Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge (9 page)

Only guarded wall and barred gate

Shield us from the baleful Getans' hate.
34

Ovid's fear of mutilation or violent death, though natural enough, was in his case morbidly acute. This would make exile to the Sarmatian steppe a singularly unpleasant experience, so much so that one might wonder whether it had been devised with his particular sensitivities in mind. We have compared Ovid to Byron, but there is also a resemblance to Wilde. Both were brilliant, witty men. Both defied the orthodoxies of their age. Both were early fêted and abruptly dropped. Both served spiteful, life-shortening sentences. And both produced two ‘poems of exile',
35
works strikingly different from anything they had previously written.

By the spring of
AD
9 Ovid was in Tomis and had begun work on the
Tristia.
Its opening book describes his last night in Rome; how he looked up toward the Capitol, flooded in moonlight; how, the next morning, his wife, hysterical, rolled in the hearth, clutching the household gods. Glimpses of the voyage follow: lying awake beneath the thwarts of a creaking ship, with seas so mountainous that the terrified helmsman abandoned the tiller and turned to prayer. Since he later mentions an exchange of letters as requiring a year, we may guess his journey was long, with various pauses, changes of vessel and overland stretches. Here is a characteristic passage about Tomis and its ambience:

Would you like to know just how things are

In Tomis town and how we live?

Though Greek and Getan mingle on this coast

It owes more to the Getan than the Greek.

Great hordes of them and their Sarmatian

Cousins canter to and fro along the rough roads,

Everyone with bow and quiverful of

Arrows, yellow-nibbed and vile with venom.

Villainy of voice and face betray their thoughts;

Hairiness of head and beard tell us they

Have never seen a barber. Right hands itch

To pull the universal knife. Such is, alas,

The company your Bard must keep.
36

The steppe peoples were formidable archers, using bows perhaps thirty inches long and shooting from the saddle at full gallop. A cavalry bow must of course be short, but strength was added by means of horn tips and plates, bound and glued to the wood. It is possible that the Sarmatians were the first in Europe to develop stirrups, in their original form of leather footloops, which steadied the mounted archer while riding hands-off and greatly increased his accuracy. To be ready to hand, the bow was carried strung, in a large holster attached to the belt, which served also as a quiver. The arrows were poisoned. Ovid's imagination brooded on the Getan arrow and he developed a special revulsion toward it. He described it as ‘dealing double death': from the venom as well as the wound itself. The arrowhead was spliced around its base with a collar of thorns, to increase tearing power. The venom's recipe has been reconstructed from ancient references and with medical advice by a German scholar, C. J. Bucher.
37
Extracts from the rotted corpses of adders, including the venom sac, were steeped in putrefying human blood tainted, in its turn, with excrement. The intention was clearly to manufacture a blend of toxicity with gangrenous and tetanoid infections. If the wound failed the poison would succeed; and if the poison did not the diseases would. Herodotus confirms this ferocity in gruesome terms; though he is speaking of the Sarmatians' predecessors, the Scyths. On the matter of head-hunting, Ovid tells us that the Sarmatians continued Scythian practice.
38
Being related peoples we might expect this to be true of a number of customs.

A Scyth drinks his first victim's blood. He takes the heads of enemies to the king, for otherwise he will have no share in the booty. He then cuts around the ears and, gripping the scalp, shakes out the rest of the head. After cleaning it with a bone scraper, he works the skin by hand till supple and makes a kerchief of it. This he attaches to his horse's reins. The best man is the one with most trophies. Some even sew these scalps into coats. Others make quiver-covers from the skin of enemies' hands: human skin being brightest and finest for such use. Yet others flay the whole body and carry the skin splayed out on a wooden frame. Regarding their worst enemies: those able to afford it have the skull sheathed in leather and the inside gilded for use as a drinking cup. This may also be done with a kinsman slain in a feud. If visited by guests he will serve them with these heads as a token of honour. This they call courage!
39

