Black Sea (14 page)

Olbia had not lost contact with the Graeco-Roman world across the Black Sea, but its inhabitants had an aggrieved feeling that their city had lost the fame and importance of its good old days. The traders and visitors who bothered to sail into the estuaries were pretty third-rate characters compared to their predecessors. 'Those who come here,' one citizen complained to Dio, 'are nominally Greeks but actually more barbarous than ourselves, traders and marketmcn, fellows who import cheap rags and vile wine and export in exchange goods of no better quality. But you would appear to have been sent to us by Achilles himself from his holy isle, and we are very glad to see you and very glad also to listen to whatever you have to say.'

This was a ghost town, with ghosts living in it. Dio Chrysostom found himself in a time warp. The Olbians were determined to impress him with their Greekness, but it was an utterly archaic and obsolete version of Greekness to which they clung. In addition, they seemed to
Dio
to be as much Scythian as Hellenic. His definition of ethnicity had nothing to do with genetics and descent but - like that of Herodotus — a great deal to do with clothes and customs and language. The Olbians wore Scythian clothes, as often as not, and the Greek they spoke was terrible.

Dio
went for a walk down to the point where the Bug and Dneiper come together. On his way back, he met a handsome lad on horseback called Callistratus and started a conversation. Callistratus was a real museum piece. He was wearing 'barbarian' trousers and a cape, but on seeing
Dio
he hopped off his horse and covered his arms, observing the old Greek rule that it was bad manners to show bare arms in public. Like the other Olbians, he turned out to know Homer by heart and to be immensely proud of it, however poor his spoken Greek was. But
Dio
was even more fascinated to discover that Callistratus was gay.

At the age of eighteen, he was already famous in the city for his courage in battle, for his interest in philosophy and for his beauty, 'and he had many lovers'.
Dio
read this not as some fact about sexual orientation, but as a wonderful survival from a lost age. Here, in the time of the Roman Empire, flourished still the ancient Greek veneration for homosexual love as the supreme intellectual and spiritual experience. The Olbians supposed that in the world beyond the sea homosexuality was still the height of fashion.
Dio,
touched and amused, wondered what would happen if they started converting barbarians to this view of love. 'No good end', he thought. The Scythians would fail to keep 'licentiousness' out of it, and would miss the point.

By now a small crowd of citizens had gathered round
Dio
and Callistratus.
Dio
suggested that they could all talk more easily if they went back inside the walls. Olbia was being raided almost daily by small Scythian war-parties, who had murdered or abducted several sentries on outpost duty only the day before.
Dio,
who had a normal sense of self-preservation, had noticed not only that the gates were being shut but that the alarm-flag had been hoisted on the battlements.

But the Olbians seemed indifferent to danger, and wanted to start a philosophical discourse with their guest on the spot. 'Admiring their earnestness, I said: "If it please you, shall we go and sit down somewhere within the city? For perchance at present not all can hear equally well what is said as we stroll... " '

In they went, and in the old Greek manner they all sat down outside the portico of the Temple of Zeus to hold their debate. As the older men settled on their benches, Dio noticed that almost everyone still wore a beard, at a time when shaving had been the fashion in the Roman world for at least a century. One clean-shaven man in the audience 'was subjected to the ridicule and resentment of them all . . . it was said that he practised shaving not as an idle fancy, but out of flattery for the Romans'.

Dio Chrysostom started off on a discourse about the 'good
polis
'
and its inadequacy in comparison to divine paradigms of perfection. But he was interrupted by an old man called Hieroson (possibly a descendant of that Heroson ship-owning family who had been so big in Olbia in the third century BC). The old man, who said proudly that he could read Plato, asked Dio not to talk about 'mortal cities', a subject which could wait, but to concentrate on 'that divine city or government... stating where it is and what it is like, aiming most closely at Plato's nobility of expression'. He and his friends, said Hieroson, were tremendously excited and worked up in anticipation of hearing something really elevated and Platonic.

So Dio gallantly changed course. The result, the 'Thirty-Sixth Discourse (Borysthenitica)', is an astonishing prose-poem about the myth of the Chariot of Zeus, about the parables of the Zoroastrian Magi, about the celestial harmony of the stars and the creation of the world by a sexual act between Zeus and Hera - the
hierosgamos
or sacred mating. (Was it from Dio Chrysostom that Symeon the New Theologian derived his own version of
unto mystica^
a sacred sexual act in which God impregnates his Elect with 'the sperm of blessing / in the wedding-rite divine'?)

It is a beautiful, baffling piece of work. It is also an eclectic patchwork of cults. For his Olbians, Dio brought in not only the Greek pantheon but his own impressions of Persian mysticism and allegory, and in his creation account there is a strong flavour of Judaism ('the Creator and Father of the World, beholding the work of his hands, was not merely pleased... he rejoiced ... he revealed the existent universe as once more a thing of beauty and inconceivable loveliness'). Somewhere at the core, buried under all this, were the original Stoic doctrines about a universe made of four concentric spheres: earth, water, air and fire.

You can still stand where Dio spoke. The space between the foundations of the Temple of Zeus and the back wall of the colonnaded stoa - the long shed-like building open on one side which served a Greek
polis
as weather shelter or meeting-place - is not as big as he suggests. But it is large enough for a few dozen interested people to gather round a lecturer. This old town centre around the agora (marketplace) was outside the makeshift wall drawn around the remaining living quarters, and the temples must have been already half-ruined when Dio stood there. He remembered from Olbia that 'not a single statue remains undamaged amongst those that are in the sanctuaries, one and all having suffered mutilation'.

