The Gates of Europe Read online

  Herodotus’s interest in the “barbarian” part of the story turned his attention to the Pontic steppes. In 512 BC, thirteen years before the start of the wars, Darius the Great, by far the most powerful ruler of the Persian Empire, invaded the region to avenge himself on the Scythians, who had played a trick on him. The Scythian kings, nomadic rulers of a vast realm north of the Black Sea, had made Darius march all the way from the Danube to the Don in pursuit of their highly mobile army without giving him a chance to engage it in battle. This was a humiliating defeat for a ruler who would pose a major threat to the Greek world a decade and a half later. In his Histories, Herodotus spared no effort in relating whatever he knew or had ever heard about the mysterious Scythians and their land, customs, and society. It would appear that despite his extensive travels, he never visited the region himself and had to rely on stories told by others. But his detailed description of the Scythians and the lands and peoples they ruled made him not only the first historian but also the first geographer and ethnographer of Ukraine.

  The lands north of the Black Sea were first settled ca. 45,000 BC by Neanderthal mammoth hunters, as we know from archeological excavations of their dwellings. Some 3,000 years later, humans who moved into the Pontic steppes domesticated the horse—according to more evidence provided by archeologists. In the fifth millennium BC, bearers of the so-called Cucuteni-Trypilian culture settled the forest-steppe borderlands between the Danube and the Dnieper, engaged in animal husbandry and agriculture, built large settlements, and produced clay statues and colored ceramics.

  Before Herodotus began to recite parts of his work at public festivals in Athens, most Greeks knew very little about the area north of the Black Sea. They thought of it as a land of savages and a playground of the gods. Some believed that it was there, on an island at the mouth of either the Danube or the Dnieper, that Achilles, the hero of the Trojan War and Homer’s Iliad, had found his eternal rest. Amazons, the female warriors of Greek mythology who cut off their right breasts to better steady their bows, also lived in that area, supposedly near the Don River. And then there were the ferocious Taurians of the Crimea, a peninsula known to the Greeks as Taurica. Their princess, Iphigenia, showed no mercy to travelers unfortunate enough to seek refuge from Black Sea tempests on the mountainous shores of the Crimea. She sacrificed them to the goddess Artemis, who had saved her from the death sentence pronounced by her father, Agamemnon. Few wanted to travel to lands as dangerous as those bordering the “Hospitable Sea,” which was in fact very difficult to navigate and known for severe storms coming out of nowhere.

  The Greeks first heard of the lands and peoples north of the Black Sea from a nation of warriors called the Cimmerians, who appeared in Anatolia after the Scythians drove them out of the Pontic steppes in the eighth century BC. The nomadic Cimmerians moved first to the Caucasus and then south toward Asia Minor, encountering Mediterranean cultures with a long tradition of sedentary life and cultural accomplishment. There the nomadic warriors became known as quintessential barbarians, a reputation recorded in the Bible, where Jeremiah describes them as follows: “They are armed with bow and spear; they are cruel and show no mercy. They sound like the roaring sea as they ride on their horses; they come like men in battle formation to attack you.” The image of the Cimmerians as savage warriors also made its way into modern popular culture. Arnold Schwarzenegger played Conan the Barbarian—a fictional character invented in 1923 by the writer Robert E. Howard—as the king of Cimmeria in a 1982 Hollywood hit.

  The Crimea and the northern shores of the Black Sea became part of the Greek universe in the seventh and sixth centuries BC, after the Cimmerians were forced to leave their homeland. Greek colonies then began to spring up in the region, most of them founded by settlers from Miletus, one of the most powerful Greek states of the era. Sinope, founded by Miletians on the southern shore of the Black Sea, became a mother colony in its own right. Colonies on the northern shore included Panticapaeum near today’s city of Kerch, Theodosia on the site of present-day Feodosiia, and Chersonesus near the modern city of Sevastopol, all three in the Crimea. But by far the best-known Miletian colony was Olbia at the mouth of the Southern Buh (Boh) River, where it flows into the estuary of the even larger Dnieper, their combined waters emptying into the Black Sea. The city featured stone walls, an acropolis, and a temple to Apollo Delphinios. According to archeologists, Olbia covered more than 120 acres at its peak. As many as 10,000 people lived in the city, which adopted a democratic form of government and managed relations with its mother city of Miletus by treaty.