Blood was drunk in brotherhood rituals: ‘They bleed those involved, mixing blood with wine in a large pottery bowl into which is dipped a sword, axe, spear and arrows. Then, after solemn oaths, they and the witnesses drink.'
40

Their source of wine was of course the Pontic cities. The Sarmatians' national drink was
koumis,
a fermentation of mare's milk. Hemp (in Greek
kannabis
) is native to the steppe. Sets of inhaling equipment, consisting of bronze cauldrons, trays to contain hot stones, clusters of short tentpoles four feet high, with leather seed bags and charred hemp seeds, were found in the Scythian tombs. Such was the apparatus rendered obsolete by the invention of pipe and cigarette. Herodotus describes hemp as a fumigant as well as an intoxicant, even a source of clothing.

They have cannabis in their country, like flax except thicker and taller. It is both wild and cultivated. The Thracians make cloth from it, hemp being very like linen. The Scyths take the hempseed and, crouching under blankets, throw it onto hot stones. The seed smoulders and gives off steam at which they emit cries of pleasure. This serves instead of bathing, for seldom do they wash in water.
41

The practice of ritual divination is mentioned by more than one author. As Herodotus put it, ‘there are many fortune-tellers, who divine by means of willow wands'.
42
The wand is still of course associated with magic, but here the method was to drop a bunch of osiers to the ground and consult the pattern which they formed. In this matter it can hardly be maintained that Roman practice was superior, for the latter included the examination of animal entrails, observations of birds and other ‘omens from the sky',
43
such as lightning, the shape and movement of clouds and all natural or accidental occurrences, reading into them what they hoped or feared, ‘constantly peering into the intestines of sacrificial victims and watching the flight of birds. Agonizing over vague and equivocal predictions'.
44
It has rightly been said that epoch-making Roman decisions hung on a chicken's innards.

The steppe had its own answer to diviners whose prophecies misdirected royal policy. ‘Such fortune-tellers are bound and gagged inside a waggon laden with kindling wood, to which two oxen are harnessed. The wood is then fired and the terrified animals stampeded. Sometimes the oxen are roasted with the fortune-teller, sometimes the pole is burned through and they escape.'
45
Regarding religion, there are Euripides' references to the Crimea of the Scythian period, with its cult of Artemis.
46
We have only a single, specifically Sarmatian image, though a powerful one: worship of a naked sword thrust into the ground.
47
‘In their country is neither temple nor shrine, nor even thatched hut; only a naked sword stuck into the soil, which they worship with due reverence. Such is the war god who presides over the lands on which they wander.'
48

The above quotations mention the absence of huts and presence of wagons. The latter were the standard dwelling of the Sarmatian tribes and an essential part of nomad equipment. Where might timber for these carts be found? Though the steppe was generally treeless, its river bottoms were often wooded. The so-called Iron Age was a period of major advance in wood working, not least in the construction of vehicles with strong, spoked wheels. Clay models, probably toys, from Scythian tombs show these as covered wagons, with skins stretched over (or bark nailed onto) hooped frames. Sometimes only the rearward half was enclosed, leaving an open-fronted driving compartment. Occasionally the covering was pyramidical, a sort of wigwam erected on the wagon's stern. The classic shape, however, resembled the American or Afrikaner covered wagon and was possibly a distant ancestor of the gypsy caravan.

The 4th-century historian Ammianus Marcellinus of Antioch has this to say about Sarmatian nomadism:

Midway along the Black Sea's northern coast are numerous Sarmatian tribes whose lands have no known limit. They roam over vast solitudes: places ignorant of plough or seeds and knowing only disuse and frost. Here they forage like animals. Their families, homes and chattels they load onto bark-roofed wagons; and when the mood is on them they move off, without a second thought, rolling on toward the place which takes their fancy next.
49

This is the means by which they and others like them had travelled along that great and grassy road whose beginning and end none knew. When they halted, the wagons would be formed into a
laager
or defensive ring. Though the able-bodied lived in the saddle, vehicles were essential for child-rearing and winter shelter.

