The Black Sea

by Charles King

  At its height, the Roman empire included more than half the Black Sea’s coastline, from the Dnestr river in the northwest, across Thrace and Anatolia to the Caucasus in the east. Roman warships and merchantmen, with their banks of long oars and linen sails, visited ports all the way from modern Romania to Georgia. The sea was never at the center of Roman attentions, however. When the republic began its expansion in the eastern Mediterranean, in the 200s BC, most of the Black Sea region was divided among the independent kingdoms that had sprung up after Alexander the Great. Portions of the land south and east of the sea came under the control of one of his generals, Seleucus (the eponymous founder of the Seleucid empire), and areas to the west were at various times claimed by the kings of Macedonia. But for most of the Black Sea region, their power was rarely more than notional. In the Hellenistic period, the sea seems to have been in a parlous state. Most of the old Greek colonies were in disarray, taken and retaken by tribes from the interior, mere shadows of the robust marketplaces of a few centuries earlier. The coastline was dominated by peoples in whom outsiders had little immediate interest: the Getae and other Thracian peoples to the west, a bevy of Scythian and Sarmatian chieftains in the north, warlike Caucasus peoples to the east, and a few small kingdoms in Crimea and along the southern coast, some headed by Greek-speaking rulers who arrogated to themselves the title of monarch but who, more often than not, held their throne only until some more powerful neighbor decided to usurp it. There was, thus, good reason for the heroic nostalgia of Apollonius’ Argonautica.

  That might have been the way things had remained had it not been for the particular ambition of one set of rulers, the kings of Pontus. In the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the name “Pontus” referred both to the sea, as in the past, as well as to a specific region along the shore, the southeastern coastline running roughly from Sinope to Trapezus. Like their neighbors, the kings of Pontus had carved out control over their territory in the century or so of political turmoil that followed the death of Alexander. They governed a fertile region, the same area whose lush river valleys and dense forests had attracted Greek settlers centuries earlier. The grand mausoleums cut into the cliffs above their capital of Amaseia (modern Amasya, Turkey) testify to their strength.

  Their real advantage, however, lay in their keen appreciation of the power of the sea itself—coupled with some strategic good sense. While other rulers in Asia Minor had contented themselves with the spoils of Anatolia, the Pontic kings looked around the coastline. They built a navy of sturdy galleys able to make the crossing to the north and strengthened ties with the old Greek colonies there. Across the sea, at Chersonesus, they concluded an agreement under which the kingdom would protect the city against Scythian incursions, and they secured the support of the cities on the western coast as well. Their friendly relations with the powerful Bosporan kingdom, centered in the old colony of Panticapaeum, guaranteed their access to fishing on the Sea of Azov. The kings also saw what the growing power of Rome meant for their own region. They aided Rome in the wars with Carthage and assisted the legions in defending Roman conquests in the east against local rivals.

  Pontus reached its height in the first century BC, under a ruler of near mythical proportions, Mithridates VI Eupator. Mithridates came to power as a boy after the assassination of his father. The throne was not easily won. His mother sought to have him killed and to install a younger sibling in his place. Mithridates fled to the mountains, but in time he emerged from the wilderness with an army of supporters, imprisoned his mother, and put to death his usurping brother.

  Ancient sources invested Mithridates with almost superhuman powers. He is said to have spoken nearly two dozen languages. He was a skilled hunter and warrior who could outrun and outride any opponent. In culture he was broadly Greek, speaking the koine language that had grown up from centuries of interaction among various Greek dialects and the influences of non-Greek peoples, but he drew much from the traditions of Persia and the east. Later dramatists and composers cast him as half Hellenic patriot, half Oriental despot. (Racine’s version of his life was a favorite of Louis XIV, and both Mozart and Scarlatti composed operas with the king as the central character.)

