The Black Sea

by Charles King

  There, in the footnotes, Barthélemy supported each quotation, argument, and conjecture with a reference to an original source. It became possible, at last, to acquire a sound knowledge of the classics without being able to read Greek or Latin—and to enjoy a good adventure story in the bargain

  The Travels had a major effect on the growth of French neoclassicism in literature and art and, in its many translations, on philhellenism across Europe. Travelers had Anacharsis, both the elder and the younger, in mind when they ventured onto the Black Sea. From the 1780s forward, a remarkable number of writers mention him in their own accounts of sailing across the sea and exploring its coasts. Some claimed to have found the very forest where the elder Anacharsis was killed by his comrades; others identified the site where the younger Anacharsis set off on his voyage to Greece—unaware, it seems, that Barthélemy’s version was self-consciously fictional.49

  The great popularity of Barthélemy’s work points to the central irony of the Anarchasis story. The popular European vision of ancient Greece as ordered, rational, virtuous, and civilized—the vision that Europeans would eventually come to hold of themselves—was refracted through a Scythian lens. The form of Barthélemy’s narrative, an account by a somewhat bemused traveler casting a fresh eye on familiar themes, was not unusual in the eighteenth century, but no single work in this genre had as great an impact on the average educated European’s understanding of the art, architecture, and philosophy of the ancient world as the Travels of Anacharsis the Younger. It was a barbarian from the shores of the Black Sea who helped to introduce the ancient Greeks to the grammar schools and middle-class drawing rooms of modern Europe and, in a way, to introduce modern Europeans to themselves.

  The Voyage of Argo

  The reputation of Anacharsis the elder was in full bloom in the closing centuries of the first millennium BC. The critical virtues embodied by the wise Scythian proved to be a useful light that Greek philosophers could shine on their own societies. At about the same time, another story about the Black Sea was also widely popular. The legend of Jason and the Argonauts was known already to Homer and Hesiod, but the earliest full version of the story dates, like many of the Anacharsis proverbs and stories, from the Hellenistic period, the era stretching from the late fourth century BC to the rise of republican Rome three centuries later. Apollonius of Rhodes composed his Argonautica, the most important account of the Jason legend, in the third century BC, and it may have been due to the acclaim the work received that he was eventually named to a plum post, keeper of the famous library at Alexandria.

  “It was King Pelias,” Apollonius begins, “who sent them out.” Pelias, usurper of the throne of Iolcus, had learned from an oracle that death would come to him in the form of a man walking with one bare foot. So when his nephew Jason limped into his court, having lost a sandal in the sticky mud of a river in its late winter swell, Pelias devised a plan to send Jason away on a dangerous expedition, and thus escape his fate. The task was to retrieve a golden ram’s fleece from Aeetes, king of Colchis, which lay guarded by a serpent at the far edge of a tempestuous sea. A special ship, the finest that ever held oars, was built under the watchful eye of Athena, and in its hull lay a plank from Zeus’s sacred Dodonian oak, which gave it the power of speech. The best and bravest, demi-gods and heroes, were assembled for the crew. The perilous voyage tested their skills. Hostile tribes lurked along the coasts, magical beasts rose up to bar the way, and once the treasure was in hand, a vengeful king and his family spared no effort to recover their stolen goods. In the end, the Argonauts returned to Greece, diminished in number but with the fleece and Medea, the Colchian king’s daughter, in tow.