Indeed they are without even hovels and cannot be bothered with ploughshares, living on meat and milk, dwelling in wagons roofed with rounded canopies of bark and driving them over the wide solitudes. When they come to good grazing they arrange their carts in a circle, then gorge like beasts. And when foraging is finished they load their cities, so to speak, and off they go. In these same wagons the men lie with the women and the children are born and brought up. Such are their houses; and at whatever place they chance to arrive, that to them is home.
50

The Greeks were amazed and amused by the nomad diet, calling the steppe peoples
hippemolgi
(horse milkers) and
galactophagi
(milk eaters). ‘They live on meat, including horse meat; and mare's milk, the latter (prepared in a certain way) being especially enjoyed. Hence the poet
51
calls all the nomads
galactophagi.
'
52

Other food products were nevertheless available, both from the north and the Crimea. The latter, in climate a mini-Mediterranean, had been famous for its grain from the late Bronze Age.
53
There is also evidence for millet cultivation in valleys on the steppe itself; and the Pontic cities had surrounded themselves with fields. All this the Sarmatian peoples regarded as their own. Having conquered the entire western steppe from the Scyths they believed it their right to charge for its use: ‘They turn over their land to anyone who wishes to till it, requiring only that in return they receive the rent they have put on it.'
54

Even so there were shortages. The trading colonies did not consider it their role to feed the Sarmatians but rather, with their help, to acquire grain for shipment to Greece in return for luxury goods. This could be a recipe for trouble. In winter the pasture disappeared under snow and the undernourished herds produced little milk. The Pontic colonies then faced starving tribes to their front and frozen seas at their back; for the freshwater of the great rivers reduced the freezing point of the coastal waters and induced the formation of fringe ice which in turn blocked the harbours and completed their isolation. As if this were not enough, the Danube and other rivers also froze, allowing easy passage for raiding parties. Even wagon columns could now cross. Herodotus' claim that the Sea of Asov freezes for eight months in the year was doubtless an exaggeration. It does, however, share the same January isotherm as the Gulf of Finland, though 850 miles further south. ‘For eight months every year there is frost unbearable [ … ] the sea freezes [ … ] and the Scythians drive their wagons across to the land of the Sindi.'
55
Pliny the Younger adds that: ‘When the Danube banks are joined by ice and it can carry great preparations for war upon its back, then its fierce tribes have both their arms and the cold to fight for them…'
56

Did the Sarmatians incline to villainy only when pushed to starvation's brink, or were they habitual robbers and raiders? Though winter was the time of greatest danger, sources are unanimous in branding them as bad for all seasons. Ammian calls them ‘a tribe highly experienced in brigandage'
57
and ‘a people better suited to theft than war'.
58
Tacitus admitted their quality as fighters, though only when mounted: ‘While they are useless on foot, on horseback it is another matter. The line of battle which can stand up to them hardly exists.'
59
He describes an incursion by one of their tribes into imperial territory higher up the Danube in
AD
69 when the intruders were intercepted by Roman infantry on ground unfavourable to cavalry: ‘The Rhoxolans, a Sarmatian tribe [ … ] 9,000 rampaging horsemen, seeking booty rather than battle [ … ] had scattered for plunder and [returning] loot-laden were unable, because of the slippery paths, to benefit from their horses' speed. They were delivered as lambs to the slaughter.'
60

But once out on the open steppe there was little likelihood of catching them. ‘Pursuing or pursued, they gallop great distances on fast horses, leading one or even two more so that by alternating mounts they can maintain speed.'
61

Herodotus touched upon a universal military problem when he wrote: ‘They who are without permanent towns or fortifications and live not by agriculture but by stock-raising, carrying dwellings in wagons: surely such people will be uncatchable and therefore unconquerable.'
62
The underlying point is that strength alone does not determine the outcome of war. Rome had often defeated the strong, whose weakness was that they possessed roads which could be marched on, granaries which could be commandeered and towns which could be knocked out. What of that other kind of enemy whose territory was trackless and townless, whose soil had never been ploughed? Conflict with backward peoples would prove less and less rewarding as Rome advanced and the Mediterranean fell behind.