Black Sea

by Neal Ascherson

  Dio Chrysostom started off on a discourse about the 'good polis' and its inadequacy in comparison to divine paradigms of perfection. But he was interrupted by an old man called Hieroson (possibly a descendant of that Heroson ship-owning family who had been so big in Olbia in the third century BC). The old man, who said proudly that he could read Plato, asked Dio not to talk about 'mortal cities', a subject which could wait, but to concentrate on 'that divine city or government... stating where it is and what it is like, aiming most closely at Plato's nobility of expression'. He and his friends, said Hieroson, were tremendously excited and worked up in anticipation of hearing something really elevated and Platonic.

  So Dio gallantly changed course. The result, the 'Thirty-Sixth Discourse (Borysthenitica)', is an astonishing prose-poem about the myth of the Chariot of Zeus, about the parables of the Zoroastrian Magi, about the celestial harmony of the stars and the creation of the world by a sexual act between Zeus and Hera - the hierosgamos or sacred mating. (Was it from Dio Chrysostom that Symeon the New Theologian derived his own version of unto mystica^ a sacred sexual act in which God impregnates his Elect with 'the sperm of blessing / in the wedding-rite divine'?)

  It is a beautiful, baffling piece of work. It is also an eclectic patchwork of cults. For his Olbians, Dio brought in not only the Greek pantheon but his own impressions of Persian mysticism and allegory, and in his creation account there is a strong flavour of Judaism ('the Creator and Father of the World, beholding the work of his hands, was not merely pleased... he rejoiced ... he revealed the existent universe as once more a thing of beauty and inconceivable loveliness'). Somewhere at the core, buried under all this, were the original Stoic doctrines about a universe made of four concentric spheres: earth, water, air and fire.

  You can still stand where Dio spoke. The space between the foundations of the Temple of Zeus and the back wall of the colonnaded stoa - the long shed-like building open on one side which served a Greek polis as weather shelter or meeting-place - is not as big as he suggests. But it is large enough for a few dozen interested people to gather round a lecturer. This old town centre around the agora (marketplace) was outside the makeshift wall drawn around the remaining living quarters, and the temples must have been already half-ruined when Dio stood there. He remembered from Olbia that 'not a single statue remains undamaged amongst those that are in the sanctuaries, one and all having suffered mutilation'.

  Dio's picture of Olbia is a picture of periphery as perceived from the centre. Malcolm Chapman, in his book The Celts: The Construction of a Myth, shows how customs, fashions and artefacts travel outwards from a centre like rings on a pond until they reach the periphery and finally vanish. It is just before this moment of final disappearance that the 'central' intellectual suddenly bursts into lament: out there, they still have sound values, nurturing families, organic oatmeal, authentic folk music — which must be preserved at all costs before they disappear for ever.

  Once, Homeric Greeks in the Aegean had worn beards and shaggy Athenian philosophers had approved the love of man for boy. The concentric waves sent out by these things were still breaking on the shores of the Bug liman many centuries after the razor had conquered Athens and poets had started writing erotic fantasies about girls. Dio was touched by the 'real Greekness' which he found surviving at Olbia. At the same time, he was an unromantic person, not a nostalgic metropolitan intellectual in Chapman's sense. It might be true that Athenians had once lived much as the Olbians now lived, but Dio had no wish to reverse history. He liked the present, and was doing well out of it.

  In his own way, Dio Chrysostom was also in the archaism business. He was a Greek trader whose trade was Greekness. His line was to play on the Roman inferiority complex by posing as the voice of ancient Greek wisdom and discrimination. As a Stoic preacher, Dio made big Romans feel coarse and clumsy, a feeling they evidently appreciated. He climbed high in Rome, knowing several emperors personally, but he spent much of his life on the road as a prestigious travelling lecturer. His message was 'virtue' and 'philanthropy', conveyed to a parvenu world whose ruling classes were in the grip of a gigantic wealth boom. In reality, Dio was as much a creature of that boom as the audiences he rebuked for their materialism. In his home territory of Bithynia (in northwest Asia Minor), Dio was a businessman who did well out of property deals. As an old man, long after his visit to Olbia, he was taken to court by the younger Pliny, the emperor Trajan's commissioner in Bithynia, over corrupt tendering for a public-works contract.

