Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge (10 page)

On the other hand, steppe brigandage becomes more understandable, perhaps more excusable, as the empire takes shape. It has already been noted how the Sarmatian tribes migrated as far as the Black Sea and then stopped. Whatever the earlier reasons, by Ovid's time one is dominant: the growing presence of Roman arms in the Balkans. Like westbound wanderers generally, their path was now blocked. Particularly it meant they had ceased to be true nomads, exchanging the carefree, open-ended steppe for confinement to one area, with other tribes behind and the unattainable wealth and security of the Roman provinces in front. An obvious solution was to settle and practise farming. Like the American Indian, however, Sarmatian development had not attained this level. Nor did the north Pontic region, with its summerlong drought
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and winterlong freeze, invite it. Even in the late Roman period offshoots of this same group of tribes would still be hanging around in the lower Danube region with nowhere to go. In the 4th century of our era, when Tomis had risen to respectability as the seat of the Bishop of Scythia, a Greek cleric called Grigoris was out on the steppe, preaching to the Sarmatian tribes. He admonished them to mend their ways, abandon rapine and follow the path of Jesus. When he concluded there was a puzzled silence. Then their leader spoke, asking the question which evidently troubled them all: ‘But suppose we do as you say and obey the law of the Church; suppose we cease to rob and plunder the goods of others: on what then shall we live?'
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Returning to the subject of winter: this was the season Ovid most dreaded. The Dobruja is in fact transitional, between Russian and Mediterranean climates. Mamaia and the other beach resorts remind us that this is Romania's playground, where winter can be mild. But when the wind backs toward Russia, Ovid's comments become credible. Ancient geography had little understanding of the influence of landmass on climate. Cold was attributed to latitude and altitude, but not to distance from the ocean or the direction of its currents. That is why Ovid imagined himself much further north than he really was, locating Tomis as ‘close to the shivering pole'! In fact Constantsa lies on the O°C January isotherm, which also runs through New York and across the northern United States. In his tendency to dwell on the cold, Ovid may be compared with a Southern Californian writing home from Chicago. One must therefore allow for exaggeration and the expectations of a warm-climate readership. Shocking descriptions of cold were a literary convention. In the
Poems of Exile,
however, cold is inseparable from the dangers it provoked:

While summer lasts the Danube is our friend:

His war-preventing water between us

And them. But when the spiteful season shows

His sordid face and grim frost grips the ground,

Then are those savage peoples by the quaking cold

Driven toward the limit of endurance.
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Now comes the ill-wind from the steppe: the mounted raider and the singing arrow. These Getans, like their Sarmatian parent tribe and the Scyths before them, wore scale armour: overlapping plates of horn or iron, sewn onto a leather jerkin. Helmets were cone-shaped. They flew tubular standards, like wind socks, painted to resemble dragons or snakes.
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From Scythian tombs we also know of brightly coloured saddles and embroidered horse trappings. As well as the shortbow, they used sword or axe, plus a vicious weapon of their own: the fighting whip, multi-thonged with a small, metal weight on each tip, used against the enemy's face to inflict blindness. Accoutrement and ornament depended on social status. Burials suggest wide differences, not only in finery but in horse size and even human stature. To have defeated the lavishly equipped Scyths, the Sarmatians must have had an aristocratic, heavy cavalry, perhaps using horses of Ferghana (Uzbek) origin. Their underlings, more lightly and crudely outfitted, rode the usual steppe pony, controlled, as was normal in the ancient world, by means of the knees and bit alone. The upper mane was shortened to prevent fouling the bow, the withers left long for hanging onto.

We may suspect that the raiders described by Ovid were of the lower social order: a rabble, acting in defiance of their own chieftains; for it is doubtful whether Tomis could have withstood an organized attack by heavy cavalry. Even so, these ruffians would possess the usual skills of steppe horsemen: capable of wheeling with the oneness of a flock of starlings; brilliant archers, able to shoot backwards, in Parthian fashion; employing clever ruses, including the celebrated feigned retreat, which enticed the enemy to break ranks or abandon a defensive position.
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On the other side of the picture we have the treatise, by an anonymous physician, known as
Airs, Waters and Places,
once attributed to Hippocrates. He visited the Pontic region around the same time as Herodotus, examining a number of Scythian men and women. It portrays the steppe warrior as far from fit or strong. Hip and spinal problems are given as the commonest ailments, wages of a life on horseback. The men are described as short, with skin pink and clammy; the women as ugly and loathsomely fat. At any rate, so they seemed to a sophisticated Greek. The Sarmatians looked fit enough to Ovid. He writes of their forays, in the danger zone outside the walls, where the small city was obliged to support itself by farming:

When bitter Boreas cements both stream and sea,

When Danube by the north wind has been frozen flat:

Then comes the enemy, riding to attack,

Savaging the surroundings far and wide.

Some flee, abandoning to plunder what little

The country and the wretched peasant has.

Others, dragged off with pinioned arms,

Gaze helplessly behind toward families and farms.

Yet others, shot with barbed shaft, fall writhing:

For poison rides aboard the flying steel.

The barbarian will break all things he cannot take,

His hungry flame devouring harmless home.

Even when peace returns the land is paralysed.

Fallow and fruitless the fields. Frightful the

Foe, in prospect as in presence.
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Barbarian portraits are common on Roman soldiers' tombstones; especially of cavalry troopers, who are shown overleaping sprawling enemies. Prisoners are featured on triumphal arches: usually tousled and muscular, dressed (when not naked) in shaggy skins and often trousers. Were they always of strapping build, or was this so that Roman courage would seem greater? To the Mediterranean nations, trousers were as much a symbol of savagery as today's clichés of war-paint or bones through noses. In fact they were simply the invention of horseriding peoples and a practical part of their lives.