Dio's picture of Olbia is a picture of periphery as perceived from the centre. Malcolm Chapman, in his book
The Celts: The Construction of a Myth,
shows how customs, fashions and artefacts travel outwards from a centre like rings on a pond until they reach the periphery and finally vanish. It is just before this moment of final disappearance that the 'central' intellectual suddenly bursts into lament: out there, they still have sound values, nurturing families, organic oatmeal, authentic folk music — which must be preserved at all costs before they disappear for ever.

Once, Homeric Greeks in the Aegean had worn beards and shaggy Athenian philosophers had approved the love of man for boy. The concentric waves sent out by these things were still breaking on the shores of the Bug
liman
many centuries after the razor had conquered Athens and poets had started writing erotic fantasies about girls. Dio was touched by the 'real Greekness' which he found surviving at Olbia. At the same time, he was an unromantic person, not a nostalgic metropolitan intellectual in Chapman's sense. It might be true that Athenians had once lived much as the Olbians now lived, but Dio had no wish to reverse history. He liked the present, and was doing well out of it.

In his own way, Dio Chrysostom was also in the archaism business. He was a Greek trader whose trade was Greekness. His line was to play on the Roman inferiority complex by posing as the voice of ancient Greek wisdom and discrimination. As a Stoic preacher, Dio made big Romans feel coarse and clumsy, a feeling they evidently appreciated. He climbed high in Rome, knowing several emperors personally, but he spent much of his life on the road as a prestigious travelling lecturer. His message was 'virtue' and 'philanthropy', conveyed to a parvenu world whose ruling classes were in the grip of a gigantic wealth boom. In reality, Dio was as much a creature of that boom as the audiences he rebuked for their materialism. In his home territory of Bithynia (in northwest Asia Minor), Dio was a businessman who did well out of property deals. As an old man, long after his visit to Olbia, he was taken to court by the younger Pliny, the emperor Trajan's commissioner in Bithynia, over corrupt tendering for a public-works contract.

Olbia had been abandoned for more than a thousand years when a new port-city was founded on the Black Sea coast, a full day's sailing to the west. In 1792, the Turkish fort at Hadji Bey was conquered for the empress Catherine by General Don Joseph de Ribas. It stood on high red bluffs over a bay with deep water inshore. De Ribas thought this was a good site for a new port. The idea was to name it Odessos, after a Greek colony which had stood further down the coast. Catherine, who admired the Greeks, initially agreed. But then, at a court ball in 1795, she suddenly announced that this city which had been founded by a woman was going to have a feminine gender. So Odessa began.

The main strolling street, where Odessan families with icecreams inspect goods they cannot afford, is named Deribasov-skaya after de Ribas. One morning I was taking photographs of the old Lycée Richelieu on Deribasovskaya when I was picked up by a sea-captain and his first mate. Their ship had no fuel to put to sea. Bored to death by a daily routine of window-shopping, watching television and getting on their wives' nerves, they wanted diversion. We went to a standup bar to have a 'party': a bottle of vodka, Odessa hot-dogs tasting of horse rather than dog, coffee 'made from popcorn'.

The captain, who had been stranded ashore for nine months, shrugged when I asked him what he thought about Ukraine's newfound independence as a sovereign state. 'We have no history. Only Party history. Anyway, this place is lawless now and nobody is ruling it - not Ukrainians, not Soviets, nobody.'

Drunk, I wandered down the street to revisit the Museum of Archaeology and came to a halt in front of a big photograph of Boris Farmakovsky which commands one wall of the Olbian room. There he sat: calm, benign in his old stick-up celluloid collar, his eyes narrow and crow's-footed by so many seasons of standing in the east wind off the Bug
liman.
Farmakovsky, whom even the austere émigré Mikhail Miller had allowed to be 'a good methodologist', had died just in time. Only two years later, men came in the night with guns for his old friends and colleagues, for the young men and women who had crouched and toiled for him in the Olbia excavations, for his brightest pupils who had tried to understand in new ways the encounter of Greek, Scythian and Thracian.

Why did it happen? Millions perished in the purges of the 1930s, but why this particular small profession - why this black hurricane which exploded over the men and women who led Russian and Ukrainian archaeology, blew them into oblivion and then, only four years later, died down as suddenly as it had arisen? Sir Mortimer Wheeler, the Nestor of British archaeologists in the 1960s, used to say that archaeology was not a profession but a vendetta. His colleagues laughed indulgently, but he was serious.

Soviet archaeology became in two senses a vendetta. In the first place, the disaster of 1930
—4
amounted to the assassination of the profession's leadership by a dogmatic, Stalinist minority. Miller remembered how university lectures were broken up by Komsomol students shouting: Take off the mask!', or 'What is your attitude to Marxism?' Behind the students came a handful of ambitious older archaeologists who switched to the Party line, denounced their colleagues and inherited their jobs. The ideology adopted by the new Soviet archaeology was 'Marrism', a curious, pseudo-Marxist farrago of linguistic and archaeological doctrine developed by Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr, son of a Scottish immigrant and a Georgian mother, who had been a professor at St Petersburg before the Revolution. Marr introduced the notion of autochthony, the weird proposition that changes in language and culture were never the result of new inward migrations but were instead the products of class chemistry working slow transformations in essentially static societies. In the name of Marrism Professor Vladislav Ravdonikas (to take one example) denounced and destroyed the career of his younger rival Sergei Kiselev. In 1950, twenty years later, Stalin suddenly proclaimed that Marrism was arrant nonsense, and it was the turn of Kiselev to destroy the ancient Ravdonikas in equally murderous terms of Party abuse.