  Olbia’s prosperity, like the well-being of other Greek cities and emporia (trading places) in the region, depended on good relations with the local population of the Pontic steppes. At the time of the city’s founding and throughout its most prosperous period, the fifth and fourth centuries BC, the locals happened to be Scythians, a conglomerate of tribes of Iranian origin. The Greeks of Olbia and their neighbors not only lived side by side and engaged in commerce but also intermarried, giving rise to a large population of mixed Greek and “barbarian” blood whose customs combined Greek and local traditions. Olbia’s merchants and sailors shipped cereals, dried fish, and slaves to Miletus and other parts of Greece, bringing back wine, olive oil, and Greek artisanal wares, including textiles and metal products, to sell at local markets. There were also luxury items made of gold, as we know from excavations of burial mounds of Scythian kings. The steppes of southern Ukraine are full of such mounds, now largely reduced to small hills and known in Ukrainian as kurhany.

  By far the most impressive piece of so-called Scythian gold, a three-tier pectoral, was discovered in southern Ukraine in 1971 and can be seen today at the Ukrainian Museum of Historical Treasures in Kyiv. The pectoral, which probably dates from the fourth century BC and once decorated the chest of a Scythian king, offers a view of the inner workings of Scythian society and economy. At its center is a depiction of two kneeling bearded Scythian men who hold a sheepskin coat. Given the material of which the entire pectoral is made, this reminds one of the golden fleece of the Argonauts—a symbol of authority and kingship. To the right and left of the central scene are images of domesticated animals—horses, cows, sheep, and goats. There are also images of Scythian slaves, one milking a cow, another a ewe. The pectoral leaves little doubt that the Scythians lived in a male-dominated society of steppe warriors whose economy depended on animal husbandry.

  If the images of Scythians and domesticated animals take us inside the Scythian world, those of wild animals depicted on the pectoral tell us more about how the Greeks imagined the farthest frontier of their universe than about real life on the Pontic steppes. Lions and panthers pursue boars and deer, while winged griffins—the most powerful animals of Greek mythology, half eagles, half lions—attack horses, the animals most important to the Scythian way of life. The pectoral is an ideal symbol not only of Greek cultural transfer but also of the interaction of the Greek and Scythian worlds in the Pontic steppes.

  That intertwining of cultures allowed Herodotus to collect the kind of information about Scythian life that no archeological dig could provide. The founding myth of the Scythians certainly belongs to that category. “According to the account that the Scythians themselves give, they are the youngest of all nations,” stated Herodotus in his Histories, allegedly descended from a certain Targitaus, who had three sons. “While they still ruled the land, there fell from the sky four implements, all of gold—a plough, a yoke, a battle axe, and a drinking cup,” as Herodotus retold the Scythian founding myth. Two elder brothers tried to take the gifts from the sky, but they burst into flames, and only the youngest brother managed to take and keep them. He was immediately recognized as the supreme ruler of the realm and gave rise to the Scythian tribe known as Royal Scythians, who dominated the Pontic steppes and kept the gold that had fallen from the sky. The Scythians apparently saw themselves as an indigenous population. Otherwise, they would not have claimed that
the parents of their founder, Targitaus, were a sky god and a daughter of Borysthenes, known today as the Dnieper, the main river of the realm. The same myth suggests that although ruled by nomads, the Scythians also thought of themselves as agriculturalists. The tools given to them by heaven included not only a yoke but also a plow, a clear sign of sedentary culture.