  Mithridates’s ambitions were even greater than those of his predecessors. He used the old treaty with Chersonesus as a pretext for annexing the city. He took control of the Bosporan kingdom and installed a viceroy at Panticapaeum. Within a few years, he conquered Colchis, central Anatolia, and Bithynia, placing relatives and friends on the thrones. His lands extended along most of northern Turkey, southern Ukraine, and the western Caucasus. Tribute paid in wheat and silver enriched his coffers, and the lands of the north were active recruiting grounds for skilled cavalry and archers. He also concluded an alliance with Tigranes, king of Armenia, who had been pursuing the same expansionist aims in eastern Anatolia as Mithridates around the Black Sea.

  His rapid conquests and powerful army worried the Romans. In the second century BC, Rome had acquired a toe-hold in Asia Minor, and the region along the old Ionian coast was soon transformed into the province of Asia, a province now separated from the powerful Pontic kingdom by only a thin array of pliant Roman allies. Mithridates, by contrast, was said to command 250,000 infantry and 40,000 cavalry, and a war fleet of hundreds of ships, with soldiers and seamen drawn from all the Black Sea’s coasts. With only a token force in Asia, Roman commanders before Pompey could not face Mithridates directly, so they encouraged their local allies to act as proxies and stage a preemptive attack on Pontus. The plan proved disastrous. Mithridates easily overwhelmed the invading force and pushed across Asia Minor to the Aegean coast, renouncing his predecessors’ alliance with Rome and promising a revival of Hellenic greatness against the new power in the west. In that campaign season, in 88 BC, he ordered the wholesale slaughter of all Roman men, women, and children whom his armies encountered, a total of perhaps 80,000 victims.64

  His victories were spectacular. His warships ferried marines and foot soldiers across the Aegean to Greece, where he routed the Roman army and occupied Athens. Pushing forward, though, was difficult. His forces were constantly harassed by Roman troops, now reinforced from other regions, and the Greek cities had come to see the erstwhile liberator as little better than the Romans. Mithridates quickly concluded a peace agreement; he renounced his conquests and agreed to pay a fine to Roman authorities for disturbing the peace. That was hardly the end, however. What followed was a series of small but bloody wars, again pitting Mithridates against his neighbors and, in turn, against Rome.

  Within a few years, Rome at last reached the end of its tether. The Senate invested ultimate military authority in Pompey and persuaded him to strike out to the eastern frontier. He had earlier achieved historic victories at the other extremities of Roman power, in Libya and Spain, which had allowed him to stage two triumphal processions in Rome before the age of forty. The Senate hoped he could earn yet a third.

  The new campaign against Mithridates was swift. As in the past, the king staged a strategic retreat, attempting to entice the Roman legions into rugged territory and then wear them down. But Pompey refused to take the bait. When Mithridates fled to the Caucasus, Pompey turned his attention to Armenia, quickly subjugating the king’s ally, Tigranes. He then marched along the southern Black Sea coast, conquering cities that had earlier fallen to Mithridates and invading the Pontic kingdom itself.

  In the meantime, the king made his escape, traveling north among the Caucasian tribes and avoiding the coast, which was patrolled by Roman ships. He finally arrived at Panticapaeum, where he had installed one of his sons as ruler of Crimea. With most of Pontus now in his hands, Pompey turned his attention to quelling rebellions elsewhere, leaving the exiled king to brood among the barbarians of the north.

  In his Crimean redoubt, Mithridates was plotting his comeback. He drew up an elaborate plan to raise a new army among the Scythians and the Getae, march up the Danube, and with the assistance of the Gauls race down through Italy an
d attack Rome itself. This time, however, his aims overreached his abilities. Although he had initially been welcomed by some Hellenistic rulers in Asia Minor and the Black Sea, in time he had come to seem little more than a tyrant, extracting the same tribute for himself that he had warned local potentates they would be required to pay under Roman authority. Rebellions broke out among his own soldiers, and one of his sons, Pharnaces, persuaded the officers to crown him king in his father’s place. Realizing that his throne was lost, Mithridates attempted suicide by drinking poison. When it failed to take effect, a merciful Gaul in his retinue dispatched him with his sword.