With stitched trousers and sewn skins covering all

But face, the savage grapples with grim winter.

Ice hangs from hoary hair and sparkling beard,

Wine stands moulded to the vessel's shape,

Streams stop dead. Ice is dug as drinking water.

The very Danube (no less narrow than the Nile

And mingling with the deep through many mouths)

Stiffens under freezing wind and gropes its

Seaward way beneath the ice. Now will men

Walk where ships once sailed and ice becomes

A drum for horses' hooves. Across the new-formed

Bridge over the still-moving stream, there rumble

The ox carts of the Sarmatian.
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Progressively the ice builds against the coast, sealing Tomis from the south; closing that last option of a beleaguered port: evacuation by sea.

The
Euxine,
called the
Axine
in the past,

Now holds me captive in its cold embrace.

No softness shields these waters from the blast,

No foreign shipping, safe in sheltered place.

Ringed round with ravening tribes, which endless vigil keep,

The land is no more docile than the deep.
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As winter advances, so does the hungry savage. Now arrows begin to fall inside the city.

I am a captive of the counterfeit Euxine,
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That luckless land beside the Scythian shore,

Hemmed in by numberless and tameless tribes

Who recognize no way of life but plunder.

All outside is danger. Just saved by skilful siting,

Our little hill with little walls defended.

The foe rises quickly as a cloud of birds:

Scarce sighted, they are already on their loot-laden way.

Though closed the gate we gather deadly missiles

In mid-street.
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Now Ovid, though in his mid-fifties, must arm himself and mount the town wall. Gentle Ovid, ‘the soft philosopher of love'.
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I shrink from matters military.

Even as a young man

I never handled weapon but in jest.

Now, in middle age, I buckle sword to side,

Fit shield to arm and helmet to grey head;

For when the lookout signals the attack

I rush to arm myself with trembling hand.

The foe, with bent bow and poison-pickled

Arrow, wheels the wall on snorting steed;

And as the sheep, which lacks the shelter of

The fold, is dragged o'er field and forest by

The ravening wolf, so he who reaches not

The shelter of the gate can count himself

A goner, with a rope around his throat,

Or else a dead man, dropped by deadly dart.
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Weeks pass and the hit-and-run attacks upon the beleaguered town become more hit and less run.

Now are the frighted walls made dizzy by the mounted archer

As stockaded sheep are giddied by the circling wolf.

Now is the shortbow, strung with horse hair, never slack.

Our housetops bristle with a feathered mist of arrows

And the stoutly crossbarred gate scarce counters the attack.
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The barbarian is at the gate, yet there is little comfort inside it.

The town's defences scarce defend; and even within

The walls a tribal riff-raff mingles with the Greek.

What safety when unbarbered barbarians

In skins inhabit over half the houses?

Even descendants of the Grecian mother-city

Instead of patriotic dress wear Persian breeches.

What conversation! They in local lingo, I in gestures.

Here
I
am the barbarian, understood by none.

At Latin words the Getans simply gape and giggle.
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This was a frontier town, a ‘wild west' in the Greek east. Violence might erupt at any moment; even in the
agora,
close to where Ovid's statue now stands:

Law has no force and force is all they know

Since force replaces justice in their eyes …
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Here sword is law and many is the wound

Inflicted in the middle of the market place.
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Such then was the favour to which one of the Olympians of Latin verse had come.

Pathetic, for one whose name was ever on

Men's lips, to live among the Bessans and the Getans.

Pathetic, to do one's stint at the gate

And on the wall: a wall scarce strong enough

To guard its guardians.
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Ovid was an amiable, companionable man; Tomis shrewdly selected to ensure his dejection. He broods constantly on the total absence of Latin-speaking company, indeed of kindred spirits of any kind. He feels his powers waning through disuse and the absence of stimulus or encouragement. He struggles with composition in surroundings deeply hostile to poetry.

Though clash of arms is ever near

I cheer myself with versifying as I may,

Albeit there is no one here to hear;

In this wise may I pass the dawdling day.
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And again

Poetry should be free from fear;

I cringe continually from the throat-slitting sword.

Poetry should spring from peace;

I am churned by suffering.

Poetry should flow from sweet solitude;

I am vexed by sea and storm.
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Even so, though he never stopped complaining, neither did he stop composing. Timid as a man, his toughness as an artist is beyond dispute. However monotonous his plea, the fact is that he found the strength to write and write well. If exile were a contest to break or preserve his spirit then, in the long view, we must judge Ovid, life's loser, the winner. At the time, however, he was a desperately lonely man. He even began to learn the despised Sarmatian tongue. Such was his need of an audience that he started to write in groping Getic:

While some have smatterings of Greek, made barbarous

By tribal twang, none knows a word of Latin.

A Roman poet (Muses forgive me!)

Here I have no option but Sarmatian;

And to my shame, from long desuetude,

Latin words come sluggishly. A man apart,

I talk to myself, seeking by practice

To keep bright the tarnished coinage of my art.
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I have become, to my embarrassment

Something of a Getic poet, having

Done a piece in Getic tongue, working their

Wild words to fit our metre. So the uncouth

Getans begin to call me ‘bard'.
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Ovid's descriptions of his Getic essays are not without a rueful humour. Unfortunately none has been preserved. But would his serious work now be read? With high hopes the winter's stanzas were collected and sent to Rome on the first ship. Would they arrive? And now that he was a non-person, would anyone spare his work a second glance? Suppose only the copy kept in Tomis would survive, one day to perplex some puzzled savage:

Oft have I asked myself, ‘For whom this

Careful craftsmanship? Will Getan or

Sarmatian read my verse?'
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