by Charles King
In sailing to the Black Sea, ancient visitors were moving into a world that was literally the frontier of human understanding. According to Plato, the world extended from the Pillars of Hercules to the Phasis (Rioni) river, from the western end of the Mediterranean to the eastern end of the Black Sea.3 In ancient cosmology, the continents and islands existed on a plane encircled by Ocean, a boundless body of water that was the source of the world’s great rivers—the Nile, the Danube, the Don. In theory, one could sail around the outer edge of the world and drop in via one of the river routes, or portage overland and get back to one’s starting point by following Ocean’s circular path.
Ancient writers dated the earliest Greek encounters with the Black Sea to the mythical Heroic age, and they imbued the sea with the same fantastic qualities that defined all the outer limits of the world. The sea was the locus of many of the myths that formed the warp and weft of Greek popular religion. A rocky island at the mouth of the Danube (or perhaps the Dnepr) was said to hold the grave of Achilles. On the south coast, Hercules descended to Hades in order to tame the guard dog Cerberus. The Amazons lived in the same neighborhood, at the mouth of the Thermodon (Terme) river in northern Turkey or, in an alternative version, on the Tanais (Don) river in southern Russia. The Crimean peninsula was the home of the Tauri, whose blood-thirsty priestess, Iphigeneia, sacrificed wayward travelers to Artemis. To the east, in the Caucasus mountains, the fire-stealer Prometheus lay chained to a rock with an eagle feasting on his liver, until he was rescued by Hercules.
When Mediterranean travelers encountered the real people who lived along the shores, they described them in terms not far removed from such fantastic stories. On the south coast, Xenophon reported that one warlike tribe, the Mossynoeci, could muster a raiding fleet of 300 dug-out canoes.4 Along the western coast, marauding Thracians were said to hang out lanterns on the rockiest stretches of shoreline, hoping to attract sailors in search of a leeward bay; like moths, the sailors would make straight for their doom, leaving a treasure trove of debris strewn along the shore.5 Stories about the fierce Tauri in Crimea may have been built on similar pursuits by local populations in Crimea. In the northeast, tales of coastal pirates who set out to attack wayward vessels gave rise to an entire mythical ancestry for the local populations. The Achaei of the Caucasus were said to descend from part of Agamemnon’s host, lost on their way back home from the Trojan war. Their neighbors, the Heniochi (“charioteers”), were the putative descendants of the chauffeurs of the demi-gods Castor and Pollux, who accompanied Jason on his quest for the Golden Fleece. These two tribes reportedly prowled along the coasts in covered boats and bore down upon foreign vessels, hauling off their goods and rounding up the crew as hostages. They would then melt into the harborless coastline, hoisting their boats on their shoulders and disappearing like phantoms into the forest.6
There were still other groups who were only obscurely known, a carnival sideshow of human oddities catalogued by Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny, and other Greek and Roman writers. The region along the western coast, around the modern Bulgarian port of Varna, was said to have been occupied by a race of pygmies who were driven away by cranes.7 The Hyperboreans—literally, the people beyond the north wind—were to be found in the extreme north, where they lived to an advanced age and performed miracles. Near them were races with even more outlandish quirks. There were the one-eyed Arimasps, who fought a perpetual war with the griffins for control of gold mines. Another tribe had double pupils in one eye and a likeness of a horse in the other. These lived next to a people with prodigiously long beards and another who ate lice, and others who turned into wolves and sported hooves like goats and slept for six months out of the year.8