  Indeed, Herodotus described the Scythians as divided into horsemen and agriculturalists, each group occupying its own ecological niche in the northern Black Sea region. On the Right Bank of the Dnieper, as viewed from a ship sailing southward, directly above the Greek colony of Olbia, from whose citizens and visitors Herodotus took most of his knowledge of the region, he identified a tribe called the Callipedae, probably descendants of Greek intermarriage with local Scythians. To the north, along the Dniester and north of the steppes controlled by the Royal Scythians, were the Alazonians, who “in other respects resemble the Scythians in their usages but sow and eat grain, also onions, garlic, lentils, and millet.” North of the Alazonians, on the Right Bank of the Dnieper, Herodotus located the Scythian plowmen, who produced corn for sale. On the Left Bank of the river, he placed the Scythian agriculturalists, or Borysthenites. He wrote that these tribes were quite different from the Scythians to the south, who inhabited the Pontic steppes.

  Herodotus found the lands along the Dnieper to be among the most productive in the world:

  The Borysthenes, the second-largest of the Scythian rivers, 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 River Nile—with which none can be compared. 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—whereas that of other rivers in the vicinity is turbid; no better crops grow anywhere than along its banks, and where grain is not sown, the grass is the most luxuriant in the world.

  An apt description indeed. The black soil of the Dnieper basin is still considered among the richest in the world, earning modern Ukraine the nickname “breadbasket of Europe.”

  The lands of the middle Dnieper, settled by agriculturalists, were not yet the end of Herodotus’s frontier. There also existed peoples to the north about whom not only the Greeks of the colonies but also Scythians of different walks of life knew little if anything. These peoples inhabited the ultimate frontier. On the Right Bank of the Dnieper, they were called Neuri; on the left, farther to the east and north, they were simply called Cannibals. Herodotus did not know much about them, but the location of the Neuri in the Prypiat marshes on today’s Ukrainian-Belarusian border coincides with one of the possible homelands of the ancient Slavs, where a cluster of some of the oldest Ukrainian dialects is to be found.

  If one trusts Herodotus and his sources, the Scythian kingdom was a conglomerate of ethnic groups and cultures in which geography and ecology determined the place of each group in the general structure of the polity and its division of labor. Greeks and Hellenized Scythians occupied the coast, serving as intermediaries between the Mediterranean world of Greece and the hinterland in terms of both trade and culture. The main products of trade—cereals and dried fish, as well as slaves—came from the parklands or mixed forest-steppe areas. To reach the Black Sea ports, those products, especially cereals and slaves, had to pass through the steppes inhabited by Royal Scythians, who controlled trade and kept most of the proceeds for themselves, leaving part of their golden treasure in the mounds of the region. The division that Herodotus described between coast, steppe, and forest would become one of the main divisions of Ukrainian history—lasting for centuries, if not millennia.

  The multilayered Scythian world depicted in the Histories came to an end in the third century BC. The Romans, who took control of the Greek colonies of the northern Black Sea region and extended protection to them in the first century BC, had to deal with different masters of the steppes.

  A new wave of nomads from the east, the Sarmatians, defeated, pushed aside, and eventually replaced the Scythian horsemen, who controlled the trade routes between the agricultural regions and the Greek colonies. These newcomers, like the Scythians, were of Iranian stock. Herodotus, who located them east of the Don River, recorded a legend according to which they were descended from the Scythians and Amazon women who escaped Greek captivity. Like the Scythians, the Sarmatians included different tribes and ruled over a variety of peoples, including the Roxolani, Alani, and Iazyges. The Sarmatians ruled the Pontic steppes for half a millennium, until the fourth century AD. At the height of their power, they controlled the whole area from the Volga in the east to the Danube in the west and penetrated central Europe all the way to the Vistula.

