Black Sea (12 page)

What was the steppe like? Anton Chekhov grew up a few hundred miles from here, at Taganrog on the Sea of Azov, and as a boy he lay on his back on the wheat sacks aboard a
chumak,
an ox-drawn wagon, and sailed slowly for days and nights across this ocean. The 'ocean' image, somehow never
a cliché,
came to all travellers who wrote about their voyage as an obvious response to the infinite, apparently sterile and featureless horizon of coarse grassland, rising and falling a little as it approached a river, treeless and marked only by the hill-like
kurgan
burial mounds of vanished nomads. William of Rubruck remembered his journey so: 'We therefore went on towards the east, seeing nothing but heaven and earth, and sometimes the sea on our right hand ... and the sepulchres of the Comanians [Cumans] which appeared unto us two leagues off ...'

In the nineteenth century, Western tourists found the landscape oppressive, ugly and insulting to the progressive mind. Others, like Chekhov, were happy to be adrift in the summer steppe and to breathe in the scent of its herbs: tough, blue-green plants like thyme, rue and wormwood.

The term 'barbarian' began as an onomatopoeic Greek world about foreign language: the 'bar-bar babble' sound of an incomprehensible tongue. It occurs once in the
Iliad,
when the Carian army is described as
'barbarophonos
'
- barbar-speaking. What the word signifies, whether that the Carian troops actually spoke a foreign language or that they spoke Greek with some accent or intonation that struck other Greeks of the Homeric period as grotesque and alien, is endlessly disputed. But it is fairly clear that at the time of the
Iliad
and for long afterwards the Greeks did not lump all foreigners together under the linguistic definition 'barbarians'. Still less did they use the term as a catalogue of inferior 'otherness' comprising all that the Greeks were not. Victorian scholars in the age of empire misread the
Iliad
as an account of the triumph of civilisation over 'barbarous' and morally inferior Trojans. But there is nothing remotely like that in the text of the poem, in which the Greeks are if anything more cruel and treacherous — epithets later heaped into the tray of 'barbarism' — than the Trojans.

In her book
Inventing the Barbarian^
Edith Hall argues that the great change came at the time of the Persian Wars. 'The story of the invention of the barbarian is the story of the Greeks' conflict with the Persians.' Before then, there had certainly been an 'other': the magical and monstrous half-humans and creatures supposed to inhabit the fringes of the world, like Cyclops or the harpies in the
Odyssey^
the sirens and one-eyed Arimaspians. But in the fifth century BC Athens, above all the Athenian tragedians, constructed a single barbarian world, squeezing peoples as distinct as Scythian nomads and Mesopotamian city-dwellers into a single new species, and opposed it to the image of a single and united Hellenic world. All that the Athenian ideology found alien and repulsive was now transferred from the 'monster' to the 'barbarian'. The 'other' was moved inwards from the unknown periphery of the world to the frontiers of Greekness, to the other shore of the Black Sea or the Aegean. And from this new species were born other oppositions. It was not only the Scythian whose
aporia
was barbaric in contrast to Greek autochthony and settledness. It was the Persian or Asian whose servility, luxuriousness and cowardice were barbaric in contrast to Greek and European qualities of freedom, self-restraint and valour. The first-born twins Civilisation and Barbarism were soon joined by an equally long-lived brother: the discourse of Orientalism.

The Athenian tragedies were performed at the City Dionysia. By the end of the Persian Wars, this old popular festival had expanded into a grand propaganda occasion designed to legitimise Athens and its policies - including the democratic constitution, with which the Athenians now identified themselves against Persian 'tyranny' which threatened them with extinction. The
Persae
of Aeschylus was first staged at the Dionysia in 472 BC, only eight years after the Athenian victory at Salamis. But
Persae
already assumed, as if it were common knowledge, what Edith Hall calls 'the absolute polarisation' of Hellene and barbarian (the word 'barbarian' is used ten times in the text). Hall extracts from the
Persae
a long list of barbarous characteristics. Barbarians were cruel, simple-minded, undisciplined and subject to panic. They had an excessive taste for luxury and ultra-refinement. They gave unrestrained expression to their emotions. They wallowed in
ploutos
(gross and unimaginable riches), as opposed to the
olbos
(respectable wealth) which had given Olbia its name. They swung between boastfulness and cowardice. They gave power to women - sometimes even military command or the leadership of the nation.

This last point obsessed and fascinated the Greeks. In the fifth-century world, their society was unique in its exclusive, nervous maleness, but this Greek exception was transmitted and transformed into the rule for the centralised imperial societies which were to follow. The identification of 'civilisation' with a totally male-dominated society was adopted by the Roman Empire, together with its corollary that political authority for women was a sure mark of barbarism. It was only to be expected that savages like the Iceni in Britain would choose Boudicca to lead their rebellion against Roman occupation, or that Gaulish women with 'huge white arms' - as Ammianus Marcellinus wrote in the fourth century AD - would pitch in to save their husbands in a brawl. From the Roman Empire, the tradition of male authority flowed into the Roman Catholic Church, uniting with the Judaic pattern of patriarchy. In the Church of England today, the addled dregs of a classical education lie at the bottom of the deepest resentments against the admission of women to the priesthood: a woman at the altar is 'uncivilised'.

The final item which Edith Hall dredges from the subtext of the
Persae
is political. Greek citizens were free. Barbarians (in this case Persians) were not, and imposed despotism and unfreedom wherever they went. An Athenian citizen enjoyed several kinds of equality under the constitution of the
polis,
and took part in a continuous limitation of state power. Barbarians and their conquered subjects had to humiliate themselves, by the physical act of prostration, before a royal power which was arbitrary and unlimited. The Chorus in the
Persae,
after hearing the news of the Persian defeat at Salamis, proclaims: 'Not for long now [will the conquered] pay tribute and perform prostration . . . Men will no longer curb their tongues, for the people, unbridled, can chatter freely.'

