The history of the Greek cities of the Black Sea is usually written in terms of the spread of Greek life and culture in the region, and there is some truth in such reconstructions. Cities such as Herakleia Pontike, Sinope, and Olbia proudly affirmed their ‘‘Greek-ness’’ by working their foundations into Panhellenic saga, maintaining close ties with their metropoleis, patronizing the Delphic oracle, celebrating their military triumphs at Olympia, and keeping abreast of cultural developments in the Aegean. Such Helle-nocentric accounts, however, ignore an equally important truth: these cities formed a thin fringe on the edges of a vast ‘‘barbarian’’ world. Although a few cities such as Herakleia Pontike succeeded in dominating their non-Greek neighbors, most were not so fortunate and had to find accommodations with their ‘‘barbarian’’ neighbors, trading and intermarrying with them and sometimes even seeking their protection in order to survive. The negotiation and renegotiation of these accommodations is central to the history of the Greek cities of the Black Sea, especially during the fifth and fourth centuries, when they assumed the form that they would maintain for the rest of antiquity.
During the sixth century the cities had grown and prospered, building their first stone temples and expanding and settling their choras. Olbia, for example, founded over a hundred subsidiary agricultural settlements in its chora in the lower reaches of the Dnieper and Bug Rivers. The good times ended, however, in the first third of the fifth century. Although literary evidence is lacking, evidence of the change is clear in the archaeology of the cities. The situation is clearest at Olbia, where the city acquired new defensive walls at the same time that virtually all the settlements in its chora were abandoned. New walls and evidence of widespread destruction have also been found at Istria in levels dated about 500 by the excavators. Finally, there are remains of an extensive system of fortifications intended to defend the cities of the Kerch peninsula dating to this period. Russian and Ukrainian scholars explain these development by the efforts of powerful non-Greek states located in the hinterlands of the Black Sea - those of the Odrysian Thracians in the Balkans and the ‘‘Royal Scythians’’ in the Ukraine - to extend their control over the Greek cities on their coasts, and their view is supported by the character and extent of the changes (Vinogradov 1997c: 20-1).
For much of the late sixth century the Persian Empire had protected the Greek cities of the south and west coasts of the Black Sea, albeit at the price of their paying tribute and providing troops for Persian military campaigns. Unsuccessful efforts by Kyros the Great (c. 530) and Dareios I (c. 513) to extend Persian power north of the Black Sea were followed by withdrawal of Persia from the region in the wake of the defeat of Xerxes’ invasion of Greece in 480/79 and its aftermath. In northern Anatolia the result was political fragmentation as various local populations vied for control of the coast and its hinterlands, while elsewhere the Odrysians and Scythians hastened to fill the vacuum created by the collapse of Persian power. Herodotos (4.80) refers to hostilities - probably in the 470s - between the Thracians and Scythians near Olbia that ended with the mutual surrender of rival claimants to the thrones of the two peoples and recognition of the Danube as the boundaries between their kingdoms, thereby freeing them to turn their attention to the Greek cities of the coasts of Thrace and Scythia.
The cities’ responses to the changed political environment of the Black Sea varied according to the peculiarities of their local situation. The lack of a dominant nonGreek power in northern Anatolia to replace the Persians encouraged the cities there to try to expand their influence over their neighbors. First to take advantage of these possibilities was Herakleia Pontike. Founded about 560 by colonists from Megara and Boiotia near the mouth of the Lykos River about 150 km east of the Bosporos, Herakleia had co-existed uneasily with the natives of the region - a people of probably Thracian origin called the Mariandynoi - for most of the first century of its existence, recognizing Persian suzerainty and possibly even participating in Xerxes’ ill-fated Greek campaign.
The weakening of Persian power in the area, however, freed the city to turn on the Mariandynoi, and by the second half of the fifth century at the latest, Herakleia had conquered its neighbors, a victory it celebrated with a monument in Olympia. Following their victory, the Herakleotes reduced their new subjects to a form of agricultural servitude that reminded other Greeks of the condition of Sparta’s helots and the Thessalian penestai. Henceforth the Mariandynoi were bound to the soil as hereditary tenants protected only by the guarantee that they would not be sold out of their homeland.