  Pharnaces quickly sent Pompey a token of his good will and friendship, the body of his father. The embalmer had done a poor job, forgetting to remove the brain, and the decay of the soft tissue had distorted the face to such an extent that the king was barely recognizable.65 But after confirming the body’s identity, Pompey pronounced him the greatest adversary that Rome had encountered in the east and buried him in a specially built mausoleum in Sinope. After a few sweeping up operations, Pompey reorganized the newly acquired lands into the Roman province of Pontus and returned home to receive his triumph.

  Mithridates, as it turned out, had foreseen his end. Before an early battle with Pompey, he dreamed that he was sailing the Black Sea in a fair wind, with the entrance to the Bosphorus just visible in the distance. He turned to his fellow passengers, congratulating them on their good fortune in coming safely to the passageway to the Mediterranean. But suddenly he found himself in the midst of a storm, his companions lost and the boat smashed, the great monarch tossed about on a small piece of wreckage.66 His attempt to create a kingdom that would encircle the Black Sea suffered a similar fate. It was now Rome, not the old citystates or Hellenistic monarchs, that claimed much of the coastline.

  Dacia Traiana

  Even after the defeat of Mithridates, the Black Sea was still a restless place. Not long after Pompey’s triumphant homecoming, Pharnaces, the king’s treacherous son, reneged on his alliance with Rome and sailed across the Black Sea from Crimea, with the aim of reestablishing his father’s empire. He was quickly dispatched by Caesar—a campaign that Caesar famously dismissed with the comment “Veni, vidi, vici.”

  That line belied the complicated nature of Rome’s relationship with the peoples of the coasts and hinterlands. Both Mithridates and Pharnaces had very nearly assembled a strong coalition of barbarian peoples to challenge the power of Rome, and the ability of any group along the imperial frontiers to put together a credible military threat was a constant worry. One of the most important of these groups were the Getae of the western coast.

  Long before Rome entered the Black Sea world, Herodotus had described the Getae as “the most manly and law-abiding” of the Thracian peoples, and he was fascinated by their bizarre religious beliefs, which included the idea that they could pass through death to a new life in communion with their god, Zalmoxis. Dying, they said, was merely changing residence, hence the epithet generally given to them by the Greeks, athanatizontes—the immortals. To the Romans, the Getae were generally known as the Daci, perhaps originally a separate tribe closely related to the Getae in language and culture. Over the centuries since Herodotus, they had grown powerful through trade, particularly in gold and silver which they dug from mines in Transylvania, the region beyond the Carpathian mountains northwest of the sea. They had long been feared warriors, but under their king Burebista, a contemporary of Julius Caesar, the Daci expanded their military and exerted control over the old Greek cities along the coast. They presented such a threat to Rome that Caesar planned an expedition against them, but the campaign was preempted when he and Burebista met the same fate, assassination by inconstant friends, at about the same time. Under Augustus, the Daci became nominally subject to Rome, but in winter, they marched across the frozen Danube to raid the imperial province of Moesia, in modern-day Bulgaria. “What’s here is a Scythian rabble,” complained Ovid from the seacoast during Augustus’ reign, “a mob of trousered Getae.”67

  As with Mithridates in the east, the Romans fought a series of small wars with the Daci, yet each time the political outcome remained largely the same as before: a formal recognition of Roman suzerainty but little in the way of order. At the beginning of the second century AD, the emperor Trajan decided to destroy the power of the Daci and their king, Decebal, for good. In two separate campaigns from 101 to 106, he laid waste to Dacia. A massive bridge was built across the Danube, with twenty stone piers connected by arches and standing 150 ft high above the foundations. Supply lines stretched across the bridge and deep into Dacian territory. Roman troops eventually surrounded the capital, Sarmizegethusa, in the southern Carpathians, but like Mithridates, Decebal committed suicide before he could be captured and brought back alive to Rome. His head, along with a treasury of gold and silver found in the Dacian stronghold, made the journey instead. In celebration, Trajan staged 123 days of spectacles, involving 10,000 gladiators and the sacrifice of 11,000 animals.68 To commemorate his victory, the emperor had a grand monument built, and on it a spiral relief giving a narrative of the conquest. It was dedicated by the emperor himself in 113 and still stands, as Trajan’s Column, in Rome.

