Chapter VII · (continued 2)

Under Roman protection.All these settlements enjoyed Roman protection, after the Romans had become generally the leading power on the Graeco–Asiatic continent; and the strong arm, which often came down heavily on the Hellenic land proper, prevented here at least disasters like the destruction of Lysimachia. The protection of these Greeks devolved in the republican period partly on the governor of Macedonia, partly on the governor of Bithynia, after this became Roman; Byzantium subsequently remained with Bithynia.203 We may add that in the imperial period, after the erection of the governorship of Moesia and subsequently of that of Thrace, the supplying of protection devolved on these.

Protection and favour were granted by Rome to these Greeks from the first; but neither the republic nor the earlier imperial period made efforts for the extension of Hellenism.204 After Thrace had become Roman, it was divided into land–districts;205 and almost down to the end of the first century there is no record of the laying out of a town there, with the exception of two colonies of Claudius and Vespasian—Apri in the interior not far from Perinthus, and Deultus on the most northern coast.206 Philippopolis and other towns with civic rights. Domitian began by introducing the Greek urban constitution into the interior, at first for the capital of the country, Philippopolis. Under Trajan a series of other Thracian townships obtained like civic rights; Topirus not far from Abdera, Nicopolis on the Nestus, Plotinopolis on the Hebrus, Pautalia near Köstendil, Serdica now Sofia, Augusta Traiana near Alt–Zagora, a second Nicopolis on the northern slope of Haemus,207 besides, on the coast, Traianopolis at the mouth of the Hebrus; further, under Hadrian Adrianopolis, the modern Adrianople. All these towns were not colonies of foreigners but polities of Greek organisation, composed after the model set up by Augustus in the Epirot Nicopolis; it was a civilising and Hellenising of the province from above downwards. A Thracian diet existed thenceforth in Philippopolis just as in the properly Greek provinces. This last offshoot of Hellenism was not the weakest. The country was rich and charming—a coin of the town Pautalia praises the fourfold blessing of the ears of grain, of the grapes, of the silver, and of the gold; and Philippopolis as well as the beautiful valley of the Tundja were the home of rose–culture and of rose–oil—and the vigour of the Thracian type was not broken. Here was developed a dense and prosperous population; we have already mentioned the largeness of the levy in Thrace, and few territories stand on an equality with Thrace at this epoch in the activity of the urban mints. When Philippopolis succumbed in the year 251 to the Goths (p. 240), it is said to have numbered 100,000 inhabitants. The energetic part taken by the Byzantines in favour of the emperor of the Greek East, Pescennius Niger, and the several years’ resistance which the town even after his defeat opposed to the victor, show the resources and the courage of these Thracian townsmen. If the Byzantines here, too, succumbed and lost even for a season their civic rights, the time, for which the rise of the Thracian land paved the way, was soon to set in, when Byzantium should become the new Hellenic Rome and the chief capital of the remodelled empire.

Lower Moesia.In the neighbouring province of lower Moesia a similar development took place, although on a smaller scale. The Greek coast–towns, the metropolis of which, at least in the Roman period, was Tomis, were, probably on the constituting of the Roman province of Moesia, grouped as the “Five–cities–league of the left shore of the Black Sea,” or as it was also called, “of the Greeks,” that is, the Greeks of this province.Tomis and the Pontic Pentapolis.Later there was annexed to this league, as a sixth town, that of Marcianopolis, constructed by Trajan not far from the coast on the Thracian frontier, and organised, like the Thracian towns, after the Greek model.208 We have already observed that the camp–towns on the bank of the Danube, and generally the townships called into life by Rome in the interior, were instituted after the Italian model; lower Moesia was the only Roman province intersected by the linguistic boundary, inasmuch as the Tomitanian cities–league belonged to the Greek, the Danubian towns, like Durostorum and Oescus to the Latin, linguistic domain. In other respects essentially the same holds true of this Moesian cities–league, as was remarked regarding Thrace. We have a description of Tomis from the last years of Augustus, doubtless by one banished thither for punishment, but certainly true in substance. The population consists for the greater part of Getae and Sarmatae; they wear, like the Dacians on Trajan’s column, skins and trousers, long waving hair and unshorn beard, and appear in the street on horseback and armed with the bow, with the quiver on their shoulder, and the knife in their girdle. The few Greeks who are found among them have adopted the barbarian customs, including the trousers, and are able to express themselves as well or better in Getic than in Greek; he is lost, who cannot make himself intelligible in Getic, and no man understands a word of Latin. Before the gates rove predatory bands of the most various peoples, and their arrows not seldom fly over the protecting city–walls; he who ventures to till his field does it at the peril of his life, and ploughs in armour—at anyrate about the time of Caesar’s dictatorship; on occasion of the raid of Burebista, the town had fallen into the hands of the barbarians, and a few years before that exile came to Tomis, during the Dalmato–Pannonian insurrection, the fury of war had once more raged over this region. The coins and the inscriptions of that city accord well with these accounts, in so far as the metropolis of the “left–Pontic cities–league” in the pre–Roman period coined no silver, which several other of these towns did; and, in general, coins and inscriptions from the time before Trajan occur only in an isolated way. But in the second and third centuries it was remodelled and may be termed a foundation of Trajan with very much the same warrant as Marcianopolis, which likewise quickly attained to considerable development. The barrier formerly mentioned (p. 227) in the Dobrudscha served at the same time as a protecting wall for the town of Tomis. Behind this wall commerce and navigation were flourishing. There was in the town a society of Alexandrian merchants with its own chapel of Serapis;209 in municipal liberality and municipal ambition the town was inferior to no Greek town of middle size; it was still even now bilingual, but in such a way that, alongside of the Greek language always retained on the coins, here on the border, where the two languages of the empire came into contact, the Latin is also often employed even in public monuments.