Several ancient authors offered detailed lists of the tribes around the shore, but these are a mix of fancy and hearsay and, even well into the Byzantine period, only occasionally based on first-hand information. When the Greeks first arrived, the coast was probably already populated by a host of settled communities or nomadic confederations, but today we have only broad, mainly regional labels to distinguish them. In the west were the Thracians, known in later antiquity for their fighting skills and the use of the short sword. Farther north were the Scythians, some nomadic and some settled, who raised horses and cultivated the cereals that would attract Greek traders and settlers. To the east were a variety of warlike groups inhabiting the mountain vastness of the Caucasus and, in the lowlands, the Colchians, who may already have established a powerful kingdom in the Bronze Age, a collection of log-hut villages built on raised hillocks in the wetlands of the Rioni river. 9 Along the southern coast were the Bithynians and Paphlagonians, perhaps originally of Thracian origin, along with mountain tribes that had migrated westward from the Caucasus. Even peoples such as these, whom the Greeks acknowledged as wholly human, were sometimes endowed with a fabled past. The Colchians, Herodotus believed, were descended from the Egyptians, since both groups had curly hair, practiced circumcision, and wove linen. 10
Any attempt to link the ancient inhabitants of the seaboard, whether fantastic or real, with one or another modern ethnic group is futile. No unbroken line runs between any ancient population—including the Greeks—and the modern peoples who now claim them as ancestors. Even some groups who were named by ancient authors as distinct peoples turn out to be frustratingly elusive in the historical record, appearing and then disappearing while leaving little evidence of their cultures and customs. That is the case with the one of the earliest recorded groups in the Black Sea basin, the Cimmerians. We know of them only because they were apparently forced to flee their homeland north and east of the sea and became mobile warriors; in their wanderings, they bumped up against older literate cultures in central Anatolia and Mesopotamia, who wrote of their arrival. The Cimmerians were said to have been chased from their own land by a group of invaders from the east, the Scythians. One group of Cimmerian migrants then pushed southwest into Thrace and another southeast into the Caucasus. The two wings converged in Asia Minor, disrupting the local kingdoms there before coming under Assyrian influence. It was perhaps history’s earliest recorded foreign refugee crisis, a story that was already ancient history to Herodotus and other writers of the Classical period. 11
The Cimmerians float like specters in the ancient texts of the Near East. The biblical Genesis links them to Gomer, one of the grandsons of Noah (10:2–3), while Jeremiah laments the invasion of cruel horsemen “from the north country,” armed with bow and spear and with voices that “roar like the sea” (6:22–23). If such an invasion of northern nomads did in fact take place—whether as a single incursion or a series of nomadic migrations into Anatolia—textual evidence would date it to sometime in the eighth century BC. After that the Cimmerians quickly disappear from history; little other than occasional literary references remains. They did leave some footprints, however. They gave their name to the Black Sea’s chief peninsula, Crimea, and the most famous of their number eventually ended up in America: Conan the Barbarian, prince of the fictional kingdom of “Cimmeria,” was created by the pulp fiction writer Robert E. Howard in the 1930s, revived by Marvel comics, and immortalized in the cinematic oeuvre of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The arrival of Greek sailors and traders in the Black Sea may even have been spurred on by the Cimmerian refugees, who carried with them news of the riches of the north,12 for not long after the supposed Cimmerian invasion, Greekspeaking peoples on the Aegean began to take a keen interest in the region. Greek city-states in Ionia, along the coast of Asia Minor, sent out small-scale expeditions to the north and east. Enterprising captains rowed through the Bosphorus and hoisted sail beyond the rocky opening, perhaps following the current to the east along the coasts of Bithynia and Paphlagonia or using a favorable wind to turn to the west and skim the edge of Thrace.
“Frogs Around a Pond”
For all the epic elements that would later be injected into these expeditions, it was entrepreneurship, not conquest or adventure, that drove them.
Stashed in the deep hulls of sailing ships or in the spaces beneath the benches of rowed vessels were cloth and amphoras filled with wine and olive oil. Returning ships were laden with wood for shipbuilding, cut from the forests of the Pontic Alps and the Caucasus, iron and precious metals extracted from the Caucasus and the Carpathians, millet from the delta of the Rioni, and wheat grown on plains watered by the rivers of the north. In time, Ionian mother-cities began to finance the construction of long-term settlements along the coasts. Permanent dependencies, housing expatriate Greeks who could serve as on-the-spot middlemen with local populations, began to emerge by the middle of the seventh century BC.