The conquest of the Mariandynoi enriched Herakleia and provided the city with a strong foundation for future economic growth. References by Aristotle and other sources to demands for redistribution of land, conflicts between ‘‘oligarchs’’ and ‘‘democrats,’’ and a short-lived tyranny by an otherwise unknown Euopios suggest, however, that it was Herakleia’s aristocracy that had profited most from the city’s victory. The result was stasis and political instability that probably contributed to the city’s decision to colonize outside its chora, first in the late 420s when it founded Chersonesos near modern Sevastopol in the southwestern Crimea, and again in the early fourth century when it founded Kallatis on the site of modern Mangalia in the Dobruja (Graham 1994: 6). Equally important, domination of Mariandynia provided Herakleia with an extensive labor force to work the citizens’ estates and numerous rowers to man its fleet, making it the most powerful of the cities of northern Anatolia.
The situation was more complex east of Herakleia. Sinope was the principal city on the Paphlagonian coast. Founded by Miletos in the second half of the seventh century, Sinope had flourished, founding a series of colonies of her own further east on land seized from the Paphlagonians, including Kotyora, Kerasous, and, most importantly, Trapezous. Not surprisingly, relations between Sinope and her colonies and the Paphlagonians were tense throughout the city’s history. Xenophon (Anabasis 5.5.7-12) reveals that by the end of the fifth century Sinope had been able to exploit that tension and bind her colonies tightly to her, forcing them to accept Sinopean harmosts and pay tribute to Sinope. Epigraphic and archaeological evidence indicates Sinope’s influence was not limited to northern Anatolia but that the city established economic and political ties with the cities of the north and west coasts of the Black Sea, most notably with Olbia, where Sinopean pottery and decrees honoring Sinopeans and granting special trading privileges have been found. At the same time, the presence of a tyranny at Sinope in the 430s suggests that the city had experienced internal tensions similar to those documented at Herakleia Pontike and elsewhere in the Black Sea.
Significantly different from the experience of Herakleia Pontike and Sinope was that of the cities of Colchis - modern Georgia - at the eastern end of the Black Sea. Unlike their kinsmen to the west, whose neighbors were small-scale polities capable of being conquered as Herakleia had done or held at bay as was the case at Sinope, the Colchian Greek cities had been founded on the coast of rich states with a long tradition of urbanism and close ties with the various empires of their hinterlands, such as Urartu, Assyria, and, of course, Persia.
Three cities are mentioned in the sources as founded in this remote area - Dios-kourias, Gyenos, and Phasis - while archaeology has added two more, whose ancient names are still unknown, one at the important site of Pitchvnari and another nearby at Tsikhisdziri. The sources suggest, therefore, that the Colchian Greek cities were virtual dependencies of the various kingdoms of the interior, whose precarious survival depended on their usefulness as commercial gateways to the outside world; Phasis is even described as an emporion - a market - for the Colchians. Although the
Earliest written sources for the Colchian cities date to the fourth century, archaeological evidence indicates Greek activity in the region began as early as the sixth century. Excavations at Pitchvnari and interior sites such as Vani indicate that by the late fifth century there was an unusually high degree of intermingling of Colchian and Greek traditions in the region, so ‘‘that the culture of the gymnasium coexisted at Pitchvnari with a local culture exemplified by its tools, wares, and dwellings’’; while ‘‘deep in the hinterland, at least some of the elite sported an identity that was both Colchian and Greek’’ (Braund 1994: 116, 118).
The central theme of the history of the west coast of the Black Sea in the fifth century was the emergence of the Odrysian Thracians as the dominant power in the region. Freed from Persian suzerainty, the Odrysian kings rapidly expanded their power in the Balkans. The details of the process are unknown, but Thucydides (2.96-7) describes their empire in the 420s as extending over the whole of the eastern Balkans from the Propontis to the Danube and including both the tribes of the interior and the Greek cities of the Black Sea coast, all of whom paid tribute to the Odrysian high king. The amount of their tribute is unknown, but it is likely to have been substantial since Thucydides says that Sitalkes realized an income of four hundred talents a year in gold and silver, a sum almost comparable to that of the Athenian empire at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. Although evidence concerning relations between the Greek cities and their Odrysian suzerains is lacking, it is likely that, just as would be the case in the Hellenistic Period, the burden of their tribute was offset by the protection afforded them against raids on their choras by neighboring tribes and increased trading opportunities with the peoples of the interior.
