The Black Sea

by Charles King

  In Arrian’s day, raiding parties from mountain peoples harassed the frontier, much as nomadic peoples were already beginning to do across the sea in Dacia. The Parthians, the major power to the east, were also actively building their empire and were always interested in profiting from Roman weakness. Piracy had been virtually eliminated on the Mediterranean, but it remained a serious problem on the Black Sea, sometimes encouraged by the very rulers who were supposed to be loyal to Rome. Security depended on striking deals with local potentates. One of Arrian’s first duties as governor was to survey how these deals were working in practice and to provide a report to the emperor Hadrian, the successor to Trajan. A portion of that report has survived as his Periplus Ponti Euxini, or navigation around the Black Sea.

  Arrian began recording his journey at Trapezus. The city was the last outpost of real Roman power in the eastern part of the sea; beyond it there were no more than occasional frontier garrisons. Even Trapezus, though, hardly counted as a civilized metropolis. The altars in the city were of rough stone, with shoddy engravings and misspelled inscriptions, “as is common among barbarous peoples.” The emperor, he requested, should send new ones right away. The people of the old Greek city seemed loyal and good-hearted enough; they were proud of a recently erected statue which depicted the glorious Hadrian pointing out toward the water. But the resemblance was so poor, Arrian regretfully reported, that it did the emperor no honor at all.71

  Leaving Trapezus, Arrian sailed along the coast to the east. Within a day his party had come to the port at Hyssus (near modern Sürmene, Turkey). There he found a company of Roman foot soldiers, whom he put through their paces. When they set off again, the early morning breezes that came off the river mouths filled the sails for a time, but the crew later had to set to the oars. Soon, the winds picked up again, this time with force. Great waves crashed up over the gunwales and flooded the deck. The hands set to bailing out the water, and only some skillful maneuvering by the captain prevented the ship’s turning sideways to the waves. One of the other ships in the party lost control and smashed against the rocky shore. The ship was a loss, but Arrian ordered the crew to salvage the sails and tackle and to scrape the wax, a scarce sealant, off the hull.

  The storm lasted for two days. When the party could once again take to sea, they sailed on to Apsarus (near modern Sarp, Turkey). Apsarus was said to have taken its name from Apsyrtos, heir to the throne of Colchis, who was supposedly murdered and buried there by his sister, Medea, as she fled with Jason and the Argonauts. The putative tomb had long been an attraction to travelers from the Roman west, a place of pilgrimage tended by the locals; but Arrian found something even more impressive in the town: a large, fortified Roman encampment, housing five cohorts in relatively good order. The prefect delivered their pay, which had been long in coming, and inspected the armaments and walled defenses. He also toured the sick ward, ministering to legionaries who had succumbed to the unhealthy air along the Acampsis (Çoruh) river.

  Apsarus was an important garrison, for the nearby Acampsis was the eastern extremity of stable Roman power. When Arrian sailed past the river’s mouth, he knew he was entering a place in which the Romans had only a meager foothold. He docked at the old Milesian colony of Dioscurias, where he found a small Roman outpost. The ruler of the hinterland was loyal to Hadrian, but there was little in the place to suggest Rome exercised any real power there. All along the eastern coast, hostile tribes made inland travel impossible. Rome was sometimes able to extort tribute and promises of loyalty from their leaders. The Laz people, governed by one King Malassas, were nominally subjects of Rome, as were the Apsilae under a King Julianus, who received his crown from Hadrian’s father; the good graces of the Sanigae and the Abasci, whose king had been crowned by Hadrian, allowed Roman troops to be stationed in Dioscurias. But another group, the Sanni, had recently reneged on their promise to pay tribute and instead survived by plundering the cities of the coast. “We will oblige them to be more punctual,” Arrian reported to Hadrian, “or exterminate them.”72

  That was braggadocio, however. As Arrian surely knew, there was little except skillful diplomacy and occasional cajoling to keep these peoples tied to Rome. That was why he was especially interested in finding out something of the political climate in areas beyond the real limits of the empire. He heard at Dioscurias that the ruler of the Bosporan kingdom, once controlled by Mithridates, had recently died, and that the political turmoil created by his death might open an opportunity for expanding Rome’s interests on the northern coast. But other than that, information was sparse. People who might have had knowledge of happenings in the north were disinclined to share it with a nosy Roman official.