  Olbia had been abandoned for more than a thousand years when a new port-city was founded on the Black Sea coast, a full day's sailing to the west. In 1792, the Turkish fort at Hadji Bey was conquered for the empress Catherine by General Don Joseph de Ribas. It stood on high red bluffs over a bay with deep water inshore. De Ribas thought this was a good site for a new port. The idea was to name it Odessos, after a Greek colony which had stood further down the coast. Catherine, who admired the Greeks, initially agreed. But then, at a court ball in 1795, she suddenly announced that this city which had been founded by a woman was going to have a feminine gender. So Odessa began.

  The main strolling street, where Odessan families with icecreams inspect goods they cannot afford, is named Deribasov-skaya after de Ribas. One morning I was taking photographs of the old Lycée Richelieu on Deribasovskaya when I was picked up by a sea-captain and his first mate. Their ship had no fuel to put to sea. Bored to death by a daily routine of window-shopping, watching television and getting on their wives' nerves, they wanted diversion. We went to a standup bar to have a 'party': a bottle of vodka, Odessa hot-dogs tasting of horse rather than dog, coffee 'made from popcorn'.

  The captain, who had been stranded ashore for nine months, shrugged when I asked him what he thought about Ukraine's newfound independence as a sovereign state. 'We have no history. Only Party history. Anyway, this place is lawless now and nobody is ruling it - not Ukrainians, not Soviets, nobody.'

  Drunk, I wandered down the street to revisit the Museum of Archaeology and came to a halt in front of a big photograph of Boris Farmakovsky which commands one wall of the Olbian room. There he sat: calm, benign in his old stick-up celluloid collar, his eyes narrow and crow's-footed by so many seasons of standing in the east wind off the Bug liman. Farmakovsky, whom even the austere émigré Mikhail Miller had allowed to be 'a good methodologist', had died just in time. Only two years later, men came in the night with guns for his old friends and colleagues, for the young men and women who had crouched and toiled for him in the Olbia excavations, for his brightest pupils who had tried to understand in new ways the encounter of Greek, Scythian and Thracian.

  Why did it happen? Millions perished in the purges of the 1930s, but why this particular small profession - why this black hurricane which exploded over the men and women who led Russian and Ukrainian archaeology, blew them into oblivion and then, only four years later, died down as suddenly as it had arisen? Sir Mortimer Wheeler, the Nestor of British archaeologists in the 1960s, used to say that archaeology was not a profession but a vendetta. His colleagues laughed indulgently, but he was serious.

  Soviet archaeology became in two senses a vendetta. In the first place, the disaster of 1930—4 amounted to the assassination of the profession's leadership by a dogmatic, Stalinist minority. Miller remembered how university lectures were broken up by Komsomol students shouting: Take off the mask!', or 'What is your attitude to Marxism?' Behind the students came a handful of ambitious older archaeologists who switched to the Party line, denounced their colleagues and inherited their jobs. The ideology adopted by the new Soviet archaeology was 'Marrism', a curious, pseudo-Marxist farrago of linguistic and archaeological doctrine developed by Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr, son of a Scottish immigrant and a Georgian mother, who had been a professor at St Petersburg before the Revolution. Marr introduced the notion of autochthony, the weird proposition that changes in language and culture were never the result of new inward migrations but were instead the products
of class chemistry working slow transformations in essentially static societies. In the name of Marrism Professor Vladislav Ravdonikas (to take one example) denounced and destroyed the career of his younger rival Sergei Kiselev. In 1950, twenty years later, Stalin suddenly proclaimed that Marrism was arrant nonsense, and it was the turn of Kiselev to destroy the ancient Ravdonikas in equally murderous terms of Party abuse.

  But there exists another, always latent vendetta between all authoritarian nation-states and independent men and women who investigate the past. Archaeology tunnels into the deep foundations on which the arrogance of civilisations and revolutions rests. When the tunnellers enter foundations which should be rock but are merely sand, the floors of the state apartments high above them begin to tremble. Had Farmakovsky and his pupils burrowed their way into a zone of secret weakness, and was that why so many archaeologists had to die?