  There have been many attempts to find the roots of the Jason legend in fact. As with the Anacharsis stories, travelers since antiquity have sought proof of places and practices described in Apollonius’s epic. In the 1980s, the British adventurer Tim Severin even constructed a ship using Bronze Age techniques and took it from Greece to Soviet Georgia—modern Colchis—to show that such a journey would have been possible.50 The earliest versions of the Jason story no doubt did reflect the experiences of ancient sailors, seen through the veil of popular mythology. The geographer Strabo knew how much the experience of the sea could lend itself to myth-making:

  [T]he men of Homer’s day, in general, regarded the Pontic Sea as a kind of second Oceanus, and they thought that those who voyaged there got beyond the limits of the inhabited world just as much as those who voyaged far beyond the pillars of Heracles; the Pontic Sea was thought to be the largest of the seas in our part of the world, and for that reason, they applied to this particular sea the term “The Pontus,” just as they spoke of Homer as “The Poet.”.51

  Even the Golden Fleece, Strabo said, perhaps had its origins in the use of sheepskins as a makeshift sluice for extracting gold from rivers, a technique known among the peoples of the Caucasus.52

  However, searching for the real-life sources of the Jason legend misses the most important point about it. As a piece of literature, Apollonius’s Argonautica was far more a product of the author’s own time than a throwback to the earliest ages of Greek exploration of the Black Sea. Apollonius was writing at a time when the triumphs of Alexander the Great had given way to infighting among his generals and other rival claimants to his legacy. His conquests had made the language and culture of the Greeks dominant throughout much of the known world, but his death in 323 ushered in a period of perpetual warfare among his successors. During the Hellenistic age, it was left to writers such as Apollonius to reconstruct the glories of a mythical past, set against the harsh realities of the present. The tug of nostalgia, not the lust for adventure, is the real theme of his epic.

  Even the route taken by Apollonius’s Argonauts is revealingly anachronistic. Some of the world’s earliest accounts of business travel come in the form of periploi, a combination of gazetteer and sailing guide, dating back perhaps as far as the sixth century BC. A remarkable change in the periploi occurs with time, however. The earliest ones instruct sailors to turn left as they enter the Black Sea—that is, to the west—and sail around to the north coast. It is only in much later accounts that sailors are told to turn to the right, toward the Caucasus. The reason for this early left turn is unclear, but it may have had to do with the more attractive prospects for trade in the north and west.53 Cities such as Sinope, on the south coast, predated those in other parts of the sea, but it was the trade in fish and cereals, most plentiful along the Thracian and Scythian coasts, that would have attracted most visitors. Only later, with Sinope’s creation of its own colonies farther to the east and the growth of eastern cities such as Phasis, did the long-distance route along the south coast become a regular one. In sailing straight for Colchis, then, the Argonauts were setting off in a direction that would have been far more likely in Apollonius’s own day than in the misty past in which his narrative is set.

  In the third century BC, and perhaps even before, any traveler to the Black Sea would have found many references to Jason and the Argonauts along the coast—headlands and bays named for incidents during the voyage and local myths associated with particular members of the crew. But these were probably relatively recent innovations, not remnants of an ancient voyage by heroic adventurers. What was a major event in the cultural memory of the Hellenistic age seems to have gone unremarked by the native peoples of the east. In the mythology and folklore of the peoples around the sea, there is a surprising dearth of information on the Argonauts and their alleged voyage. Only after trade with the Mediterranean world began to expand and cities began to flourish would Greek settlers and even Hellenized natives find it useful to link the histories of their towns with an imaginary past. Citizens invented foundation stories and alleged progenitors connected with the Argo and endued prominent geographical features with an ancient pedigree. The most significant headland on the southeastern coast is never mentioned in the Argonautica, yet it has been called Cape Jason (now Yasun Burnu in Turkish) f
or more than two millennia.54 It is perhaps because of a similar logic that visitors can today enjoy “Argo” beer while dining at any number of “Medea” restaurants farther along the coast in post-Soviet Georgia. The art of marketing is not a modern invention.