  His report on other parts of the sea is crude, mixing legend and second-hand news of lands that were still imperfectly understood—and much of it reminiscent of the same fantasies reported by Herodotus some 500 years earlier. North of Dioscurias were “lice-eaters,” Arrian told the emperor, and little was known about the Tanais (Don) river, except that it was believed to be the boundary between Europe and Asia. He reported that, according to his sources, the once flourishing port of Theodosia in Crimea was now deserted, and Achilles was said to come to inhabit the dreams of people who slept on the island at the mouth of the Danube.73 Apart from giving a summary of sailing distances, that was all Arrian had to report. The rest he left to the imagination, just as the poets and playwrights of Herodotus’ day had done.

  The Prophet of Abonoteichus

  There are no habitable offshore islands in the Black Sea, but to the Romans, the cities along much of the coastline might as well have been. They were oases of imperial power, some of them fortified and garrisoned, but often not much more. The earliest known map of the Black Sea, a drawing on a Roman-era soldier’s shield, found along the Euphrates river, illustrates the point: The seacoast is shown as a succession of individual cities, nothing more. Even in those cities themselves, however, local society—a mixture of Roman soldiers, Greeks descended from the old colonists, barbarians from the interior, and the products of generations of intermarriage—little resembled that of urban centers closer to the Mediterranean. To westerners, the inhabitants of the Black Sea lands were at best credulous bumpkins, at worst semi-barbarians. A few decades after Arrian had retired from his frontier posting, the Roman satirist Lucian recorded a series of events that demonstrated just how bizarre the people of the Black Sea world could seem to observers from other parts of the empire.

  Around AD 150 a magnificent prophecy was revealed in Abonoteichus, a town in the region of Paphlagonia on the southern coast (now the city of Inebolu, Turkey). Workers in a temple had discovered some mysterious bronze tablets which announced the advent of the healer Asclepius, son of Apollo. It turned out that, of all the magnificent cities on earth, the god had picked provincial Abonoteichus as the place to make himself incarnate. Divine ways, as always, were imponderable.

  The local notables quickly made the city ready to receive the heavenly visitor. Construction on a new temple began, so that the god might have a place to rest and receive worshippers when he arrived. But when the foundation was nearly finished, yet another wonder appeared. A local man, one Alexander, discovered a perfectly formed egg amid the earthworks. When he cracked it open, out slithered a new-born snake. The animal, he announced, was in fact Asclepius. The god had at last come to Abonoteichus, prematurely and in an unexpected but not implausible form, inside his own incomplete temple.

  Within days, the snake had miraculously grown to the size of a python, and Alexander was hailed as its chief intercessor. The god quickly set to work. Asclepius revealed oracles to his prophet, who in turn passed the tidings on to the faithful. To especially high-ranking citizens, the god would even speak directly, in Greek.

  Over the next twenty years, Abonoteichus became the center of a major cult of Asclepius that rivaled any in the Roman world. Dignitaries journeyed all the way from Rome to have their fortunes told. Families competed to send their most
beautiful sons to serve as choristers in the Asclepian temple and, perhaps, to catch a glimpse of the slithering god. Husbands gave up their wives, asking that they sleep with the prophet Alexander and bear his children as a sign of the god’s favor.

  It all worked brilliantly. The entire affair had, of course, been devised by Alexander himself. He was the one who had buried the original bronze tablets, and his laborious attempt to stuff a baby snake into a hollow goose egg had paid off even better than he could have hoped. The mature snake—the god incarnate—was his masterpiece. He had fashioned a head out of a kind of papier mâché and painted it with vaguely human features. Using a system of hinges and horsehair, he could open the snake’s mouth and cause a forked tongue to dart out. He placed the head on a long snake’s body and set it up in the temple to receive supplicants.

  He also endowed the snake with the power of speech. By linking together the windpipes of several cranes, he formed a speaking tube which ran through the temple wall into another room. With a crowd gathered to hear the god, Alexander would excuse himself from the god’s presence, retire to the back room, and like the Wizard of Oz, make his own words issue from the snake’s mouth. When he happened to make a prediction that turned out to be false, the god would belatedly deliver an oracle to correct the mistake.

