Download PDF | Byzantium And The Bosporus A Historical Study, From The Seventh Century BC Until The Foundation Of Constantinople By Thomas Russell, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
309 Pages
Preface
In ap 330 the Emperor Constantine consecrated the new capital of the eastern Roman Empire. Today his city has become a bustling, international metropolis located at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, and the histories of Constantinople and Istanbul are well known. Yet comparatively little is known about the city before it was Constantinople, when it was a minor Greek polis located on the northern fringes of Hellenic culture at the Black Sea, surrounded by hostile Thracian tribes, and denigrated by one ancient wit as the ‘armpit of Greece’. Despite its problems, ancient Byzantium possessed one unique advantage: control of the Bosporus strait. This strategic waterway links the Aegean to the Black Sea, and confers on its possessor the ability to tax shipping passing through the strait; that is, all maritime traffic passing between the Aegean and the Black Sea.
This book presents a historical study of the relationship between the city of ancient Byzantium and the Thracian Bosporus, a relationship which shaped the region’s history. Viewed through this lens, the history of the Bosporus sheds light on the nature of economic exploitation and ancient imperialism, and on the nature of ancient communities’ local identities. Drawing extensively on Dionysius of Byzantium’s Anaplous Bosporou, an ancient account of the journey up the Bosporus, local inscriptions, and by exploring regionally specific geographical features in the strait, it illustrates how the history of this region cannot be understood in isolation from its geographical context. Not so much a history of ancient Byzantium, this is a meditation on regional particularism, revealing the pervasive influence which this waterway had on its local communities.
Acknowledgements
This monograph began life as a DPhil thesis undertaken at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and I have incurred many debts over the years spent conducting the research and in the process of transforming the thesis into a monograph. Peter Thonemann was an ideal supervisor, and his influence and ideas are apparent on every page. Without his direction and advice, the conceptual focus and scheme of my work would never have materialized. For the topic itself, I owe particular gratitude to David Whitehead, who originally suggested a history of ancient Byzantium.
Other thanks are due to Katherine Clarke, my college supervisor at St Hilda’s, who read and commented on sections of the thesis. Alfonso Moreno and Robin Osborne examined the thesis, and provided me with valuable observations, changes, and improvements, many of which were incorporated into the final monograph. Robert Parker and Neil McLynn also made useful comments at the formal stages of progression through the thesis, while Rosalind Thomas, who supervised the transition from thesis to monograph, made a number of very useful suggestions and improvements which helped to shape the monograph into its current form. I would also like to thank Michael Scott for his thoughts on Dionysius during a seminar on regional histories at Leicester in September 2016.
For financial assistance during the research, I am indebted to St Hilda’s College and the Classics Faculty at Oxford, for a research scholarship which made the project possible. The Craven fund at Oxford and St Hilda’s College provided funding to travel to Turkey during my research. I am also indebted to Volker Heuchert and the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, who generously granted access to their coin collection and gave permission to include pictures in the monograph. Gabe Moss, at the Ancient World Mapping Center, very kindly produced maps of the Bosporus and the Propontis for use in the book, and I am extremely grateful to him and to Richard Talbert.
The map was produced by the Ancient World Mapping Center; the toponyms were selected based on Dionysius’ itinerary, and their placement is based on those of C. Foss, in Map 53 of the Barrington Atlas. Our intention is that a more detailed digital, interactive version of the Bosporus map will soon be available at . Nathan Miller kindly provided an image of a coin from his own collection for use on the cover, for which I am very thankful.
I follow personal preference when transliterating Greek proper names, aiming only for some degree of internal consistency.
The thesis was submitted in summer 2013 and examined in October 2013. It was submitted to Oxford University Press at the end of December 2015. I was particularly pleased to make use of Adrian Robu’s recent monograph on Megara and the colonies (Robu 2014a) in the book. However, transformation of the thesis into monograph form has had to compete with my day job and a heavy teaching load, and I am sure that my efforts to make use of more recent items have not been comprehensive.
My deepest thanks are to A, for extraordinary patience and support, and to whom this book is dedicated.
Introduction
The Armpit of Greece
Though all other cities have their periods of government, and are subject to the decays of time, Constantinople alone seems to claim to herself a kind of immortality, and will continue a city, as long as the race of mankind shall live either to inhabit or rebuild her.’
Many ages before Constantine, one of the most judicious historians of antiquity had described the advantages of a situation, from whence a feeble colony of Greeks derived the command of the sea and the honours of a flourishing and independent republic.”
