Black Sea

by Neal Ascherson

  The Trojans too were called in for ideological reprocessing. The war against Troy had to be re-cast as a first round in the cosmic struggle between 'European' virtue and 'Asian' vice, the perpetual war between the two halves of humanity which was now being renewed in the struggle between Greeks and Persians. The image of the Trojans, once brave enemies whose 'manliness' did credit to their Greek opponents, began to be orientalised. They became subtly 'Asian', emotional to an unseemly degree, alien: such conquered, un-Hellenic Trojans were carved into the metopes of the Parthenon in about 435 BC. The Roman and Byzantine imperial cultures inherited this perception of the Trojan War and this reading of the Iliad as the earliest literature on the struggle between civilisation and barbarism. It was an interpretation which was to survive virtually unchallenged for a thousand years.

  Autopsy, when the Greeks invented the word, meant seeing for oneself. It is a word about individualism and independence of mind, about the right to make up one's own mind on the basis of what one's own eyes have seen. By the late Middle Ages, autopsy was at war with authority — with the version of the natural world and its geography laid down for all time in the corpus of surviving Graeco-Roman literature. For authoritarians, all further enquiry could only amount to scholia: mere annotation and exegesis of this existing body of knowledge. But, for the autopsist, enquiry by voyage or discovery or reasoning might reveal entirely new facts, new worlds unknown to the ancients.

  To persuade readers to conceive of something completely unfamiliar, the persuader had to use narrative and to carry that narrative upon the first person: 'I saw', 'I heard', i experienced for myself. When Bartolomé de las Casas began his Historia de las Indias in 1527, he declared that he was writing 'out of the very great and final need to make known to all Spain the true account and truthful understanding of what I have seen take place in this Indian Ocean', and he told a minister of the emperor Charles V that he was 'the oldest of those who went over to the Indies, and in the many years that I have been there and in which I have seen with my own eyes, I have not read histories which could be lies, but instead I have experienced.' Pagden quotes the Jesuit historian José de Acosta who went to the Americas and 'on finding himself cold at midday yet with the tropical sun directly overhead - an impossible situation according to ancient meteorology — he "laughed and made fun of Aristotle and his philosophy" '.

  In the classical world itself, autopsy-narrative was not unknown, but it was rare. The word bistor first meant an eyewitness, especially in a trial, and when Herodotus chose the title Histories for his work, it carried the implication of 'enquiries', the personal conclusions of an investigator. Yet Herodotus only occasionally descends to declaring that he saw something for himself, and then usually to make clear that the rest of what he has to say is rumour or the unconfirmed product of historeion (enquiry). Greek and Roman historians constantly produced 'pseudo-autopsy', in set-piece battle scenes or reconstructed deathbed speeches which were pastiches of genuine first-hand narrative. Julius Caesar planned and led the conquest of Gaul which he describes in The Gallic War. But he not only distances his narrator into the third person ('Caesar'), but actually offers artificial reconstructions of events - battles and speeches indeed — of which he must have had vivid and direct memory.

  Nobody disputed the value of the eye as the most senior and formidable of all witnesses. But that witness appeared only in court, or very occasionally to settle a dispute about geographic or natural fact. Elsewhere, 'I saw' had a faintly disreputable air about it, less acceptable than i believe' or T know'. This leads to an apparent reticence, or lack of curiosity, in Greek or Roman writers who could have told us something enormously interesting which they must have seen for themselves, but chose not to.

  The poet Ovid is particularly maddening. In the year 8 AD, when he was just over fifty, Ovid was banished from Rome by the emperor Augustus and sent to live at Tomi, now the Romanian port of Constanta on the Black Sea. Here he spent the rest of his life, a clever, observant man who continued to write fluently and at length. Tomi was an old Greek colony in the country of the Getae, a Thracian people who had lived for many centuries around the delta of the Danube. Ovid met them every day, in the streets and in the countryside outside the walls, and the circumstantial evidence that he had Getic friends is very strong.

