by Charles King
Fish were plentiful, and the ready supplies of salt available in various locales, especially in the shallows on either side of the isthmus connecting Crimea to the northern shore, meant that the catches could be preserved for the journey to the Aegean. Bonito and tunny were in great demand, either salted whole or cut into cubes and pickled. In Rome of the first century BC, a jar of pickled Pontic fish could cost as much as hiring a day laborer27—even if, as Pliny complained, such delicacies were known to cause prodigious flatulence.28
The great annual migrations of various fish species were times of intense work for fishermen and traders. In the winter, anchovies congregated in shoals in the warmest parts of the sea, in the shallows off Anatolia and Crimea. Toward the spring, they migrated to the north to spawn in the Sea of Azov. The anchovy’s chief predator, the mackerel, wintered farther south, in the Sea of Marmara, and collected in schools in the spring for the journey toward feeding grounds in the Black Sea. The bonito followed its own pattern, migrating around the sea clockwise from the northwestern shelf to the Bosphorus over the summer and autumn. During these migrations, Strabo reported, the people of Trapezus enjoyed the first catch of bonito, the people of Sinope the second, and the people of Byzantium the last, as the schools hugged the shore seeking the outlet to warmer waters in the south. Even by the time the schools reached the Bosphorus, however, fish were still numerous enough to be caught by hand—or so fishermen claimed.29 In the late eighteenth century, the naturalist Peter Simon Pallas still found peasants in southern Russia making a living in much the same way as their predecessors some two millennia before, catching fish in the Sea of Azov, cutting the bellies into slices, curing them, and exporting the product to the Aegean archipelago.30
“A Community of Race”
The vibrant commerce of the Black Sea depended not only on the energy of the Ionian mother-cities and their colonies, but also on the symbiotic relationship between Greek settlers and non-Greek natives. To Mediterranean settlers and travelers, the native peoples of the Black Sea were “barbarians”—non-Greekspeakers—to be sure, yet they were not necessarily considered barbaric, at least in the sense that the adjective now connotes. As in other frontier regions, the Pontic Greeks found their own way of adapting to and even adopting the cultures of the peoples they encountered—in part because of the fluidity of the very concept of “Greekness,” in part because of the natural exchange of customs among cultural groups over long periods of sustained interaction. Over time, something of a hybrid civilization developed, a “community of race,” as the Russian scholar Mikhail Rostovtzeff called it, that blended artistic forms, styles of life, and even languages of the coast and the hinterland.31 As time went on, the clear cultural line between “Greek” and “barbarian” imagined by the poets and playwrights of Classical Athens became very fuzzy indeed.32
The precise characteristics of this symbiosis are unclear, but evidence of it is clearly visible in the archaeological record. Even writers such as Herodotus were impressed by how much it had resulted, already in his day, in a culture that owed a great deal to the mutual influences of settlers and natives. At Berezan the earliest Greek colonists copied the practices of locals by building dug-out houses to protect themselves from the winter cold.33 Some cities integrated images of the barbarians into their coinage, and the so-called Thracian horseman—a rider with a flowing cloak—can be found on innumerable Greek funerary monuments along the western coast. Cultural influence worked in both directions. At Gelonus, a city in the land of a northern tribe known as the Budini, the barbarians erected statues and shrines in the Greek style, although carved in wood rather than stone, and celebrated the festival of Dionysus. Their language was a mixture of Greek and barbarian, says Herodotus, who even speculated that the natives were perhaps originally Greeks who had adopted barbarian ways.34 (Herodotus may have been referring to a massive site, now excavated, on a tributary of the Dnepr river, which consisted of a wooden rampart over 30 km long.)35 The ties between Greeks and non-Greeks sometimes extended all the way from the real world to the mythical one. Pausanias, as late as the second century AD, still contended that the mythical Hyperboreans paid tribute to the Athenians by delivering their first fruits via barbarian intermediaries living north of the Black Sea.36
Cultural mixing seems to have been especially pronounced in the north and northwest, for two main reasons. First, the region’s landscape—flat coastal plains crossed by wide rivers—created an easy geographical link between the cities on the littoral and the interior. By contrast, on the southern and southeastern coasts, the colonies sat perched on the edge of the water, their backs against the uplands. Second, colonists in the north and northwest interacted with barbarian peoples whose civilizations and political structures seem to have been already well developed by the time the Greeks arrived. It was in this region that the Greeks encountered the Scythians, a broad spectrum of peoples who, in the imagination of writers in Athens and in other centers of Greek civilization in the Mediterranean, would come to represent the quintessential barbarians of the Pontic world.
