoples as distinct as Scythian nomads and Mesopotamian city-dwellers into a single new species, and opposed it to the image of a single and united Hellenic world. All that the Athenian ideology found alien and repulsive was now transferred from the 'monster' to the 'barbarian'. The 'other' was moved inwards from the unknown periphery of the world to the frontiers of Greekness, to the other shore of the Black Sea or the Aegean. And from this new species were born other oppositions. It was not only the Scythian whose aporia was barbaric in contrast to Greek autochthony and settledness. It was the Persian or Asian whose servility, luxuriousness and cowardice were barbaric in contrast to Greek and European qualities of freedom, self-restraint and valour. The first-born twins Civilisation and Barbarism were soon joined by an equally long-lived brother: the discourse of Orientalism.
The Athenian tragedies were performed at the City Dionysia. By the end of the Persian Wars, this old popular festival had expanded into a grand propaganda occasion designed to legitimise Athens and its policies - including the democratic constitution, with which the Athenians now identified themselves against Persian 'tyranny' which threatened them with extinction. The Persae of Aeschylus was first staged at the Dionysia in 472 BC, only eight years after the Athenian victory at Salamis. But Persae already assumed, as if it were common knowledge, what Edith Hall calls 'the absolute polarisation' of Hellene and barbarian (the word 'barbarian' is used ten times in the text). Hall extracts from the Persae a long list of barbarous characteristics. Barbarians were cruel, simple-minded, undisciplined and subject to panic. They had an excessive taste for luxury and ultra-refinement. They gave unrestrained expression to their emotions. They wallowed in ploutos (gross and unimaginable riches), as opposed to the olbos (respectable wealth) which had given Olbia its name. They swung between boastfulness and cowardice. They gave power to women - sometimes even military command or the leadership of the nation.
This last point obsessed and fascinated the Greeks. In the fifth-century world, their society was unique in its exclusive, nervous maleness, but this Greek exception was transmitted and transformed into the rule for the centralised imperial societies which were to follow. The identification of 'civilisation' with a totally male-dominated society was adopted by the Roman Empire, together with its corollary that political authority for women was a sure mark of barbarism. It was only to be expected that savages like the Iceni in Britain would choose Boudicca to lead their rebellion against Roman occupation, or that Gaulish women with 'huge white arms' - as Ammianus Marcellinus wrote in the fourth century AD - would pitch in to save their husbands in a brawl. From the Roman Empire, the tradition of male authority flowed into the Roman Catholic Church, uniting with the Judaic pattern of patriarchy. In the Church of England today, the addled dregs of a classical education lie at the bottom of the deepest resentments against the admission of women to the priesthood: a woman at the altar is 'uncivilised'.
The final item which Edith Hall dredges from the subtext of the Persae is political. Greek citizens were free. Barbarians (in this case Persians) were not, and imposed despotism and unfreedom wherever they went. An Athenian citizen enjoyed several kinds of equality under the constitution of the polis, and took part in a continuous limitation of state power. Barbarians and their conquered subjects had to humiliate themselves, by the physical act of prostration, before a royal power which was arbitrary and unlimited. The Chorus in the Persae, after hearing the news of the Persian defeat at Salamis, proclaims: 'Not for long now [will the conquered] pay tribute and perform prostration . . . Men will no longer curb their tongues, for the people, unbridled, can chatter freely.'
Over the next few years, this 'discourse of barbarism' begun by Aeschylus was carried on enthusiastically by other playwrights. There were obvious problems involved in this cramming of blatantly different peoples into a single 'barbarian' category. Athens was full of foreign slaves, especially Thracians and Scythians, and their unlikeness to each other was evident to every slave-owner. Logically, it was even more difficult to put them in one category with Persians, whose literate, highly organised, urban culture should have put them closer to Greeks than to Scythians. These difficulties were overcome by emphasising the only feature which these foreigners did have in common: their non-Greekness. The Scythians and other northern peoples, for example, were supposed to be wild, hardy and ferocious, while the Persians were perceived as effeminate and undermined by easy living. Never mind! By swerving between two extremes, barbarians were only showing how far away they were from the Greek ideal of mesotes (measuredness), or from the Greek ethic of nothing-in-excess.
A more serious difficulty was the past of the Greeks themselves. In their own history, mythical or more recent, the Greeks had done everything they now deplored as 'barbaric'. Heroes and kings (and the Greeks could not deny that they had once been ruled by kings rather than democracies or oligarchies) had committed every kind of sexual excess, mutilation and sadistic murder, revelling in spontaneous emotion and showing no sense of mesotes whatever.
One ingenious response was to export this criminal history overseas. For example, Euripides presented Medea to his theatre audiences as the paradigm of barbarian w
omanhood: domineering, uncontrollably passionate, murderess of her own brother and then of her own children, a witch skilled in the magical preparation of herbs. But Edith Hall shows that Medea entered earlier mythology as a Greek, probably that Agamede in the Iliad who was a daughter of the sun and knew 'all the drugs ... which the wide earth nourishes'. Euripides relocated her origins in Colchis, at the southeastern corner of the Black Sea: 'her conversion into a barbarian was almost certainly an invention of tragedy, probably of Euripides himself.' Tereus was a hero of Megara, on the isthmus of Corinth, until Sophocles (in a lost play) exported him to Thrace to become a barbarian king who raped his wife's sister, cut out her tongue and ate his own son. Euripides seems to have invented many of his barbarian characters in order to display cruelty, mendacity or the propensity to butcher one's closest relations as non-Greek traits, and Hall suggests that he devised the central plot of Iphigenia in Tauris - her captivity as priestess to the savage Taurians, on the southernmost sea-cliff of Crimea - around the idea that only barbarians would make a cult of murdering shipwrecked strangers by hurling them over a precipice. This, too, was a shameless imposition of 'political correctness' upon Greek mythology, which abounded with tales of Greeks performing human sacrifices on one another.
But not all Greek 'barbarism could be exported, and it was also necessary to invent barbarous or 'oriental' origins for traditions which did not fit the new self-image. The cult of Dionysus, which Scyles joined in Olbia, had frenzied, orgiastic mystery-festivals for which the tragedians suggested foreign origins in Thrace or Asia -although the cult had ancient roots in Greece and was central to the state religion of Athens itself. Sadistic cruelty was now presented as a Thracian infection, excessive luxury as a disease floating in from Asia. Aeschylus does not pretend that Clytemnestra was a barbarian immigrant, but before she murders her husband Agamemnon - presented as an un-Greek weakling who can't keep a woman in her place - she is given speeches stuffed with deliberately ornate, servile and 'oriental' language. As Hall says, 'femaleness, barbarism, luxury and hubris are ... ineluctably drawn into the same semantic complex.'
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