  “More Barbarous Than Ourselves”

  For the first few centuries after the initial Greek expeditions, the colonies grew in fame and wealth. They exported grain and luxury goods to the Mediterranean and even produced their own share of philosophers and literati. Their success, however, depended on two things: a guaranteed export market, particularly in grain, to Ionia and mainland Greece and good relations with the non-Greeks of the interior. As time went on, neither of these factors was any longer assured. The conquests of Alexander the Great had little immediate impact on the Black Sea cities themselves, but the opening up of Egypt as a source of grain for the rest of the Mediterranean began to rob them of their privileged position as suppliers of essential foodstuffs. Patterns of trade began to shift to the south: down the Nile toward the Horn of Africa, down the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean and on to the east, overland from Antioch and Damascus to Persia and central Asia. Later, with the expansion and consolidation of Roman power in the eastern Mediterranean, these routes would become even more significant than the older one to the Black Sea.

  Relations with inland barbarians also began to sour. The connections to the hinterland had long been delicate, and the cities were often compelled to pay off barbarian chieftains in exchange for peace. Thucydides reported that the cities along the western coast were obliged to deliver a huge quantity of gold, silver, and woolen fabrics to the Odrysians, a Thracian tribe which controlled much of modern Bulgaria.55 But from the second century BC, even those older tributary relationships began to falter. Especially in the northern cities, the amount and frequency of tribute to barbarian rulers seem to have increased, with little left in local treasuries for public works. The chora, or agricultural outskirts, of many cities began to contract; public buildings were allowed to decay or were destroyed by attacks. Defensive walls were erected and then ruined, either from neglect or assault.56 On the sea, piracy—uncommon in the age of Greek colonization—gradually began to appear, perhaps encouraged by local kings and barbarian rulers eager to profit from the activities of freebooters.57

  Visitors were unimpressed with what they found in the old colonies. Many of the inhabitants had forgotten how to speak Greek, or pronounced it with such archaic accents that they seemed amusing shadows of their Ionian forebears. In the first century AD, the writer Dio Chrysostom claimed to have visited Olbia, the once flourishing city that Herodotus had described a few centuries earlier. The city was not quite what he expected.

  The city of [Olbia], as to its size, does not correspond to its ancient fame, because of its ever-repeated seizure and its wars. For since the city has lain in the midst of barbarians now for so long a time—barbarians, too, who are virtually the most warlike of all—it is always in a state of war and has often been captured, the last and most disastrous capture occurring not more than one hundred and fifty years ago.58

  The surrounding barbarian population, the Getae, had often been at war, attacking cities along the northern and western coasts, even raiding as far south as Byzantium. The Olbians, who had once maintained extensive environs of agricultural land, had retreated behind crumbling walls. The sanctuaries and funeral monuments were all desecrated. Ships from the Aegean came only infrequently. Even when ships did drop anchor, there were usually only pirates or petty shysters on board. As one Olbian complained, “As a usual thing those who come here are nominally Greeks but actually more barbarous than ourselves, traders and market-men, fellows who import cheap rags and vile wine and export in exchange products of no better quality.”59 The cultural mix in the colony could sometimes be confusing. Dio reported an encounter with a certain Callistratus, clad in trousers and a black cloak, like those worn by barbarian horsemen, and carrying a great cavalry saber on his belt. But for all these trappings, Dio suspected that he was really a Greek at heart. Callistratus, he implies, propositioned him.60

  Rather than a source of enrichment or exoticism, the Black Sea was now looked upon as a place of exile, once again the inhospitable edge of the world imagined by the earliest Greek poets and geographers. Ovid, banished in AD 8 to Tomis on the west coast by the emperor Augustus, left the most poignant account of life on the sea during the period of the colonies’ decline. It was a miserable place: cold, far colder, he claimed, than his native Abruzzi. In some winters the sea iced over, so that dolphins bumped their heads when they tried to jump. The snow lay on the ground for two years at a stretch, and wine came out as slush when you poured it from the bottle. Men walked about with icicles tinkling on their beards. All around were babbling barbarians, and marauders on swift ponies swept down from the north to carry off the few rudiments of civilization that the people had managed to acquire. “They call it the Euxine, ‘hospitable,’” he wrote. “They lie.”61