  All knowledge about the Scythians, as it accumulates, has undermined the proposition that the peoples of the Black Sea steppe were primitive and barbarous, and the conclusion that nomadism was a backward form of existence. That conclusion - so central to old-fashioned Russian nationalism — was raised to the level of geopolitics by Germans like J. G. Kohl, who wrote in 1841 that 'from time immemorial down to the present day, [the steppes] have been the dwelling-place of savage nomads and barbaric hordes in whom no independent seed bearing the idea of the state, the building of towns or cultural development ever took place'. His compatriot Roesler thought that the very landscape was reactionary: 'such desolate surroundings, where the wandering imagination finds no point of rest on the shifting horizons and the memory no place whereby it can orient itself.

  Out of this kind of stuff developed the popular assumption - still widespread in Europe — that settled agriculture and the existence of a crop-sowing peasantry represented a huge forward development from an earlier stage of nomadism. Here pseudo-anthropology feeds the basic European nightmare: a terror of peoples who move. This nightmare, inherited from the great migrations during and after the decline of the Roman Empire and renewed by the Hun and Mongol raids into the West, was given an extra dimension of horror by nineteenth-century evolutionist intellectuals. The moving peoples were no longer a merely physical menace emerging from the trackless East. They now also seemed to incarnate a cosmic disorder in which the past rose out of its tomb and swarmed forward on horseback to annihilate the present.

  That nightmare survives in the new Europe after the revolutions of 1989. It survives as Western fear of all travelling people, of the millions pressing against Europe's gates as 'asylum-seekers' or 'economic migrants', of a social collapse in Russia which would send half the population streaming hungrily towards Germany.

  But nomadic pastoralism was not a 'primitive' condition. It was, on the contrary, a specialisation which developed out of settled agricultural communities. To move large herds of domesticated animals hundreds of miles twice a year, north into summer pastures and south again in winter, requires, above all, horses and high skill at riding them. It requires the wheel, if the population is to migrate with its herds by cart or wagon. This way of life needs many kinds of craftsman or specialist, far more than family subsistence farming. And it cannot be carried on without a central leadership able to take rapid and effective decisions in emergency. That emergency could be economic — a traditional pasture destroyed by drought or flooding — or it could be military. The power to ride a horse created armed elites, who were now able to lead their followers out to plunder farming communities or to migrate and conquer distant regions of grassland.

  As Herodotus knew, 'pure' nomadism is a rarity. Recording the various 'tribes' or nations of the Scythian culture, he pointed out that many of them were farmers as well as pastoralists. Some ate what they grew; others cultivated grain for the Greek market. And the Scythians were in no way exceptional; that sort of flexibility has always belonged to the economy of mobile steppe peoples. The vision of mounted hordes living off meat and plundered food-stocks belongs only to times of war or of decisive long-range migration - as opposed to the normal circular journeyings after pasture.

  Pastoral nomads, even when they do not settle, can and do raise crops. In the fifteenth century, the friar and merchant Giosafat Barbaro lived for many years in the Venetian colony of Tana, on the Don estuary at the head of the Sea of Azov. He used to watch Tatars from the Golden Horde being sent out each March to plant wheat in patches of fertile soil. When the wheat was ripe, the Horde would pass by and reap it from the open steppe on its seasonal journey northwards to the summer grazing.

  And Herodotus, a millennium before, had pointed out that, by his time, there were 'natives' who lived in towns. He described neighbours of the Scythians called Budini, who 'have a city built of wood, named Gelonus'. The Budini were nomads, but the Geloni who lived around the city were - according to Herodotus - farmers descended from Greek colonists. His description of their countryside, with its forests and marshes, makes it sound like the middle Dnieper territory. And in recent years, archaeologists have begun to find town-like sites there: fortified enclosures around large settlements with granaries, potteries, smithies for ironwork and permanent cemeteries outside the walls. One of the most spectacular is at Belsk, on a tributary of the Dnieper, whose ramparts are nearly twenty-one miles in circumference. Belsk, which is claimed to be the biggest inhabited earthwork ever discovered on earth, might plausibly be the 'Gelonus' of Herodotus. A workshop has been found there which manufactured drinking-cups out of human skulls - a custom which Herodotus described in great ethnographic detail.