  The Daci of the column would have been familiar to Herodotus. They are bearded, clad in trousers, with a fierceness in battle evident even on a piece of architecture intended to praise their subjugator. The distinctive Dacian scimitar, a weapon perhaps borrowed from other peoples to the east, made the legionaries’ work especially bloody, and the cavalry tactics of the Daci, which owed much to the influence of the steppe Scythians, were formidable.

  But what probably struck the conquering legionaries is how much they had in common with their barbarian enemies. For generations, the Daci had been in contact with the cities along the coast, and their walled fortresses of cut stones were as sophisticated as those found in the old Greek colonies. Moreover, the Romans themselves had earlier sent engineers to assist the Daci with their fortifications (the strategic problem of giving away too much technology that is also familiar to modern great powers). Their symbol, a wolf’s head of metal attached to a windsock that flapped in the breeze, would eventually be adopted by the Roman legions as their own battle standard.

  After the defeat of the Daci, their region became the province of Dacia—or Dacia Traiana, after its conquering hero—an area that covered much of modern Romania. Legionaries were stationed there and colonists imported from other parts of the empire to work the mountain mines and fertile lands of the Danube plain. The geographer Ptolemy reported some forty-four settlements in Dacia, and those, he said, were only the “most important towns.”69

  Dacia was always, however, a frontier province. Incursions of nomadic peoples from the northern steppe taxed the meager defenses, and it may have been only concern for the welfare of the settler population that prevented an early abandonment of the province. The area to the west was rather quickly brought under solid Roman control, but to the east, on the plains closer to the Black Sea, Roman influence was only one part of a complicated landscape. Plenty of Daci had remained in the new province, and nomadic peoples from the eastern steppe traveled the flatlands in the same wooden carts described centuries earlier by Herodotus. Many other peoples, both settled and pastoral, fished the Danube, farmed the floodplains, and hunted the Carpathian foothills. Roman power north of the Danube, such as it was, lasted only about a century and a half. By 275 the emperor Aurelian had taken the decision to quit Dacia and retreat with his legions south of the river, a natural boundary that could be more readily defended. Some Roman settlers no doubt remained, loath to leave their farmsteads and flocks; some may have moved farther north into the granite vastness of the Carpathians, in response to the influx of new peoples fanning out from the northern steppe.

  The Expedition of Flavius Arrianus

  Textual evidence about the nature of the Black Sea world in the Roman period, both before and after the abandonment of Dacia, is sketchy
. Much of it is derivative of Herodotus, who wrote several centuries before the Romans even arrived in the region. One important source, however, is the account of one Flavius Arrianus, whose early encounter with the sea was as upsetting in reality as the old king Mithridates had found it in his prophetic dream:

  [A] cloud suddenly arising burst nearly in an easterly direction from us, and brought on a violent storm of wind, which was entirely contrary to the course that we held, and from the fatal effects of which we had a narrow escape. For it almost instantly produced such a swell of the sea, as to make it appear hollow to the view, and caused a deluge of water to break [over us]. Our situation was then truly tragic, since as fast as we pumped out the water, so fast did it burst in upon us.70

  The ships received a tossing, but Arrianus survived unscathed. That was a good thing for Rome, for he had just been appointed governor of much of the Black Sea’s southern coast, including Mithridates’ former kingdom, now subsumed within a province of the Roman empire.

  His fortune at sea was in keeping with a charmed life. Arrianus—or Arrian, as he is usually known—was Greek by birth, a native of Bithynia, but served as a high-ranking military commander in the Roman army, the only Greek to hold such a position in his day. In his youth, he had nurtured a love of philosophy, and his notes on the lectures of Epictetus became a major document for students of Stoicism. He later turned to literary pursuits, compiling an important history of Alexander the Great, as well as respected treatises on military tactics, hunting, and India. In AD 131, at the age of thirty-five, he was named prefect of Cappadocia, the province into which the old kingdom of Pontus now fell, with responsibility for overseeing the Roman frontier along the eastern Black Sea and the Caucasus.