  He reveals in one poem that he had learned the language well enough not only to write verses in it but to read and discuss them with a circle of Getae ('All moved their heads and their full quivers, and there was a long murmur on the lips of the Getae'). This suggests an intimacy which Ovid was not prepared to acknowledge to his readers. Instead, he disguises the occasion as a half-comic casting of pearls before swine, a Roman holding a poetry-reading for gaping barbarians. About that Getic language, about what the Getae wore or ate or believed or sang, the thousand upon thousand of lines of the Tristia and Ex Ponto say practically nothing whatever. They say even less about Tomi itself and about Ovid's life there, except to describe it as a hell of snow, wind and barbarians.

  Many readers find the Tristia absurd, a wail of self-pity and self-obsession. Konstantin Paustovsky, living in Odessa in 1921, 'could never understand why the Black Sea had struck [Ovid] as gloomy. I had always thought of it as one of the brightest and gayest of seas. And how could anyone speak of Scythian cold in a region where it doesn't even snow every winter, and when the snow does come it stays only a few days and leaves the thawed-out earth smelling faintly of spring?'

  But there is much more to the Tristia than complaint. Even if Ovid's life there cannot have been the uninterrupted misery he proclaimed, everything he wrote from Tomi was a plea for remission of sentence, a lamentation designed to arouse the pity of Augustus and the circle of his favourites. Autopsy about the strange place and its peoples would have struck the wrong note, suggesting that he was finding consolations and stimulations in Tomi.

  Probably he was, but Tristia is written deliberately from within the consciousness of a Roman living in Rome, ventriloquising as feigned experience all the horrors and discomforts which a cultivated Roman reader would imagine to accompany 'life among the barbarians'.

  When Ovid does write directly and candidly about what happened to him, he is writing about Rome and his own disaster there. He was banished partly for Ars Amatoria, which Augustus found immoral, and partly for failing to distance himself from some unknown sexual intrigue involving a woman of the imperial family. In the first book of Tristia, he remembers the last, long, sleepless night at home, the bewilderment about what clothes or luggage to take with him in the morning, his wife in tears, the stricken household slaves standing about. It was this passage which Osip Mandelstam had in mind when he wrote his own marvellous 'Tristia' in 1920. At one level, Mandelstam seems to be anticipating his own end in the Soviet Tomi of Stalin's labour camps. There the voice is Ovidian and mourning. But then secret joy, un-Latin, unexplainable, begins to rise up like dawn mist from the ground of the poem as if a forced parting were also a rebirth into an unknown land:

  I have studied the science of saying goodbye

  in bareheaded laments at night.

  Oxen chew, and the waiting stretches out,

  it is the last hour of my keeping watch in the city,

  and I respect the ritual of the cock-loud night,

  when, lifting their load of sorrow for the journey,

  eyes red from weeping have peered into the distance,

  and the crying of women mingled with the Muses' singing ...

  Who can know when he hears the word goodbye

  what kind of separation lies before us ... ?

  The site of Olbia is 200 kilometres east of Odessa, a journey across gloomy flatness with nothing to look at until the road ends, the car stops, and you step out into a fresh south-east wind coming off the water. It looks like the sea, but it smells like a pond. This is the liman, or estuary-lagoon, of the Bug River, where it joins the estuary of the Dnieper and then flows into the sea. This is fresh water, where pike-perc
h thrive, which becomes brackish only when southerly gales stack up the river-flow and drive salt water upstream as far as the Olbia ruins. But the rivers are so huge that their far shores are no more than dim lines drawn on the horizon with charcoal.

  Olbia began in the early sixth century BC, perhaps even in the seventh century. It was a colony founded by adventurers from Miletus in the Aegean, who had already set up an advance base on the island of Berezan a few miles offshore to the west. The Milesian colony grew into a flourishing city with walls and impressive square towers, at first a trading post and harbour dealing mostly in fish and then, as the grain trade developed, the capital of a farming region whose Scythian suppliers might live as far as two hundred miles away or more. At its height, in about the fourth century BC, Olbia might have had thirty or forty thousand people living inside its walls. But nearly as many must have lived in the choray the inner hinterland of the polis. Olbia's chora developed into a densely settled network of wheatfields and villages covering the whole shore of the peninsula between the estuaries of the Bug and the Dnieper.