  Business was good. The price of a prophetic utterance, especially one that came directly from the snake’s mouth, was several times the price of a day laborer, and Alexander could manage well over a hundred prophecies per day. He took pleasure in his collection of comely chorus boys and the ready supply of women willing to service the prophet of Asclepius. He lived to a ripe age, almost seventy, but eventually came to a poetically fitting end. He died of a gangrenous wound to his groin, which became infested with maggots.

  The enterprising prophet of Abonoteichus merely confirmed what many educated Romans probably thought about the peoples of the Black Sea. But Lucian asked his readers to overlook the gullibility of his victims. “To tell the truth,” he wrote, “we must excuse those men of Paphlagonia and Pontus, thickwitted, uneducated fellows that they were.”74 If the inhabitants fell for a smalltime charlatan with a talking snake, it was a forgivable vice. What could one expect, after all, for people who lived at the exotic extremity of the empire?

  It is tempting to see the late Roman experience on the Black Sea as an effort to shore up weak borders against a growing barbarian threat—a clash of civilizations, the clean-shaven and skirted against the bearded and trousered. But as the local populations in places like Abonoteichus surely knew, those lines were never as clear as they might seem.

  It could sometimes be difficult to tell the conqueror from the conquered. The soldiers whom Arrian inspected were probably a motley crew, assembled from the far reaches of the empire and from local populations: Alpine highlanders, recruits from Spain and Gaul, a few native soldiers from Trapezus and Colchis, maybe even some Daci as well.75 Like soldiers before and since, those from far off learned how to survive in an unfamiliar environment by copying the habits of those who knew it best, their erstwhile enemies, now perhaps serving beside them as legionaries. As Arrian remarked in a treatise on military tactics,

  [the emperor Hadrian] has obliged his soldiers to practice barbaric movements, both those of the mounted archers of Parthia and the rapid evolutions of Sarmatians and Celts. They have been obliged also to learn the native war cries proper to such movements—those of the Celts, and the Daci, and the Rhaeti. They have been trained also to leap their horses across trenches and over ramparts. In a word, in addition to their ancient exercises they have learned all that has been invented … tending to grace or speed, or calculated to strike terror into the enemy, ….76

  That meant, of course, that the cries on both sides of the battle lines often turned out to be the same. But Hadrian would have known all this from first-hand experience. Under his immediate predecessor, Trajan, he had served in the Dacian campaigns, hearing the whoops of barbarian warriors as they rushed out to meet his battle formations, and he had himself made a tour of the southern Black Sea coast, years before he sent his agent Arrian. He even named his favorite horse Borysthenes, after the river of Scythia.

  In time, Romans would come to appreciate such reciprocal influences as never before. Pompey had introduced the Black Sea world to the Roman one; the conquest of the Pontic kingdom pushed the frontiers of the empire all the way to the Caucasus. In the centuries that followed, Roman engagement with the sea would be extended still farther—either to the directly administered provinces along the western and southern coasts or, via patron–client relationships, to the north and east. But soon the very distinction between the Roman and Black Sea worlds would fade away. Less than a century after the retreat from Dacia, the imperial capital picked itself up and alighted at the gateway to the sea—Byzantium.

  Notes

  1. Xenophon, Anabasis, 7.1.29.

  2. On the difficulty of dating the earliest Greek expeditions, see Thomas S. Noonan, “The Grain Trade of the Northern Black Sea in Antiquity,” American Journal of Philology, Vol. 94, No. 3 (1973):231–42; and Stefan Hiller, “The Mycenaeans and the Black Sea,” in Robert Laffineur and Lucien Busch (eds.) Thalassa: L’Egée préhistorique et la mer (Liège: Université de Liège, 1991), pp. 207–16.

  3. Plato, Phaedo, 109b.

  4. Xenophon, Anabasis, 5.4.

  5. Pierre Gilles, The Antiquities of Constantinople, ed. Ronald G. Musto, trans. John Bell, 2nd edn. (New York: Italica Press, 1988), p. xlv.

  6. Strabo, Geography, 11.2.12.

  7. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 4.9.44.

  8. Strabo, Geography, 11.2.1; Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 7.1.10, 7.2.17; Herodotus, Histories, 3.116, 4.24, 4.106.