  He has turned out to be right about many things. Especially in our own deconstructive times, new historians contrive to shrivel old historians until their information (and conveying information was the only purpose of all their arduous researching and writing) is practically discounted, if not discarded. All that is held interesting about their work is its discourse, the subconscious patterning of its information to establish certain contrasts and 'oppositions' required by the society in which the historian operated. Herodotus has his discourse too. Hartog has identified it brilliantly enough, in a book which will always be read wherever texts on 'barbarism' and 'civilisation' come under study. But when Hartog declines to examine the quality of Herodotus as reporter, to test against archaeological evidence the verifiable Tightness or wrongness of the Histories' 'enquiry', he achieves an almost perverse feat of intellectual asceticism. For the extraordinary quality of Herodotus is that his information grows in importance from year to year as archaeology confirms it.

  Since the first kurgans were excavated nearly two hundred years ago, it has been known that Herodotus was roughly right in his account of Scythian royal burial customs, with their human sacrifices and their concentric rings of slaughtered horses. He was correct, too, about the existence of wooden 'towns' on the fringes of the forest steppe. But Herodotus, the 'old liar' of Victorian classrooms, reached his peak of posthumous triumph in the 1950s when excavations were carried out in the burial mounds of Pazyryk in the Altai Mountains, thousands of miles inland from the Black Sea steppe, on the eastern edge of the Scythian realms.

  Pazyryk turned out to be the fulfilment of an archaeologist's fantasy: the past in a deep-freeze. It is high enough and cold enough to have preserved its dead and their possessions in the permafrost.

  The skin of one nomad ruler was still illuminated like a manuscript with dense patterns of lamp-black tattooing—stylised gryphons and ibex and catfish, probably an individual pictogram about his lineage, territory and cult. He and the other dead men and women lay among dazzling, many-coloured saddle-cloths, an unsuspected art form whose representations of horses in turn revealed a whole culture of decorative mane-dressing and fantastic crested horse-masks. The bodies had been stuffed with many of the herbs recorded by Herodotus in his account of Scythian burial rituals: 'cut marsh-plants and frankincense and parsley and anise seed'.

  In the corner of one tomb lay a fur bag containing cannabis. With it were
bronze cauldrons filled with stones, and the frame of a tiny, four-foot-high inhalation tent.

  After the burial. . . they set up three poles leaning together to a point and cover them with woollen mats... they make a pit in the centre beneath the poles and throw red-hot stones into it . .. [they] take the seed of the hemp and creeping under the mats they throw it on the red-hot stones, and being thrown, it smoulders and sends forth so much steam that no Greek vapour-bath could surpass it. The Scythians howl in their joy at the vapour-bath ...

  Those sentences, about the importance of cannabis as a Scythian consolation and delight, had to wait two and a half millennia to be confirmed.

  The Black Sea has eaten into the old Greek coastal cities. The colony of Tyras, under the walls of the huge Turkish fortress of Akerman, is now partly under the waters of the Dniester liman. As much as a third of Olbia lies under the Bug estuary, visited every summer by an enthusiastic Italian sub-aqua club which collects amphoras from the muddy bottom. Chersonesus, sticking out into the open sea at Sevastopol, has lost its southern suburbs by drowning, and Gorgippia, now the handsome port de plaisance of Anapa on the Kuban coast, attracts Russian divers searching for Greek columns in the yacht anchorage. Of all the archaeological sites I visited along that northern shore, only Tanais on the lower Don — at the head of the Sea of Azov — was complete under the ground. Here, the main channel of the river had moved several miles across the delta and left the port and colony inland.

  The Greeks, as colonists, stayed on this crumbling edge, the physical periphery of a Scythian-Sarmatian world. That world famously had no 'centre' of its own, unless it was the Scythian royal tombs. But the Greeks, for all the cultural allure of the jewellery and decorated pottery and wine which they had to sell, remained guests rather than dominators. Along the coast, they balanced — often precariously. The Scythians, in turn, were occasionally enemies but for most of the time hosts. Talk about centre and periphery, with its implication of the centre's general superiority to the lands on the margins, sounds unconvincing on the Black Sea.