Tyra.Beyond the imperial frontier, between the mouths of the Danube and the Crimea, the Greek merchant had made few settlements on the coast; there were here only two Greek towns of note, both founded in remote times by Miletus, Tyra at the mouth of the river of the same name, the modern Dniester, and Olbia on the bay into which the Borysthenes (Dnieper) and the Hypanis (Bug) fall. The forlorn position of these Hellenes amidst the barbarians pressing around them, in the time of the Diadochi as well as during the earlier rule of the Roman republic, has already been described (iii. 297)iii. 282.. The emperors brought help. In the year 56, that is, in the exemplary beginning of Nero’s government, Tyra was annexed to the province of Moesia.Olbia.Of the more remote Olbia we possess a description from the age of Trajan;210 the town was still bleeding from its old wounds; the wretched walls enclosed equally wretched houses, and the quarter then inhabited filled but a small portion of the old considerable city–circuit, of which individual towers that were left stood far off in the desolate plain; in the temples there was no statue of the gods which did not bear traces of the hands of the barbarians; the inhabitants had not forgotten their Hellenic character, but they dressed and fought after the manner of the Scythians, with whom they were daily in conflict. Just as often as by Greek names, they designated themselves by Scythian, i.e. by those of Sarmatian stocks akin to the Iranians;211 in fact, in the royal house itself Sauromates was a common name. These towns were indebted doubtless for their very continued existence less to their own power than to the good–will or rather the self–interest of the natives. The tribes settled on this coast were neither in a position to carry on foreign trade from emporia of their own, nor could they dispense with it; in the Hellenic coast–towns they bought salt, articles of clothing and wine, and the more civilised princes protected in some measure the strangers against the attacks of the barbarians proper. The earlier rulers of Rome must have had scruples at undertaking the difficult protection of this remote settlement; nevertheless Pius, when the Scythians once more besieged them, sent to them Roman auxiliary troops, and compelled the barbarians to offer peace and furnish hostages. The town must have been incorporated directly with the empire by Severus, from whom onward Olbia struck coins with the image of the Roman rulers. As a matter of course this annexation extended only to the town–territories themselves, and it never was intended to bring the barbarian dwellers around Tyra and Olbia under the Roman sceptre. It has already been remarked (p. 239) that these towns were the first which, presumably under Alexander († 235), succumbed to the incipient Gothic invasion.

