Authors: Neal Ascherson
In the classical world itself, autopsy-narrative was not unknown, but it was rare. The word
bistor
first meant an eyewitness, especially in a trial, and when Herodotus chose the title
Histories
for his work, it carried the implication of 'enquiries', the personal conclusions of an investigator. Yet Herodotus only occasionally descends to declaring that he saw something for himself, and then usually to make clear that the rest of what he has to say is rumour or the unconfirmed product of
historeion
(enquiry). Greek and Roman historians constantly produced 'pseudo-autopsy', in set-piece battle scenes or reconstructed deathbed speeches which were pastiches of genuine first-hand narrative. Julius Caesar planned and led the conquest of Gaul which he describes in
The Gallic War.
But he not only distances his narrator into the third person ('Caesar'), but actually offers artificial reconstructions of events - battles and speeches indeed — of which he must have had vivid and direct memory.
Nobody disputed the value of the eye as the most senior and formidable of all witnesses. But that witness appeared only in court, or very occasionally to settle a dispute about geographic or natural fact. Elsewhere, 'I saw' had a faintly disreputable air about it, less acceptable than i believe' or T know'. This leads to an apparent reticence, or lack of curiosity, in Greek or Roman writers who could have told us something enormously interesting which they must have seen for themselves, but chose not to.
The poet Ovid is particularly maddening. In the year
8
AD, when he was just over fifty, Ovid was banished from Rome by the emperor Augustus and sent to live at Tomi, now the Romanian port of Constanta on the Black Sea. Here he spent the rest of his life, a clever, observant man who continued to write fluently and at length. Tomi was an old Greek colony in the country of the Getae, a Thracian people who had lived for many centuries around the delta of the Danube. Ovid met them every day, in the streets and in the countryside outside the walls, and the circumstantial evidence that he had Getic friends is very strong.
He reveals in one poem that he had learned the language well enough not only to write verses in it but to read and discuss them with a circle of Getae ('All moved their heads and their full quivers, and there was a long murmur on the lips of the Getae'). This suggests an intimacy which Ovid was not prepared to acknowledge to his readers. Instead, he disguises the occasion as a half-comic casting of pearls before swine, a Roman holding a poetry-reading for gaping barbarians. About that Getic language, about what the Getae wore or ate or believed or sang, the thousand upon thousand of lines of the
Tristia
and
Ex Ponto
say practically nothing whatever. They say even less about Tomi itself and about Ovid's life there, except to describe it as a hell of snow, wind and barbarians.
Many readers find the
Tristia
absurd, a wail of self-pity and self-obsession. Konstantin Paustovsky, living in Odessa in 1921, 'could never understand why the Black Sea had struck [Ovid] as gloomy. I had always thought of it as one of the brightest and gayest of seas. And how could anyone speak of Scythian cold in a region where it doesn't even snow every winter, and when the snow does come it stays only a few days and leaves the thawed-out earth smelling faintly of spring?'
But there is much more to the
Tristia
than complaint. Even if Ovid's life there cannot have been the uninterrupted misery he proclaimed, everything he wrote from Tomi was a plea for remission of sentence, a lamentation designed to arouse the pity of Augustus and the circle of his favourites. Autopsy about the strange place and its peoples would have struck the wrong note, suggesting that he was finding consolations and stimulations in Tomi.
Probably he was, but
Tristia
is written deliberately from within the consciousness of a Roman living in Rome, ventriloquising as feigned experience all the horrors and discomforts which a cultivated Roman reader would imagine to accompany 'life among the barbarians'.
When Ovid does write directly and candidly about what happened to him, he is writing about Rome and his own disaster there. He was banished partly for
Ars Amatoria,
which Augustus found immoral, and partly for failing to distance himself from some unknown sexual intrigue involving a woman of the imperial family. In the first book of
Tristia,
he remembers the last, long, sleepless night at home, the bewilderment about what clothes or luggage to take with him in the morning, his wife in tears, the stricken household slaves standing about. It was this passage which Osip Mandelstam had in mind when he wrote his own marvellous 'Tristia' in 1920. At one level, Mandelstam seems to be anticipating his own end in the Soviet Tomi of Stalin's labour camps. There the voice is Ovidian and mourning. But then secret joy, un-Latin, unexplainable, begins to rise up like dawn mist from the ground of the poem as if a forced parting were also a rebirth into an unknown land:
I have studied the science of saying goodbye
in bareheaded laments at night.
Oxen chew, and the waiting stretches out,
it is the last hour of my keeping watch in the city,
and I respect the ritual of the cock-loud night,
when, lifting their load of sorrow for the journey,
eyes red from weeping have peered into the distance,
and the crying of women mingled with the Muses' singing ...
Who can know when he hears the word goodbye
what kind of separation lies before us ... ?
The site of Olbia is 200 kilometres east of Odessa, a journey across gloomy flatness with nothing to look at until the road ends, the car stops, and you step out into a fresh south-east wind coming off the water. It looks like the sea, but it smells like a pond. This is the
liman,
or estuary-lagoon, of the Bug River, where it joins the estuary of the Dnieper and then flows into the sea. This is fresh water, where pike-perch thrive, which becomes brackish only when southerly gales stack up the river-flow and drive salt water upstream as far as the Olbia ruins. But the rivers are so huge that their far shores are no more than dim lines drawn on the horizon with charcoal.