  9. David Braund, Georgia in Antiquity: A History of Colchis and Transcaucasian Iberia, 550 BC–AD 562 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 50, 90.

  10. Herodotus, Histories, 2.104–105.

  11. The present state of knowledge about the Cimmerians is outlined in A. I. Ivanchik, Kimmeriitsy: Drevnevostochnye tsivilizatsii i stepnye kochevniki v VIII-VII vekakh do n. e. (Moscow: Russian Academy of Sciences, 1996).

  12. Gocha R. Tsetskhladze, “Greek Colonisation of the Black Sea Area: Stages, Models, and Native Population,” in Gocha R. Tsetskhladze (ed.) The Greek Colonisation of the Black Sea Area: Historical Interpretation of Archaeology (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1998), pp. 8–68.

  13. Plato, Phaedo, 109b.

  14. Strabo, Geography, 12.3.11.

  15. Strabo, Geography, 11.2.17.

  16. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 6.4.13. Cf. Strabo, Geography, 11.2.16, who says that this figure was overstated, but that there were still perhaps as many as seventy tribes.

  17. Strabo, Geography, 11.3.1; Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 6.4.13.

  18. Strabo, Geography, 7.4.4.

  19. Herodotus, Histories, 4.53.

  20. Michael Grant, The Rise of the Greeks (New York: Scribner’s, 1988), p. 273.

  21. The best source on the development of the western cities is Krzysztof Nawotka, The Western Pontic Cities: History and Political Organization (Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1997).

  22. Chris Scarre, The Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Rome (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 81.

  23. An expedition by Pericles brought many of the cities and entrepôts under effective Athenian control. By 425 BC some fifty Black Sea cities were payers of tribute to the Athenians. Braund, Georgia in Antiquity, p. 125.

  24. Anthony Bryer and David Winfield, The Byzantine Monuments and Topography of the Pontos, Vol. 1 (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1985), p. 128, note 35.

  25. Virgil, Georgics, 1.58, 2.440–445.

  26. Xenophon, Anabasis, 4.8. Cf. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 21.45.47. Bees that pollenate the Pontic azalea are still known to produce hallucinogenic honey that the Turks call deli bal, crazy honey.

  27. Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, 31.24.

  28. Pliny, Nat
ural History, 9.18.48.

  29. Strabo, Geography, 7.6.2.

  30. Peter Simon Pallas, Travels Through the Southern Provinces of the Russian Empire, in the Years 1793 and 1794, Vol. 2 (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees et al., 1802–3), p. 289.

  31. Mikhail Rostovtzeff, Iranians and Greeks in South Russia (1922; reprint New York: Russell and Russell, 1969), p. 11.

  32. On the portrayal of barbarians in fifth-century literature, see Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition Through Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

  33. See S. L. Solovyov, Ancient Berezan: The Architecture, History and Culture of the First Greek Colony in the Northern Black Sea (Leiden: Brill, 1999).

  34. Herodotus, Histories, 4.108.

  35. Timothy Taylor, “Thracians, Scythians, and Dacians, 800 BC–AD 300,” in Barry Cunliffe (ed.) The Oxford Illustrated Prehistory of Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 389.

  36. Pausanias, Description of Greece, 1.31.2.

  37. Herodotus, Histories, 4.5.

  38. Herodotus, Histories, 4.75.

  39. Herodotus, Histories, 1.105.

  40. Herotodus, Histories, 4.46

  41. See Sergei I. Rudenko, Frozen Tombs of Siberia: The Pazyryk Burials of Iron Age Horsemen, trans. M. W. Thompson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970); Rostovtzeff, Iranians and Greeks; Ellis H. Minns, Scythians and Greeks: A Survey of Ancient History and Archaeology on the North Coast of the Euxine from the Danube to the Caucasus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913); Renate Rolle, The World of the Scythians, trans. F. G. Walls (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

  42. Rolle, The World of the Scythians, p. 128.

  43. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 1.103.

  44. Herodotus, Histories, 4.76–77.

  45. Plato, The Republic, 10.600; Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 1.13; Strabo, Geography, 7.3.8; Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 7.56.198. That is, an anchor with arms rather than a simple stone slab.