  Decline set in during the third century BC. The Scythian people were destabilised by the growing pressure of the Sarmatians, another nomadic Indo-Iranian group migrating westwards out of the steppe between the Volga and Don rivers, and Scythian authority began to break up. The city was raided and the grain supply became erratic. In the second century BC one of the Scythian groups took control of Olbia, probably hoping to restore the export trade which had brought such wealth to the whole north-west shore of the Black Sea. But it was unable to prevent the disaster of 63 BC, when an army of Dacians and Getae came up from the Danube delta, captured Olbia and destroyed the city. The population fell to a mere 2,000—3,000 for the next few decades. Roman occupation a hundred years later made the city once more safe to live in, and there was considerable rebuilding, but Olbia never fully recovered from the Getan storm. It was wrecked again, probably by Goths, in the third century AD, and then — finally — by Huns in about 370. After that, the ruins were abandoned to the grass and the sea-birds.

  There is not a lot to see at Olbia. Stone-robbers carted off almost everything which stuck out of the ground except for two huge burial mounds, the 'Zeus Kurgan' and the tomb dedicated to Eurisia and Arete — two unknown Olbian grandees. These are earth barrows covering majestic stone burial chambers of the second century AD, approached by stone-panelled dromoi (tunnels). But little of this can be inspected because the mounds are kept locked up, their dromoi blocked by decayed shed doors. The tombs, with hens pecking and hopping about their flanks, look more like potato clamps or abandoned air-raid shelters.

  As one walks across the site, a great triangle of unkempt foundations bounded on the east by red-earth cliffs above the Bug estuary, it is hard to realise that this is one of the places where Russian archaeology was born and grew up. But to have dug at Olbia, to have confronted its symbiosis of Greeks, Thracians and Scythians and to have contributed fearlessly to understanding it, is one of the proudest battle honours in the profession.

  Engineer-General Suchtelev started exploring the Olbian ruins in 1790, at a time when they were still officially within the Ottoman Empire. In 1839, Mikhail Vorontsov, the grandest and most ambitious of all the governors-general of New Russia, sponsored the establishment of the Imperial Odessa Society of History and Antiquity, the first archaeological society in Russia, which took over excavation at Olbia. It was the Odessa Society which brought in the true father and mother of scientific archaeology in Russia, Count Alexei Uvarov and Countess Uvarova, who gave much of their lives to Olbia. Uvarov, born in 1828, had founded the Imperial Russian Archaeological Society in Moscow, which at once became a deadly rival of the other Imperial Archaeological Society established under the eye of the tsar's court in St Petersburg.

  When Uvarov died in 1884, his widow, the Countess, took over the chair of the Moscow society, which she had helped to set up. She carried on the struggle against St Petersburg until the 1917 Revolution, when she went into exile, but by then the Olbia site was in new and safe hands. Boris Farmakovsky, calm and systematic, excavated at Olbia every season from 1902 to 1914 and then, after war and revolution had subsided, from 1924 to 1928. He left behind him a series of meticulous and handsomely illustrated excavation reports which contain most of what is known about the 'material culture' of Olbia.

  But the evidence about Olbia is not just 'material'. There is also autopsy. The Stoic philosopher Dio Chrysostom came here in about 95 AD, and this was one of the rare occasions on which a Greek or

  Latin observer wrote down, fluently and informally and in great detail, what he saw and what he heard. 'Borysthenitica' is a philosophy lecture, based on Dio's visit to Olbia, which he delivered in his home city of Prusa in Asia Minor. But it is also an extraordinary piece of cinema, a reel or two of actuality shot two thousand years ago, a home movie preserved from the Hellenistic world.