  Ovid was, of course, a poet and one for whom embellishment was no vice, especially since he nurtured the vain hope that the more colorful his descriptions, the more likely a commutation of his sentence. But he was probably right about the profound changes that had taken place in the old Greek colonies. New sources of grain and trade routes to the east, now guarded by the growing power of Rome, made the treasures of the Black Sea pale in comparison, even if the odd jar of pickled fish was still enjoyed by Mediterranean connoisseurs as an exotic import from the far reaches of the earth. A shifting array of new actors crowded the coasts and the hinterlands: new nomadic peoples arriving from farther to the east, hybrid kingdoms of Greek-speaking elites ruling a mixture of Greek and barbarian subjects, and independent city-states with little connection to the Mediterranean world other than the memory of foundation by one or another Greek mother-city. The unity that might have existed during the period of Greek colonization gave way to a more variegated economic and cultural space, a frontier where the desire for political control came up against the challenge of disorder.

  Pontus and Rome

  In 62 BC a triumphal procession in Rome honored the general and consul Pompey. The spectacle lasted over two days and exceeded in magnificence any that had gone before. Inscriptions carried in the parade proclaimed the new conquests: Paphlagonia and Pontus; Armenia and Cappadocia; Media, Colchis, Iberia, and Albania; Syria, Cilicia, and Phoenicia; Palestine and Judea; Mesopotamia and Arabia. In all, 1,000 fortresses and 800 ships had been captured; 900 cities had fallen, and another thirty-nine had been founded. The spoils of war were immense. Hundreds of carriages and litters were required to bring the treasury of gold and jewels into the city.

  Pompey himself entered in a gem-studded chariot, wearing a cloak that was said to have belonged to Alexander the Great. Behind him trailed a retinue of more than 300 subjugated dignitaries, all in native costume—the son and daughter-in-law of the king of Armenia, kings of the Jews and of Colchis, chieftains from the Caucasus mountains, miscellaneous pirates, and at the end, a gaggle of Scythian women, said to be Amazons.62

  One important figure was absent, though. In his place came a likeness, nearly 12 ft high and made of solid gold. It was accompanied by some of his many sons and daughters, led to Rome as companions for the lifeless statue. The missing monarch was Mithridates, king of Pontus, whose fall was the focus of the celebration. A succession of Roman generals had battled him unsuccessfully for decades, until Pompey’s leadership had at last revived the weary legions. But in the end, Mithridates denied the general his greatest glory, delivering the king in person to Rome. Two years earlier, sensing defeat, he had taken his own life and now lay in Sinope, in a stately sepulcher built by Pompey himself.

  Both literally and figuratively, the conquests of the first century BC brought the Black Sea into the Roman world; the victory over Mithridates extended the frontiers of Rome east to the Euphrates river and north to the land of the Scythians. The new acquisitions more than doubled the republ
ic’s annual revenue in taxes and tribute and restored a degree of order to a zone that for two centuries had been plagued by warfare among local rulers. Ships could cross the sea without fear of pirates, and the local potentates that had controlled the coastline were now under the suzerainty of the Roman republic and, later, the empire.

  The late Greek experience on the sea had been one of isolated urban islands, an unwelcoming hinterland on one side and an inhospitable sea on the other. The Romans, however, had grander ambitions. They sought to bring the Black Sea into an orderly empire and to benefit from the fish, grain, precious metals, and—especially important for an imperial power—fighting men that the sea and its littoral could provide. But as the experience with the elusive Mithridates illustrated, conquering the sea was never a simple task. The frontiers of the empire were never clearly delineated boundaries. They were literally a limit—limes, in Latin—a measure of the extent to which Rome could reasonably project its military might, and that measure was not always the same, even from month to month. Of course, the nature of Roman frontier policy changed over time, but by and large the process of Roman expansion around the sea rarely involved establishing state control, in a modern sense, over the outlying regions. Rather, conquest was mainly about altering the relationship between the empire and the indigenous populations63—striking deals, paying off potential adversaries, and where possible turning competitors into clients.