Bosporus.If the Greeks had but sparingly settled on the mainland to the north of the Black Sea, the great peninsula projecting from this coast, the Tauric Chersonesus—the modern Crimea—had for long been in great part in their hands. Separated by the mountains, which the Taurians occupied, the two centres of the Greek settlement upon it were, at the western end the Doric free town of Heraclea or Chersonesus (Sebastopol), at the eastern the principality of Panticapaeum or Bosporus (Kertch). King Mithradates had at the summit of his power united the two, and here established for himself a second northern empire (iii. 298), which then, after the collapse of his power, was left as the only remnant of it to his son and murderer Pharnaces. When the latter, after the war between Caesar and Pompeius, attempted to regain his father’s dominion in Asia Minor, Caesar had vanquished him (iv. 439), and declared him to have forfeited also the Bosporan empire. Asander. In the meanwhile Asander, the governor left there by Pharnaces, had renounced allegiance to the king in the hope of acquiring the kingdom for himself by this service rendered to Caesar. When Pharnaces after his defeat returned to his Bosporan kingdom, he at first indeed repossessed himself of his capital, but ultimately was worsted, and fell bravely fighting in the last battle—as a soldier at least, not unequal to his father. The succession was contested between Asander, who was in fact master of the land, and Mithradates of Pergamus, an able officer of Caesar, whom the latter had invested with the Bosporan principality; both sought at the same time to lean for support on the dynasty heretofore ruling in the Bosporus and on the great Mithradates, inasmuch as Asander married Dynamis, the daughter of Pharnaces, while Mithradates, sprung from a Pergamene burgess–family, asserted that he was an illegitimate son of the great Mithradates Eupator—whether it was that this rumour determined the selection, or that it was put into circulation in order to justify it. As Caesar himself was called in the first instance to attend to more important tasks, arms decided between the legitimate and the illegitimate Caesarian, and once more in favour of the latter; Mithradates fell in combat, and Asander remained master in the Bosporus. In the outset—without doubt, because he had not the confirmation of the lord–paramount—he avoided assuming the name of king, and contented himself with the title of archon, borne by the older princes of Panticapaeum; but he soon procured, probably even from Caesar himself, the confirmation of his rule and the royal title.212 At his death (737–738 U.C.)17–16. he left his kingdom to his wife Dynamis. So strong was still the power of hereditary succession and of the name of Mithradates, that both a certain Scribonianus, who first attempted to occupy Asander’s place, Polemon.and after him king Polemon of Pontus, to whom Augustus promised the Bosporan kingdom, conjoined with the taking up of the dominion a marriage–alliance with Dynamis; moreover, the former asserted that he was himself a grandson of Mithradates, while king Polemon, soon after the death of Dynamis, married a granddaughter of Antonius, and consequently a kinswoman of the imperial house. After his early death—he fell in conflict with the Aspurgiani on the Asiatic coast—his children under age did not succeed him; and even with his grandson of the same name, whom the emperor Gaius reinstated, notwithstanding his boyish age, in the year 38, into the two principalities of his father, the Bosporan kingdom did not long remain. In his place the emperor Claudius called a real or alleged descendant of Mithradates Eupator, and in this house, apparently, the principality thenceforth continued.213

The Eupatorids.Extent of the Bosporan rule.While in the Roman state elsewhere the dependent principality disappears after the end of the first dynasty, and from Trajan’s time the principle of direct government is carried out through the whole extent of the Roman empire, the Bosporan kingdom subsisted under Roman supremacy down to the fourth century. It was only after the centre of gravity of the empire was shifted to Constantinople that this state became merged in the empire at large,214 in order to be soon thereafter abandoned by it and to become, at least in greater part, the prey of the Huns.215 The Bosporus, however, in reality was and continued to be more a town than a kingdom, and had more similarity with the town–districts of Tyra and Olbia than with the kingdoms of Cappadocia and Numidia. Here, too, the Romans protected only the Hellenic town Panticapaeum, and did not aim at enlargement of the bounds and subjugation of the interior any more than in Tyra and Olbia. To the domain of the prince of Panticapaeum belonged the Greek settlements of Theudosia on the peninsula itself, and Phanagoria (Taman) on the opposite Asiatic coast, but not Chersonesus216—or at least only somewhat as Athens belonged to the province of the governor of Achaia. The town had obtained autonomy from the Romans, and saw in the prince its immediate protector, not its sovereign; as a free town, too, in the imperial period, it never coined with the stamp either of king or emperor. On the mainland, not even the town which the Greeks called Tanais—a stirring emporium at the mouth of the Don, but hardly a Greek foundation—stood permanently under subjection to the Roman vassal–princes.217 Of the more or less barbarian tribes on the peninsula itself, and on the European and Asiatic coast southward from Tanais, probably only the nearest stood in a fixed relation of dependence.218

