Black Sea (11 page)

Why does Herodotus admire this? Here his whole literary operation deftly twists on itself. He admires Scythian strategy because it defeated the Persians. Darius I of Persia, later the invader of Greece, entered Europe for the first time in
5
12 BC on a punitive expedition against the Scythians. He bridged the Bosporus, then the Danube and then (according to Herodotus) marched across the whole northern shore of the Black Sea as far as the river Don in a vain attempt to bring the enemy to battle and conquer them. Frustrated, he was eventually obliged to retreat and leave the Scythians undefeated.

So the Scythians, who in so many ways have to be presented as the polar opposites of the Athenians, are suddenly in some ways like them - they too have beaten the Persians. Not only that, but they have done so by behaving as the Athenians would later behave, according to Herodotus' description of the Persian Wars: the

Athenians overcame the invaders not by trying to defend their territory but by taking to the sea in ships and becoming
aporoi.

In the last few years, an exhilarating new pseudo-science has arisen called nomadology. The human race, say its exponents, is entering a new epoch of movement and migration, a
Volker-wanderung
which this time involves not merely Eurasia but the entire world. The subjects of history, once the settled farmers and citizens, have now become the migrants, the refugees, the
Gastarbeiter,
the asylum-seekers, the urban homeless.

Professor Edward Said, in his Lothian Lecture in Edinburgh in 1992, argued that the torch of liberation has been handed on from the settled cultures to 'unhoused, de-centred, exilic energies .. . whose incarnation is the migrant'. The Polish artist Krzystof Wodiczko, who has drawn many ideas from the 1980 'Traité de Nomadologie' by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, perceives how the hordes of the displaced now occupy the public space of cities -squares, parks or railway station concourses which were once designed by a triumphant middle class to celebrate the conquest of its new political rights and economic liberties. Wodiczko thinks that these occupied public spaces form new
agoras
(the paved assembly-square in the midst of a Greek
polis)
which should be used for statements. 'The artist . .. needs to learn how to operate as a nomadic sophist in a migrant
polis.'
And he has designed for the displaced a series of strange vehicles for shelter, mobility and communication which sharply — if unintentionally — recall what struck Herodotus about the Scythian nomads and their
aporia.
His 'Poliscar', for instance, has ancestry in the supermarket trolley and even more obviously in the battle tank. But it is also a Scythian wagon, a moving home for those who have no centre but who roam endlessly up and down the public spaces, the concrete urban steppe.

The critic Patrick Wright, a friend of Wodiczko, acknowledges the Poliscar's descent from the tank. He identifies its intellectual godfathers in very diverse thinkers about the tank's mobility, from General J. F. C. Fuller, father of modern armoured warfare, to the French sociologist of speed Paul Virilio. But he writes that 'as a "nomadic war machine" [the Poliscar] is devoted to survival, intelligence and the avoidance of engagement rather than to battle itself . . . closer to the hunted animal that learns to co-exist with enemies than to the hunter who goes out in search of prey ... an instrument of "manoeuvre" as opposed to "battle", of mobility and sudden disappearance and reappearance, of intelligence rather than brutal and unstoppable advance.'

Here, precisely, is that 'hunted who becomes the hunter' which Franqois Hartog perceives in Herodotus' account of the Scythians. Here is that technique through which the weak become stronger than their oppressors: by scattering, by becoming centreless, by moving fast across space, by all that is nomadism. It was once the ranked, slow-marching foot army of King Darius of Persia which was outmanoeuvred by the Scythians. Now, for Wodiczko, it is the New York Police Department forming up against the homeless dossers on the pavements around Tompkins Square Park which will be outrun and baffled by his Poliscars. Tomorrow it will be the turn of the customs officers and frontier guards of the European Union to be outwitted and 'hunted' by ten million illegal, inaccessible, fast-moving,
aporoi
immigrants.

Not long ago, a magnificent gold signet ring was picked up near the old Greek colony of Istria, at the mouth of the Danube. It carried the image of an unknown goddess with a diadem on her pony-tailed hair, looking at herself in a mirror, and it was engraved with the name
skyleo.

This was one of those rare moments in archaeology when something lost and found could be traced to its owner. Scyles, or Scylos, is the man at the centre of a story told by Herodotus. This story is about a different and more ominous kind of
aporia,
about the invisible frontier between ways of life and the inaccessibility of one culture to another.

Scyles was a Scythian prince who became dazzled by the Greek city of Olbia. He became two people. Outside the city walls he was a steppe ruler who commanded a complex traditional society with its wagons and herds and rituals. But within the city walls he became a Greek. Scyles kept a Greek wife in Olbia, and on entering the gates would change his nomad dress for loose Hellenic robes. According to Herodotus, he built an elaborate palace in the town (although no such palace has been found: the private houses of Olbia, as opposed to the huge municipal buildings and temples, are modest one-story structures without much decoration).

One day, a group of Scythians contrived to peer over the walls into Olbia at the time of the festival of Dionysian mysteries. There they saw Scyles dressed in the regalia of the Dionysian order, reeling through the streets at the head of the sacred procession. To them, or rather to Herodotus reconstructing their reactions, this sight meant that Scyles had crossed an uncrossable frontier: by consenting to become a Dionysian initiate, he had betrayed Scythian identity and become a Greek. When they brought the news home, Scyles' brother assumed power in his place, and Scyles took flight. Heading south-west, he sought asylum with the Thracians who lived on the other bank of the Danube, where it formed a border with the Scythian domains. But the Scythians already held a Thracian prince as hostage, and the Thracians agreed to hand back Scyles in exchange. On the banks of the river, near Istria, Scyles was put to death by his own brother.