  Dio came to Olbia (or 'Borysthenes', as he called it, which was also the word the Greeks used for the Dnieper River) at a bad time. After the Getae had destroyed the place in 63 BC, 'the Greeks had stopped sailing to Borysthenes, inasmuch as they had no people of common speech to receive them, and the Scythians themselves had neither the ambition nor the knowledge to equip a trading-station of their own after the Greek manner.' In time, the Scythians returned to the gutted streets beside the Bug and invited Greeks to come back and reopen the port. But by the year of Dio's arrival, well over a century later, 'evidence of the destruction of Borysthenes [was still] visible both in the sorry nature of its buildings and in the contraction of the city...' The citizens had retreated to the apex of Olbia's triangular lay-out, walling off a much smaller triangle with a row of houses and a low defensive rampart (all of which has been turned up just as Dio describes it, by excavation). The rest of the city had been left to fall apart, and some of the old towers which had formed part of the town wall now rose so far away in the distance that, as Dio put it, 'you would not surmise that they once belonged to a single city'.

  Olbia had not lost contact with the Graeco-Roman world across the Black Sea, but its inhabitants had an aggrieved feeling that their city had lost the fame and importance of its good old days. The traders and visitors who bothered to sail into the estuaries were pretty third-rate characters compared to their predecessors. 'Those who come here,' one citizen complained to Dio, 'are nominally Greeks but actually more barbarous than ourselves, traders and marketmcn, fellows who import cheap rags and vile wine and export in exchange goods of no better quality. But you would appear to have been sent to us by Achilles himself from his holy isle, and we are very glad to see you and very glad also to listen to whatever you have to say.'

  This was a ghost town, with ghosts living in it. Dio Chrysostom found himself in a time warp. The Olbians were determined to impress him with their Greekness, but it was an utterly archaic and obsolete version of Greekness to which they clung. In addition, they seemed to Dio to be as much Scythian as Hellenic. His definition of ethnicity had nothing to do with genetics and descent but - like that of Herodotus — a great deal to do with clothes and customs and language. The Olbians wore Scythian clothes, as often as not, and the Greek they spoke was terrible.

  Dio went for a walk down to the point where the Bug and Dneiper come together. On his way back, he met a handsome lad on horseback called Callistratus and started a conversation. Callistratus was a real museum piece. He was wearing 'barbarian' trousers and a cape, but on seeing Dio he hopped off his horse and covered his arms, observing the old Greek rule that it was bad manners to show bare arms in public. Like the other Olbians, he turned out to know Homer by heart and to be immensely proud of it, however poor his spoken Greek was. But Dio was even more fascinated to discover that Callistratus was gay.

  At the age of eighteen, he was already famous in the city for his courage in battle, for his interest in philosophy and for his beauty, 'and he had many lovers'. Dio read this not as some fact about sexual orientation, but as a wonder
ful survival from a lost age. Here, in the time of the Roman Empire, flourished still the ancient Greek veneration for homosexual love as the supreme intellectual and spiritual experience. The Olbians supposed that in the world beyond the sea homosexuality was still the height of fashion. Dio, touched and amused, wondered what would happen if they started converting barbarians to this view of love. 'No good end', he thought. The Scythians would fail to keep 'licentiousness' out of it, and would miss the point.

  By now a small crowd of citizens had gathered round Dio and Callistratus. Dio suggested that they could all talk more easily if they went back inside the walls. Olbia was being raided almost daily by small Scythian war-parties, who had murdered or abducted several sentries on outpost duty only the day before. Dio, who had a normal sense of self-preservation, had noticed not only that the gates were being shut but that the alarm-flag had been hoisted on the battlements.

  But the Olbians seemed indifferent to danger, and wanted to start a philosophical discourse with their guest on the spot. 'Admiring their earnestness, I said: "If it please you, shall we go and sit down somewhere within the city? For perchance at present not all can hear equally well what is said as we stroll... " '

  In they went, and in the old Greek manner they all sat down outside the portico of the Temple of Zeus to hold their debate. As the older men settled on their benches, Dio noticed that almost everyone still wore a beard, at a time when shaving had been the fashion in the Roman world for at least a century. One clean-shaven man in the audience 'was subjected to the ridicule and resentment of them all . . . it was said that he practised shaving not as an idle fancy, but out of flattery for the Romans'.