Several city-states sought to profit from the riches of the sea, but none excelled Miletus. The southernmost of the major cities along the Ionian coast, Miletus had long been a major commercial center in the Aegean, but in the mid-600s, it turned its full attention to the north. Over the next century and a half, before 500 BC, it was one of the most powerful cities in the Greek world, virtually controlling traffic through the Bosphorus and raking in the wealth from trade in cereals, metals, and preserved fish. Its colonies were among the jewels of the Black Sea coast: Sinope in the south; Dioscurias at the foot of the Caucasus; Panticapaeum, which guarded the entrance to the Sea of Azov; and Olbia, lying at the mouth of the Hypanis (Bug) river and providing an opening toward the grasslands of the northern steppe.
By the fifth century BC, the inhospitable sea had become far more welcoming to the Greeks than it had been in centuries past. Greek settlements speckled the littoral, a connect-the-dots of seaports that Socrates compared to “ants or frogs around a pond.”13 Seafaring vessels with their broad square sails arrived from ports on the Sea of Marmara and the Aegean. Smaller coasting vessels jumped from one colony to another, and dugout canoes carried goods up and down the widest rivers. Some of the cities remained entrepôts—emporia—serving the primary function of greasing the wheels of trade, or gained the title of city-state, or polis, with an autonomous government and publicly funded institutions. In time, the leaders of the most successful colonies improved the port facilities, adding docks or jetties to protect the harbors from the notorious storms and shoring up the coastline against erosion. Their dependence on the original mother-cities became distant memories, as new partners and patrons arrived on the scene.
Several of the cities were renowned across the Greek and, later, Roman worlds. Sinope (modern Sinop, Turkey) was “the most noteworthy of the cities in that part of the world,” says Strabo in the first century BC.14 It was situated along a narrow causeway, on the leeward side of a larger peninsula; its deep harbor was the best along the southern seaway from the Bosphorus to the Caucasus. The docking facilities included impressive roadsteads, and within the city were gymnasia, marketplaces, and colonnaded buildings. Walls encircled an imposing acropolis, while sheep and gazelles grazed nearby in the fertile plain of the Halys (Kizilirmak) river. Olives, unusual around the Black Sea, were also grown there. Trade in these and other products enriched the city. Sinope was the major stopping point before the crossing to Crimea, and its cross-sea connections were the lifeblood of the economy. Orange and black Sinopean amphoras, some with the distinctive imprint of an eagle holding a dolphin in its talons, are plentiful in archaeological sites on the northern shore.
Sinope grew so prosperous that it issued coinage and even set up its own dependencies; in fact, almost all the cities along the southeast coast were Sinopean foundations. The most prominent was Trapezus (modern Trabzon, Turkey) to the east. Although the natural harbor facilities were poor, Trapezus benefited from its geography. It was situated at the end point of an ancient land route that wound over the Pontic mountain range, through the Zigana pass, and across the Armenian plateau to the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The town’s impressive citadel, built on a series of escarpments punctuated by deep ravines, provided a ready defense if the native highlanders who surrounded it turned hostile.