Olbia began in the early sixth century BC, perhaps even in the seventh century. It was a colony founded by adventurers from Miletus in the Aegean, who had already set up an advance base on the island of Berezan a few miles offshore to the west. The Milesian colony grew into a flourishing city with walls and impressive square towers, at first a trading post and harbour dealing mostly in fish and then, as the grain trade developed, the capital of a farming region whose Scythian suppliers might live as far as two hundred miles away or more. At its height, in about the fourth century BC, Olbia might have had thirty or forty thousand people living inside its walls. But nearly as many must have lived in the
chora
y
the inner hinterland of the
polis.
Olbia's
chora
developed into a densely settled network of wheatfields and villages covering the whole shore of the peninsula between the estuaries of the Bug and the Dnieper.
Decline set in during the third century BC. The Scythian people were destabilised by the growing pressure of the Sarmatians, another nomadic Indo-Iranian group migrating westwards out of the steppe between the Volga and Don rivers, and Scythian authority began to break up. The city was raided and the grain supply became erratic. In the second century BC one of the Scythian groups took control of Olbia, probably hoping to restore the export trade which had brought such wealth to the whole north-west shore of the Black Sea. But it was unable to prevent the disaster of 63 BC, when an army of Dacians and Getae came up from the Danube delta, captured Olbia and destroyed the city. The population fell to a mere 2,000—3,000 for the next few decades. Roman occupation a hundred years later made the city once more safe to live in, and there was considerable rebuilding, but Olbia never fully recovered from the Getan storm. It was wrecked again, probably by Goths, in the third century AD, and then — finally — by Huns in about 370. After that, the ruins were abandoned to the grass and the sea-birds.
There is not a lot to see at Olbia. Stone-robbers carted off almost everything which stuck out of the ground except for two huge burial mounds, the 'Zeus Kurgan' and the tomb dedicated to Eurisia and Arete — two unknown Olbian grandees. These are earth barrows covering majestic stone burial chambers of the second century AD, approached by stone-panelled
dromoi
(tunnels). But little of this can be inspected because the mounds are kept locked up, their
dromoi
blocked by decayed shed doors. The tombs, with hens pecking and hopping about their flanks, look more like potato clamps or abandoned air-raid shelters.
As one walks across the site, a great triangle of unkempt foundations bounded on the east by red-earth cliffs above the Bug estuary, it is hard to realise that this is one of the places where Russian archaeology was born and grew up. But to have dug at Olbia, to have confronted its symbiosis of Greeks, Thracians and Scythians and to have contributed fearlessly to understanding it, is one of the proudest battle honours in the profession.
Engineer-General Suchtelev started exploring the Olbian ruins in 1790, at a time when they were still officially within the Ottoman Empire. In 1839, Mikhail Vorontsov, the grandest and most ambitious of all the governors-general of New Russia, sponsored the establishment of the Imperial Odessa Society of History and Antiquity, the first archaeological society in Russia, which took over excavation at Olbia. It was the Odessa Society which brought in the true father and mother of scientific archaeology in Russia, Count Alexei Uvarov and Countess Uvarova, who gave much of their lives to Olbia. Uvarov, born in 1828, had founded the Imperial Russian Archaeological Society in Moscow, which at once became a deadly rival of the other Imperial Archaeological Society established under the eye of the tsar's court in St Petersburg.
When Uvarov died in 1884, his widow, the Countess, took over the chair of the Moscow society, which she had helped to set up. She carried on the struggle against St Petersburg until the 1917 Revolution, when she went into exile, but by then the Olbia site was in new and safe hands. Boris Farmakovsky, calm and systematic, excavated at Olbia every season from 1902 to 1914 and then, after war and revolution had subsided, from 1924 to 1928. He left behind him a series of meticulous and handsomely illustrated excavation reports which contain most of what is known about the 'material culture' of Olbia.
But the evidence about Olbia is not just 'material'. There is also autopsy. The Stoic philosopher Dio Chrysostom came here in about 95 AD, and this was one of the rare occasions on which a Greek or
Latin observer wrote down, fluently and informally and in great detail, what he saw and what he heard. 'Borysthenitica' is a philosophy lecture, based on Dio's visit to Olbia, which he delivered in his home city of Prusa in Asia Minor. But it is also an extraordinary piece of cinema, a reel or two of actuality shot two thousand years ago, a home movie preserved from the Hellenistic world.
Dio came to Olbia (or 'Borysthenes', as he called it, which was also the word the Greeks used for the Dnieper River) at a bad time. After the Getae had destroyed the place in
63
BC, 'the Greeks had stopped sailing to Borysthenes, inasmuch as they had no people of common speech to receive them, and the Scythians themselves had neither the ambition nor the knowledge to equip a trading-station of their own after the Greek manner.' In time, the Scythians returned to the gutted streets beside the Bug and invited Greeks to come back and reopen the port. But by the year of Dio's arrival, well over a century later, 'evidence of the destruction of Borysthenes [was still] visible both in the sorry nature of its buildings and in the contraction of the city...' The citizens had retreated to the apex of Olbia's triangular lay-out, walling off a much smaller triangle with a row of houses and a low defensive rampart (all of which has been turned up just as Dio describes it, by excavation). The rest of the city had been left to fall apart, and some of the old towers which had formed part of the town wall now rose so far away in the distance that, as Dio put it, 'you would not surmise that they once belonged to a single city'.