The golden ring pretty certainly belonged to Scyles. But it was a stray find. Whether he gave it away before his death, or whether it was wrenched off the fingers of his corpse at the time of his execution or robbed much later from his grave, is not to be known.

Scyles perished because he tried, and failed, to inhabit two separate worlds simultaneously and refused to choose between them. He might have survived if he had openly declared himself a Hellene and stayed in Olbia, or if he had led a Scythian army through the city's gates to burn and plunder it, or if he had merely absorbed Greek ideas in order to 'modernise' Scythia. In that third case, he would have been a candidate for heroic status, precisely in the sense of H. M. Chadwick's theory put forward eighty years ago in
The Heroic Age.

Chadwick thought that the contact between a 'high civilisation' and a 'tribal' society (or between 'centre' and 'periphery') often produced a mutation in the less advanced culture. The traditional chieftain, exposed to 'increased opportunities of trade, travel and the gathering of wealth', might be tempted to escape from the restraining web of traditional custom and obligation and make himself into a new type of leader: a lawless, ruthless voyaging soldier and conqueror who mounted military expeditions with his own band of warrior-companions. Finn MacCumhal with his Fenians, or a Nordic hero with his loyal spear-gang, was for Chadwick an example of this heroic mutation at the periphery which substituted 'bonds of allegiance' for bonds of kinship and custom. And yet Scyles, offered all those 'increased opportunities' at exactly such a moment of cultural contact, displayed not the slightest impulse to take to the road as a muscular gang-leader. Chadwick's theory, taken crudely, might predict that Scyles' inner barbaric nature would hurl itself towards the new horizons opened to him in Olbia. But Scyles, shown two contrasting modes of life, wanted them both to continue as they were and to participate entirely in both of them. Scyles is a hostile witness both against ancient theories of 'barbarism' and against more modern theories about the subservience of 'peripheries' to 'centres'. He resembles, quite closely, certain Highland chieftains of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scotland who lived double lives: polished gentlemen in Edinburgh and (later) London, and at the same time traditional leaders of a customary Gaelic society at home. Macleod of Raasay and 'young Coll' Maclean, encountered by Samuel Johnson and James Boswell on their Hebridean tour in 1773, seemed to have achieved this equipoise in dualism.

But the Scottish Gaeltacht was already in the early stages of dissolution, and within a few decades such a balance was becoming impossible to maintain as the traditional leaders of Highland society surrendered to the temptations and pressures of the central culture and began to exploit their dependents as a source of cash. Only half a century after Dr Johnson's tour to the Hebrides, the Clearances had begun to remove the Highland tenantry and replace them with sheep; by 1820, few clan chiefs retained a command of fluent Gaelic, and their use of Highland clothing and custom amounted to little more than fancy dress. Scythia, on the other hand, survived for nearly five hundred years after the fate of Scyles.

The tale of Scyles is very much a Black Sea story. It is not only about the encounter with the new, but also about the distance between worlds. This distance may be cultural, a frontier in the mind, or it may be physical. The point is that a person cannot be two persons at once, but by traversing such a distance between cultures becomes at the end of the journey a different person. Anthony Pagden, in his book
European Encounters with the New World,
suggests that the very length of the sea journey from Europe to the Americas, the experience of months spent in fear and privation on the enormous water-desert of the Atlantic, gave to the first Spanish colonists a sense of having moved from one universe to an entirely 'other' one in which old expectations and moralities no longer applied. The return journey could be made, eventually, but the traveller could no longer disembark at Cadiz or Barcelona as the same individual who had departed years before. Antonio de Ulloa spoke of the eighteenth-century 'Indies' as 'another world'. William of Rubruck, a monk who made his way to the centre of the Mongol-Tatar empire in the thirteenth century, thought after his first encounter with Golden Horde nomads in the Don steppe that i was come into a new world'.

The Greeks who reached the northern shores of the Black Sea also felt that they had crossed between worlds. They probably made the voyage by daily stages, coasting between anchorages rather than heading straight across the open sea. But the Mediterranean had not prepared them for the ferocity of Black Sea weather, for its violent offshore squalls or blizzards or winter ice, and the Sea appeared to them as a hostile void — a black hole in time and space — in contrast to the familiar Aegean with its shoals of islands. And when they arrived and struggled ashore, they found themselves perched on the edge of another sea: the steppe.

Near the modern town of Kherson, on the lower Dnieper, there is a place called Askania Nova. 'Askania' is a fanciful nineteenth-century antiquarian's term for Prussia, and here, before the Russian Revolution, an aristocratic German landowner established a nature reserve to protect for future generations an enclosure of the ancient, unexploited steppe with its herbs and grasses and birds.

He was a wise baron. Today, almost nothing whatever remains of the old Ukrainian and south Russian steppe which was the world of the Scythians and Sarmatians and of all the pastoral nomads who followed them, and which survived intact in many regions into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Pontic Steppe, one of the formative environments of Eurasia, has been devoured by the tractor, leaving only a gigantic flatness of ploughland divided by lines of silver poplars which run beside the roads from horizon to horizon.

Even Askania Nova, the last remnant, is now in danger. Collective farms around its perimeter are putting sheep and pigs into it; a nearby canal is draining the water table; low-flying aircraft from a military base scare its creatures; there have been devastating fires. The orderly, tranquil days when a scientific staff looked after the reserve and welcomed school parties from Odessa and Kherson and Nikolaev are long gone. It is the story of Olbia over again: no more state money to pay wardens, no petrol for the coaches to bring visitors, no defence against spreading poverty and lawlessness in which each community grabs what it can.