For ancient writers, the label “Scythian” was primarily geographic. To be Scythian was to reside in a cold climate and probably live a nomadic life centered around horse-breeding. Our knowledge of the varied languages and cultures that existed beneath this umbrella comes mainly from Herodotus, whose evidence most likely came from the reports of other travelers or from simple hearsay. The Scythians, he says, thought of themselves as the youngest people. Their own myth of origin—associated with the union of a god and a river maiden—was only about a millennium distant.37 They were divided into a number of tribes that spoke mutually unintelligible languages. Some grew grain for export; some lived in forests; some wandered about the treeless steppe. They fashioned their enemies’ skulls into drinking cups and their scalps into cloaks. They milked mares by blowing into the animal’s anus, and cleaned themselves by taking cannabis vapor baths, which made them “howl with pleasure.”38 They had a particular fondness for warrior gods, and would worship at an altar consisting of a brushwood pile surmounted by a sword. Some of their number were said to suffer from a disease that turned men into women (perhaps a reference to social androgyny or even to bleeding hemorrhoids associated with long periods on horseback).39 Their greatest skill, Herodotus argued, was self-preservation, for when confronted with an invader, they could simply disappear into the steppe, fleeing like a herd of skittish deer.40
Herodotus’s picture of the Scythians became the one that most ancient geographers accepted as a true depiction of all the barbarians of the north; it would eventually be adopted wholesale by Roman and Byzantine writers as well. Many Greek mainlanders would have had direct contact with real, live Scythians on whom these images, even the most fantastic ones, could be overlaid. In Athens, immigrant Scythian archers were employed as constables and featured in the comedies of Aristophanes, the ancient equivalent of the Keystone Kops. Archaeological evidence confirms part of what Herodotus had to say. A powerful nomadic culture did exist across the Pontic steppe, and the fondness for horses, cannabis, and war-making among these communities is well-documented from the excavations of numerous burial sites stretching all the way from modern Romania to the western borderlands of China.41 Yet while the Scythians might have seemed the antithesis of civilization to writers in Ionia or mainland Greece, to Greeks on the Black Sea littoral they were both suppliers of food products for provisioning the colonies and for export, and a military power that could be either a threat or a source of security, depending on the political circumstances.
The real Scythians were a broad group of peoples, probably Iranian in origin, who originally lived as nomadic herders. They were among the earliest in a long line of peoples who migrated from central Asia to the west, driving before them vast herds of horses, sheep, and cows. By the 700s BC, they seem to have displaced the earlier Cimmerians, who themselves probably also migrated from the east.
The arrival of the Scythians in the Black Sea zone
alarmed the kingdoms of the Near East. Records of conflicts with the Scythian host appear in several ancient texts, under names that prefigure later labels. They are perhaps the Ashkenaz of Hebrew sources (Genesis 10:3), and in the sixth century BC the Persians vanquished an eastern people they called the Saka. The famous rock relief at Behistun in western Iran depicts Darius and his subjugated enemies, with the shackled Skunkha, ruler of the Saka, shown with the long beard and pointed hat that were the standard visual representations of northern barbarians. (After conquering the Scythians of the east, Darius led another, unsuccessful campaign against their western cousins around 513 BC.)