The cities along the Caucasus coast could not boast such accoutrements, but what they lacked in refinement they made up for in natural endowments and local color. At Phasis, the Milesian colony at the mouth of the Rioni river, timber was floated downstream and loaded onto coasting vessels, along with other items critical to shipbuilding: hemp for riggings, wax and pitch for sealants, and the famous Colchian linen for sails. In two or three days, the goods would arrive in Sinope and be transferred to larger ships for the voyage to the Aegean.15 Farther along the coast, at Dioscurias (near modern Sukhumi, Georgia), numerous non-Greek tribes would come down from the Caucasus mountains to meet foreign ships. Traders were said to require 130 interpreters to conduct their transactions there—surely an exaggeration, but probably not much of one.16 In time, even the hinterland began to enjoy the fruits of commerce. By the first century BC, the area beyond Phasis boasted cities and farmsteads with tile roofs, marketplaces, and other public buildings, and a century later, the Roman historian Pliny reported that the many bridges that spanned the river were always laden with people on their way to market.17
Crimea had some of the finest natural harbors, and the abundance of fish in the nearby Sea of Azov would have been an attractive prospect. However, fear of native populations probably prevented large-scale Greek settlement there until relatively late. Colonists from Megara in mainland Greece established Chersonesus (near modern Sevastopol, Ukraine) in the fifth century BC, a foray by the Megarians that would later be eclipsed by their most important colony of all, Byzantium. But here, as in other parts of the sea, it was the Milesians who were the most energetic. Their colony at Panticapaeum (modern Kerch, Ukraine) controlled the entrance to the Azov; its acropolis held various public buildings, and its harbor was said to hold up to thirty ships. Farther down the coast to the west, the people of Theodosia (modern Feodosiia, Ukraine) built a harbor that could accommodate over three times that many, and the city was surrounded by a fertile hinterland that provided food for the urban population.18
Along the northwest coast, deep harbors were scarce, but the openings of major rivers and their coastal lakes were sources of fish and easy highways to the interior. According to Herodotus, the Borysthenes (Dnepr) river was the greatest among them:
The Borysthenes … is, in my opinion, the most valuable and productive not only of the rivers in this part of the world, but anywhere else, with the sole exception of the Nile…. It provides the finest and most abundant pasture, by far the richest supply of the best sorts of fish, and the most excellent water for drinking—clear and bright …; no better crops grow anywhere than along its banks, and where grain is not sown the grass is the most luxuriant in the world.19
Perhaps the earliest settlement on the entire northern coast, Berezan, was located on a peninsula (now an island) at the mouth of the Borysthenes. In time, this early colony was overshadowed by some of its younger and wealthier neighbors. Olbia lay on the Bug river, near the point where it unites with the estuary of the larger Dnepr. It may have had a population of some 10,000 at its height, with dedicated districts sacred to Zeus and Apollo and citizens buying and selling in a grand marketplace.20 There, renowned goldsmiths manufactured intricate works of art that combined both Greek and barbarian elements of design, goldwork that is today among the most prized of the archaeological treasures of Ukrainian and Russian museums.
An even greater degree of exchange between Greeks and locals probably characterized the colonies that lay farther to the west: the Milesian cities of Istria and Tomis (modern Constanţa, Romania), near the Danube delta; Odessus (modern Varna, Bulgaria), a Milesian colony with a sheltered bay; and farther south, Mesembria and Apollonia (modern Nesebur and Sozopol, Bulgaria), Megarian and Milesian settlements with fisheries and good farmland. They were geographically closer to the centers of the Greek world and could, therefore, take advantage of both overland and seaborne trade; they were also nestled amid non-Greek Thracian peoples who, from the earliest days of colonization, already formed relatively settled and powerful political entit
ies eager to profit from interaction with the newcomers.21
The growth of the Black Sea colonies was fueled by their place within the economy of the ancient world. A merchant ship with a fair wind could go from the Sea of Azov to the Aegean island of Rhodes in nine days,22 and its fat-bellied hull held products whose value would have been appreciated across much of the known world. The wheat and barley cultivated in the interior were crucial to the food supplies of Ionia and mainland Greece. (In its war with Sparta, Athens came to depend on grain shipments from the region, and it was in part the Spartan blockade of the Dardanelles that forced Athens to capitulate.)23 Hazelnuts, still abundant today along the entire southeastern coast, were shipped as far afield as Alexandria.24 The poet Virgil offered panegyrics to the iron, strong-smelling oils, and pine timber that Roman ships brought from the area.25
Exotic animals and plants also made their way west. Traders on the eastern side of the sea discovered a peculiar, copper-colored bird with long tail feathers and succulent dark meat. It was caught in the low-lying fields near the colony of Phasis and exported to Greece and Italy. Eventually, Greeks and Romans would learn how to the rear the bird themselves, but its name gave away its origins—the “Phasian bird,” or pheasant. A red tart fruit cultivated around the colony of Cerasus on the south coast became widely popular in the Roman period. According to tradition, the colony gave its name to the word that many peoples would adopt for the fruit—the Latin cerasum, the English cherry. In the exotic, though, there was always a whisper of peril. When Xenophon and his Greek mercenaries marched along the southern coast in the fourth century BC, they discovered that the region’s delicious honey could cause madness.26