Over the next few years, this 'discourse of barbarism' begun by Aeschylus was carried on enthusiastically by other playwrights. There were obvious problems involved in this cramming of blatantly different peoples into a single 'barbarian' category. Athens was full of foreign slaves, especially Thracians and Scythians, and their unlikeness to each other was evident to every slave-owner. Logically, it was even more difficult to put them in one category with Persians, whose literate, highly organised, urban culture should have put them closer to Greeks than to Scythians. These difficulties were overcome by emphasising the only feature which these foreigners did have in common: their non-Greekness. The Scythians and other northern peoples, for example, were supposed to be wild, hardy and ferocious, while the Persians were perceived as effeminate and undermined by easy living. Never mind! By swerving between two extremes, barbarians were only showing how far away they were from the Greek ideal of
mesotes
(measuredness), or from the Greek ethic of nothing-in-excess.

A more serious difficulty was the past of the Greeks themselves. In their own history, mythical or more recent, the Greeks had done everything they now deplored as 'barbaric'. Heroes and kings (and the Greeks could not deny that they had once been ruled by kings rather than democracies or oligarchies) had committed every kind of sexual excess, mutilation and sadistic murder, revelling in spontaneous emotion and showing no sense of
mesotes
whatever.

One ingenious response was to export this criminal history overseas. For example, Euripides presented Medea to his theatre audiences as the paradigm of barbarian womanhood: domineering, uncontrollably passionate, murderess of her own brother and then of her own children, a witch skilled in the magical preparation of herbs. But Edith Hall shows that Medea entered earlier mythology as a Greek, probably that Agamede in the
Iliad
who was a daughter of the sun and knew 'all the drugs ... which the wide earth nourishes'. Euripides relocated her origins in Colchis, at the southeastern corner of the Black Sea: 'her conversion into a barbarian was almost certainly an invention of tragedy, probably of Euripides himself.' Tereus was a hero of Megara, on the isthmus of Corinth, until Sophocles (in a lost play) exported him to Thrace to become a barbarian king who raped his wife's sister, cut out her tongue and ate his own son. Euripides seems to have invented many of his barbarian characters in order to display cruelty, mendacity or the propensity to butcher one's closest relations as non-Greek traits, and Hall suggests that he devised the central plot of
Iphigenia in Tauris -
her captivity as priestess to the savage Taurians, on the southernmost sea-cliff of Crimea - around the idea that only barbarians would make a cult of murdering shipwrecked strangers by hurling them over a precipice. This, too, was a shameless imposition of 'political correctness' upon Greek mythology, which abounded with tales of Greeks performing human sacrifices on one another.

But not all Greek 'barbarism
¹
could be exported, and it was also necessary to invent barbarous or 'oriental' origins for traditions which did not fit the new self-image. The cult of Dionysus, which Scyles joined in Olbia, had frenzied, orgiastic mystery-festivals for which the tragedians suggested foreign origins in Thrace or Asia -although the cult had ancient roots in Greece and was central to the state religion of Athens itself. Sadistic cruelty was now presented as a Thracian infection, excessive luxury as a disease floating in from Asia. Aeschylus does not pretend that Clytemnestra was a barbarian immigrant, but before she murders her husband Agamemnon - presented as an un-Greek weakling who can't keep a woman in her place - she is given speeches stuffed with deliberately ornate, servile and 'oriental' language. As Hall says, 'femaleness, barbarism, luxury and hubris are ... ineluctably drawn into the same semantic complex.'

The Trojans too were called in for ideological reprocessing. The war against Troy had to be re-cast as a first round in the cosmic struggle between 'European' virtue and 'Asian' vice, the perpetual war between the two halves of humanity which was now being renewed in the struggle between Greeks and Persians. The image of the Trojans, once brave enemies whose 'manliness' did credit to their Greek opponents, began to be orientalised. They became subtly 'Asian', emotional to an unseemly degree, alien: such conquered, un-Hellenic Trojans were carved into the metopes of the Parthenon in about
435
BC. The Roman and Byzantine imperial cultures inherited this perception of the Trojan War and this reading of the
Iliad
as the earliest literature on the struggle between civilisation and barbarism. It was an interpretation which was to survive virtually unchallenged for a thousand years.

Autopsy, when the Greeks invented the word, meant seeing for oneself. It is a word about individualism and independence of mind, about the right to make up one's own mind on the basis of what one's own eyes have seen. By the late Middle Ages, autopsy was at war with authority — with the version of the natural world and its geography laid down for all time in the corpus of surviving Graeco-Roman literature. For authoritarians, all further enquiry could only amount to
scholia:
mere annotation and exegesis of this existing body of knowledge. But, for the autopsist, enquiry by voyage or discovery or reasoning might reveal entirely new facts, new worlds unknown to the ancients.

To persuade readers to conceive of something completely unfamiliar, the persuader had to use narrative and to carry that narrative upon the first person: 'I saw', 'I heard', i experienced for myself. When
Bartolomé de
las Casas began his
Historia
de
las Indias
in 1527, he declared that he was writing 'out of the very great and final need to make known to all Spain the true account and truthful understanding of what I have seen take place in this Indian Ocean', and he told a minister of the emperor Charles V that he was 'the oldest of those who went over to the Indies, and in the many years that I have been there and in which I have seen with my own eyes, I have not read histories which could be lies, but instead I have experienced.' Pagden quotes the Jesuit historian
José de Acosta
who went to the Americas and 'on finding himself cold at midday yet with the tropical sun directly overhead - an impossible situation according to ancient meteorology — he "laughed and made fun of Aristotle and his philosophy" '.