For the cities of the coasts of the Ukraine and the Crimean and Taman peninsulas, the central fact of the early fifth century was the pressure put on them by the kingdom of the Royal Scythians, which dominated the steppes north of the Black Sea. As elsewhere in the Black Sea, the responses of the south Russian cities to the new situation were not uniform. The evidence is fullest for Olbia (Vinogradov and KryZikij 1995: 130-4). In a famous passage of his fourth book Herodotos (4.78-9) tells the pathetic story of the Scythian king Skyles, who resided in Olbia for half of the year in a Greek-style palace with his Olbian wife, until his nobles learned of his participation in the rites of Dionysos and assassinated him. Herodotos’ purpose in telling the story of Skyles is to illustrate the Scythians’ hostility to foreign customs. The fact that Skyles had a Greek wife and regularly spent part of the year in Olbia, however, suggests that the Olbian aristocracy had recognized Scythian authority in return for a privileged position for the city in the kingdom, perhaps as one of the royal residences where the kings would stay during their annual migrations throughout their vast territories.
Olbia’s function as a royal residence probably ended with the death of Skyles but not the city’s subjection to the Scythians. Initially the Scythians ruled through the agency of Greek tyrants who governed the city in the interests of their Scythian masters, such as the Tymnes who Herodotos says was epitropos of Olbia for Skyles’ predecessor Ariapeithes, or a certain Pausanias who held the eponymous office of aisymnetes of the Molpoi, suggesting that as elsewhere Olbia’s tyrants governed by manipulating rather than suppressing the city’s polis institutions. Thereafter, however, Olbian coins with non-Greek names such as Arichos and Eminakos suggest that the Scythians replaced their Greek puppet tyrants and imposed their own administrators on the city. But whatever the modalities of Scythian rule, the evidence for substantial public building, including a new temple for Apollo Delphinios, suggests that Olbia prospered during much of the fifth century thanks to Scythian protection and her function as the primary center for the export of the products of the Scythians’ steppe subjects and the provision of Greek manufactured goods to the peoples of the interior.
The most original response to the rise of Scythian power, however, was that of the cities bordering the Straits of Kerch at the entrance to the Sea of Azov, which united in a military alliance led by the Milesian colony of Pantikapaion about 480/79 (Vinogradov 1997c: 21). Unfortunately, the sole evidence for this important development is provided by a brief note that the historian Diodoros (12.31) entered under the year 438/7: ‘‘In Asia the dynasty of the Kimmerian Bosporos, whose kings were known as the Arch-aianaktidai, ruled for forty-two years: and the successor to the kingship was Spartokos, who reigned seven years (438/7-432/1).’’ It has long been recognized that this note taken from Diodoros’ chronological source anachronistically treats the founders of the Bosporan state as kings, a status they first acquired in the Hellenistic Period. Although scholarship is divided as to whether the origin ofthe Archaianaktidai should be sought in Mytilene or Miletos, it is agreed that their rule took the archaic form ofthe collective rule of an aristocratic lineage like the Korinthian Bakchiads that monopolized key political and military offices, and not a simple tyranny. Information about the internal organization of the Archaianaktid state is lacking, but the existence of coins minted by Phanagor-eia suggests that it was organized as a loose alliance rather than an integrated territorial state. Its extent is also unknown, but the fact that the cities of Nymphaion (south) and Theodosia (west) of Pantikapaion remained independent throughout the fifth century points to its initially being limited to a few cities on either side of the Straits of Kerch, most probably including Pantikapaion, Hermonassa, Kepoi, and, possibly, Phanagoreia. Finally, while the manner in which the rule of the Archaianaktidai came to an end is unknown, the fact that their successors bear Thracian names such as Spartokos and Pairisades, well attested among members of the Odrysian dynasty, suggests that the new dynasty was Thracian in origin, possibly being descendants of the leaders of Thracian military units, who originally came to Pantikapaion as allies against the Scythians.
World History