  The Sarmatians were no less intimidating a power in the region than the Scythians had been, but we know much less about them. This is mainly because the trade between the Greek colonies and the Ukrainian hinterland (and, with it, the flow of information) that had flourished under the Scythians came almost to a halt under the Sarmatians. They drove the Scythians into the Crimea, where the former rulers of the realm created a new kingdom known as Scythia Minor. The Scythians controlled the peninsula and the steppes immediately to its north, including the Greek colonies. The Sarmatians held the rest of the Pontic steppe but had no access to the colonies. The Scythians, for their part, lost control over the steppe and the hinterland. The conflict between the new and old masters of the steppes undermined local trade and prosperity and, in time, the security of the Greek colonies (the Scythians and other nomads demanded money and goods from the colonists, whether trade was flourishing or not). Another equally powerful factor reducing commerce was the appearance of new suppliers of agricultural produce to the Mediterranean markets. Grain was now coming to the Aegean and Ionian shores from Egypt and the Middle East along trade routes secured by the conquests of Alexander the Great and the rise of the Roman Empire.

  When the Romans extended their reach to the northern shores of the Black Sea in the first century BC, they revived some of the former commerce by providing the Greek colonies now under their tutelage with a degree of security, but that proved an uphill battle at best. Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), who was exiled by Emperor Augustus in 8 AD to a place called Tomis on the Black Sea shore of present-day Romania and died there ten years later, left us a vivid description of the dangers of everyday life in a Greek maritime colony at the turn of the first millennium AD:

  Innumerable tribes round about threaten fierce war,

  and think it’s a disgrace to exist without pillage.

  Nowhere’s safe outside: the hill itself’s defended

  by fragile walls, and the ingenuity of its siting. . . .

  We’re scarcely protected by the fortress’s shelter: and even

  the barbarous crowd inside, mixed with Greeks, inspires fear,

  for the barbarians live amongst us, without discrimination,

  and also occupy more than half the houses.

  This sorry state of affairs, caused by hostile relations with “barbarian” neighbors and a lack of security, could not but reflect poorly on the state of the once prosperous colonies of the region. Dio Chrysostom, a Greek orator and philosopher who claimed to have visited the city of Olbia (known to the outsiders of his age as Borysthenes) at the end of the first century AD, left a vivid account of a colony in decline:

  The city of Borysthenes, 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. . . . For that reason the fortunes of the Greeks in that region reached a very low ebb indeed, some of them being no longer united to form cities, while others enjoyed but a wretched existence as communities, and it was mostly barbarians who flocked to them.

  Such was the state of the Greek co
lonies more than a century after the arrival of the Romans. The region never recovered the prosperity, trade, and links with the hinterland that it had enjoyed in the days of Herodotus. Constantly at war or in fear of war with the local population, the colonists knew little about their neighbors. “The Bosphorus, Don, the Scythian marshes lie beyond it,” wrote Ovid, looking north and east from his exile in Tomis, “a handful of names in a region scarcely known. Further there’s nothing but uninhabitable cold. Ah, how near I am to the ends of the earth!”

  Ovid’s contemporary Strabo, author of the acclaimed Geographies, knew more about the Pontic steppe than did the famous Roman exile. From Strabo we learn the names of the Sarmatian tribes and the areas under their control. According to him, the Iazyges and Roxolani were “wagon dwellers,” or nomads, but the famous geographer gives us literally nothing about the sedentary population of the forest-steppe areas around the Dnieper, not to mention the wooded areas farther to the north. Unlike Ovid, however, he did not live among the peoples of the region; nor were his sources as good as those of Herodotus. They knew nothing about the “northerners,” and Strabo complained about the ignorance that prevailed “in regard to the rest of the peoples that come next in order in the north; for I know neither the Bastarnae, nor the Sauromatae, nor, in a word, any of the peoples who dwell above the Pontus, nor how far distant they are from the Atlantic Sea, nor whether their countries border upon it.”

  Strabo’s informants came from one of the colonies, but if Herodotus made numerous references to the Dnieper, Strabo seemed more familiar with the Don. His sources likely came from Tanais, a Greek colony at the mouth of the Don that belonged to the Bosporan Kingdom, the most powerful union of Greek colonies revived with the arrival of the Romans. For Strabo, the Don had a special meaning. It served as the easternmost boundary of Europe, the term used in the Aegean homeland to describe the expanse of the Greek presence in the outer world. Europe lay to the west of the Don, while Asia began to the east of it.