Military position of the Bosporus.The territory of Panticapaeum was too extensive and too important, especially for mercantile intercourse, to be left like Olbia and Tyra to the administration of changing municipal officials and a far distant governor; therefore it was entrusted to hereditary princes—a course further recommended by the circumstance that it might not seem advisable to transfer directly to the empire the relations which this region sustained to the surrounding tribes. The rulers of the Bosporan house, in spite of their Achaemenid pedigree and their Achaemenid mode of reckoning time, felt themselves thoroughly as Greek princes, and traced back their origin, after the good Hellenic fashion, to Herakles and the Eumolpids. The dependence of these Greeks on Rome—the royal in Panticapaeum, as the republican in Chersonesus—was implied in the nature of things, and they never thought of rising against the protecting arm of the empire; if once, under the emperor Claudius, the Roman troops had to march against an insubordinate prince of the Bosporus,219 yet withal this region itself, amidst the fearful confusion in the middle of the third century, which especially affected it, never broke away from the empire even when it was falling to pieces.220 The prosperous merchant–towns, permanently in need of military protection amidst a flux of barbaric peoples, held to Rome as the advanced posts to the main army. The garrison was doubtless chiefly raised in the land itself, and to create and manage it was beyond doubt the main task of the king of the Bosporus. The coins, which were struck on occasion of the investiture of such a king, exhibit doubtless the curule chair and the other honorary presents usual at such investiture, but also by their side shield, helmet, sword, battle–axe, and war–horse; it was no peaceful office which this prince undertook. The first of them, whom Augustus appointed, fell in conflict with the barbarians, and of his successors, e.g. king Sauromates, son of Rhoemetalces, fought in the first years of Severus with the Siracae and the Scythians—perhaps it was not quite without reason that he stamped his coins with the feats of Herakles. By sea, too, he had to be active, especially in keeping down the piracy which never ceased in the Black Sea (p. 242); that Sauromates likewise is credited with having brought the Taurians to order and chastised piracy. Roman troops, however, were also stationed in the peninsula, perhaps a division of the Pontic fleet, certainly a detachment of the Moesian army; their presence even in small numbers showed to the barbarians that the dreaded legionary stood behind these Greeks. In another way still the empire protected them; at least in the later period there were regularly paid from the imperial chest to the princes of the Bosporus sums of money, of which they stood in need, in so far as the buying off of the hostile incursions by stated annual payments probably became a standing practice here—in what was not directly territory of the empire—still earlier than elsewhere.221

Position of this vassal–prince.That the centralisation of the government had its application also in reference to this prince, and he stood to the Roman Caesar on a footing not much different from that of the burgomaster of Athens, is in various ways apparent; it deserves mention that king Asander and the queen Dynamis struck gold coins with their name and their effigy, whereas king Polemon and his immediate successors, while retaining the right of coining gold, seeing that this territory as well as the adjoining barbarians were for long accustomed exclusively to gold currency, were induced to furnish their gold pieces with the name and the image of the reigning emperor. In like manner from Polemon’s time the prince of this land was at the same time the chief priest for life of the emperor and of the imperial house. In other respects the administration and the court retained the forms introduced under Mithradates after the model of the Persian grand monarchy, although the chief secretary (ἀρχιγραμματεύς) and the chief chamberlain (ἀρχικοιτωνείτης) of the court of Panticapaeum stood related to the leading court–officers of the great kings, as the enemy of the Romans Mithradates Eupator to his descendant Tiberius Julius Eupator, who, on account of his claim to the Bosporan throne, appeared as a suitor at Rome at the bar of the emperor Pius.

Trade and commerce in the Bosporus.This northern Greece remained valuable for the empire on account of its commercial relations. Though these at this epoch were doubtless less important than in earlier times,222 yet the mercantile intercourse continued very lively. In the Augustan period the tribes of the steppes brought slaves and skins,223 the merchants of civilisation articles of clothing, wine, and other luxuries to Tanais; in a still higher degree Phanagoria was the depôt for the exports of the natives, Panticapaeum for the imports of the Greeks. Those troubles in the Bosporus in the Claudian age were a severe blow for the merchants of Byzantium. That the Goths began their piratic voyages in the third century by pressing the Bosporan vessels to lend them involuntary aid, has been already mentioned (p. 244). It was doubtless in consequence of this traffic, indispensable for the barbarian neighbours themselves, that the citizens of Chersonesus maintained their ground even after the withdrawal of the Roman garrisons, and were able subsequently—when in Justinian’s time the power of the empire once more asserted itself in this direction—to return as Greeks into the Greek empire.