When the Greeks came to the northern shore, Scythian tribes were already a major presence from the Danube to the Don river. By the 300s BC they exercised some degree of hegemony over the entire region, with perhaps only the Crimean highlands outside their realm. Some had given up the pastoral life and become settled agriculturalists, cultivating grains that would be particularly attractive to traders from the Mediterranean. The most spectacular archaeological finds in Ukraine and southern Russia date from this Scythian “golden age”: housing complexes of wood and piled earth; elaborate burial mounds, or kurgans, which still punctuate the horizon across the steppe; and intricate gold artifacts, perhaps the handiwork of goldsmiths closer to the coast. Some of the goldwork originally reflected nomadic themes of sacred animals and the hunt, but in time the styles gave way to finely wrought depictions of domestic life—milking sheep, stringing a new bow, tanning a hide—and even gods and heroes borrowed from the Greek pantheon. Precious jewelry and impractically ornate weapons, including the typical gorytos, a combination bow-case and quiver, indicated that the mobile cultures of the steppe had gradually come to adopt many of the traits of their more settled Greek neighbors. This period may even have been associated with the reign of a particular king, one Ateas, the “Rex Scytharum” of later Roman sources, who is recorded as having died in a battle with Philip II of Macedon in the summer of 339 BC.42
The Scythians were skilled horsemen, and the horse formed the basis for the material culture and warrior ethos that so impressed outsiders. Various labels for Scythian tribes—such as “horse-milkers”—appear already in the Iliad and reflected the Greek fascination with their chief culinary peculiarity: the drinking of fermented mare’s milk, a mild intoxicant still enjoyed today across central Asia. But while the horse was the animal of necessity, the deer was the animal of legend. Magnificent goldwork taken from Scythian tombs features endless deer motifs, the antlers spiraling across the animal’s back in a style that would have pleased Art Nouveau enthusiasts many centuries later. Scythian warriors even fashioned elaborate antler headdresses for their horses, imbuing their domesticated animals with the mystical élan of the sacred deer.
Herodotus devoted more time to describing the Scythians than any other subject of his Histories except the Egyptians. In fact, the two peoples formed bookends to the Greek understanding of the fringes of the ancient world. The latter, says Herodotus, were the most cultured people on earth, and he took great pains to detail their customs, architecture, and agriculture. About the peoples around the Black Sea he was less enthusiastic. What struck Herodotus and other writers about the Scythians was the distance between their social mores and those of the Greeks—or, rather, the ways in which their customs seemed strangely parallel but different. They moved across the steppe in covered wagons, much as the Greeks plied the waves in ships. They commemorated their honored dead in grand festivals and built monuments to their heroes, but also ended up sacrificing humans in their frenzy. They drank wine but failed to cut it with water.
There was an important exception to this image of the uncouth foreigner, however. His name was Anacharsis, and he was one of the only men of Scythia whom Herodotus thought worth describing in any detail. In a roundabout way, he may also have invented Western civilization.
How a Scythian Saved Civilization
Greek writers generally portrayed the Scythians as antipathetic to outsiders, a parochial people who kept to themselves and regarded with suspicion ways of life foreign to their own—a claim that actually seems at odds with the clear evidence of cultural exchange in the archaeological record. But Anacharsis, Herodotus says, was unusual among his people for being a great traveler and a man of considerable learning. After living and teaching in many parts of the world, Anacharsis at last set out for home. He stopped to break his trek at a Greek colony on the Sea of Marmara before continuing up the Bosphorus and into the Black Sea. There he witnessed the rites of Cybele, a deity first worshipped in Asia Minor and whose cult eventually spread throughout Greece. Anacharsis was so impressed that he vowed to bring the rites to Scythia if the goddess were to grant him a safe onward journey.
She did, and so did he. Upon arriving home, he retired to a dense forest and, drum in hand, performed the rite just as he had seen it among the Greeks. But tragedy soon struck. As the poet Diogenes Laertius later described it:
Returning to Scythia, the peripatetic Anacharsis Tried to win over his compatriots to the Greek way of life. But a winged arrow snatched him away to the Immortals Still holding an unfinished story in his mouth.43
In the middle of his reverie, Anacharsis was discovered by the Scythian king, who drew his bow and shot the prodigal tribesman dead. That is why, Herodotus reported, if anyone traveling in Scythia asks about Anacharsis, the locals will deny ever having heard of him, all because he ventured abroad and adopted the baleful customs of foreigners.44
By the time of Herodotus, in the fifth century BC, Anacharsis was already a widely quoted figure among the educated classes in Athens, a literary character known for his pithy observations on morality and his ability to take haughty philosophers down a peg—the Oscar Wilde of his day, perhaps. He remained a paragon of barbarian virtue for some time to come. Plato praised him as an ingenious inventor and a man of practical skill. Aristotle said he was an estimable rhetorician (but a bad logician). Strabo noted that he was a man of frugality and justice. Pliny said that he may have invented the potter’s wheel and the modern anchor.45
Yet it is difficult to know whether Anacharsis ever really existed. There is no contemporary account of him, and little besides Herodotus’s story to go on. Even that is suspect, since the story contains too many of the resonant images that Classical Greeks would have associated with Scythians in general—their supposed hatred of things foreign, the bow, the primeval forest—to be completely believable.46 Still, the traditional story is that he was the scion of Scythian royalty, perhaps even the product of a union between a local king and a Greek woman. He may have come to Greece as an independent traveler or as part of a Scythian embassy, arriving around the beginning of the sixth century BC. He is reputed to have received two rare honors that would have identified him as wholly assimilated to Greek culture, Athenian citizenship and initiation into the sacred mysteries at Eleusis, but he was, nevertheless, always known to ancient writers as Anacharsis ho Skythes—Anacharsis the Scythian.
In Greek literature, Anacharsis was celebrated as the embodiment of practical wisdom despite his barbarian origins. In some ways, the simple fact of his foreignness provided a useful literary device. Putting words in the barbarian’s mouth and letting him speak as a social critic was a favorite trope, and a common motif in several literary sources is the juxtaposition of Anarchasis and Solon, the down-to-earth barbarian moralist contrasted with the Athenian lawgiver. Plutarch even placed him among the Seven Sages, in imaginary conversation over sumptuous food and drink with the likes of Aesop, and with a young maiden combing his hair to tame his savage looks.47 The distance between Greeks and barbarians, Plutarch seems to say, was never as great as one might think.
It was partly through Plutarch that Anacharsis passed from the Greek world to Rome and beyond, with his reputation as a gadfly and something of a sharptongued wag enhanced. He appears now and then on the margins of the great works of Western civilization from the Renaissance forward. Erasmus mentions his
habit of sleeping with his hand covering his mouth, to show that words can be dangerous. Montaigne quotes him on the role of virtue in governance. He may even lurk in the background of Raphael’s painting “The School of Athens,” the disheveled man with the rugged looks and blonde hair peering over Aristotle’s shoulder.
But the wise Scythian comes into his own in an unlikely time and place: in the late eighteenth century, as the subject of a French best-seller. The Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece, published in 1788, is not really about Anacharsis at all, at least not the old one. It is an extended and entertaining overview of classical civilization, written by the Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, a Jesuit and keeper of medals in the cabinet of Louis XVI. Barthélemy was an authority on classical languages and numismatics who spent over three decades writing the seven volumes of the Travels. He imagined a journey by a younger Anacharsis, a descendant of his more illustrious forebear, from Scythia to Athens. During his travels, he meets all the sages of the day, engages them in conversation and debate, and in the process provides a detailed exposition of the ideas of the Greek philosophers and accounts of the major sites of the ancient world.
In its day, and for a century or more after, the Travels remained something of a publishing blockbuster. “Its success surpassed my hopes,” Barthélemy later reflected. “The public received it in the most favourable manner; the French and foreign journals spoke of it with elogium.” Schoolboys used it as their introduction to the classics. Any self-respecting bourgeois owned a copy, in French or one of its numerous translations. As the translator of an English edition noted,
The Work now offered to the English reader exhibits a complete view of the antiquities, manners, customs, religious ceremonies, laws, arts, and literature of ancient Greece, at the period of its greatest splendour. A knowledge of these has hitherto been only attainable by a laborious perusal of writers who have been little solicitous to join entertainment with instruction. The Travels of Anacharsis, on the contrary, are so written, that the reader may frequently be induced to imagine he is perusing a work of mere amusement, invention, and fancy; till his eye glances to the bottom of the page, ….48