This book presents a study of the relationship between the ancient city of Byzantium and the Thracian Bosporus over a period of around 1,000 years. Chronologically, its scope extends from the original settlement of the city by Greek colonists in, probably, the seventh century Bc, to the consecration of Constantinople on the site of old Byzantium in ap 330. Strictly, it is not a city history: its theme is not the history of the city in a narrow sense, but Byzantium’s dynamic relationship with its immediate environment. Moreover, the chronological termini are sufficiently broad to permit the treatment to move backwards and forwards through time as necessary. No attempt is made to adhere to strict chronological order.
Instead, it identifies and examines broad historical continuities and themes over a long period of time. Neither is any attempt made to be comprehensive. This is a deliberate attempt to eschew positivism, and to avoid falling into the genre of what Moses Finley labelled a spate of ‘pseudo-histories’, ‘in which every statement or calculation to be found in an ancient text, every artefact finds a place, creating a morass of unintelligible, meaningless, unrelated “facts”’.* Instead, this is a reflection on the variability of the ancient world, and on the pervasive impact which their local environments had on Greek communities.
Byzantium’s colourful future as an imperial metropolis can make it difficult to penetrate the history of the earlier city. Edward Gibbon’s description of Byzantium’s situation is part of a long tradition, begun in antiquity and continued by modern visitors to Constantinople and Istanbul, which emphasizes the determining importance of the city’s geographical position. For Gibbon, it was primarily to its location that Byzantium owed its wealth, its political influence and, ultimately, its commercial pre-eminence.
This sentiment is expressed in more romantic terms by the voyageurs of the modern age. Gilles’ ‘immortal’ city became a common trope: Tournefort claimed that ‘its [ie. Constantinople’s] situation, by consent of all travellers, and even the ancient historians, is the most agreeable and the most advantageous of the whole universe’.* According to this view, Byzantium was destined to become a world capital, enjoying an unrivalled position at an important crossroads of land and sea routes.
Located on the Bosporus strait, separating the Black Sea from Greece, and Asia from Europe, the city was the central hub in a network of trading routes— traders travelling by land from the interior of Asia Minor, or from Greece to Asia, were forced to pass through the city; while as one of the two maritime chokepoints between the Aegean and the Black Sea, it enjoyed a constant through-trade and could levy tolls and taxes on shipping by closing the strait at will. It inevitably developed into a bustling and economically vibrant metropolis.
Such sentiments owe much to hindsight, but derive originally from ancient sources written long before Constantine’s birth. According to Herodotus, in a famous anecdote, the Persian Megabazus ridiculed the founders of Chalcedon on the opposite bank as ‘blind’ for overlooking the more favourable site of Byzantium.” In the most extensive ancient treatment of the advantages of Byzantium’s situation, Polybius, that ‘most judicious historian’ mentioned by Gibbon, claimed that the Byzantines gained a reputation as “common benefactors of all’ (xowwol evepyeTat TavTwv), because the natural advantages of their city allowed them to control and secure Greco-Pontic trade, keeping it out of the hands of hostile barbarians, and performing a benefaction to the rest of Greece.
As Gibbon shows, these sentiments are not confined to the modern travellers. The geographical advantages of the city are commonly invoked as tools of historical explanation: Constantine’s choice of the site was an obvious one, given its natural advantages, and the earlier city is commonly described by modern historians as a ‘metropolis waiting to happen’.’
Yet this kind of geographical determinism is not the same thing as historical explanation. Geography can create only potential advantages; it requires human interaction to take advantage of them, and it is deeply problematic to use geography as an explanatory tool without exploring the complex processes of interaction between communities and their environment which are the subject of this study.
Such a view also overlooks the difficulties and dangers of life at the Bosporus, and the impact which these had on the local communities. Such generalizations, in short, by assuming the city’s geographical advantages as self-evident, do not tell us how the Bosporus impacted on Byzantium and the other local communities, simplifying to the point of meaninglessness the multifaceted interactions between those communities and the strait. Furthermore, Byzantium possessed a large chora which in the Hellenistic period stretched west as far as Perinthus, to the east beyond Chalcedon, and encompassed regions along the southern shore of the Propontis. It also, in partnership with Chalcedon, controlled the length of the Bosporus as far north as Gypopolis at the mouth of the Black Sea.
This region, as we know from local sources, was comprised of numerous small communities and villages, each with their own local stories, myths, traditions, and economies. These encompass the strait and Byzantium, the neighbouring cities and villages (Chalcedon, Perinthus, Heraclea, Astacus, Selymbria, Rhegion, Chrysopolis, Delkos), and Byzantium’s overseas possessions (the southern and south-eastern Marmara).
Polybius is partly responsible for the prevailing assumptions about Byzantium which modern historians adopt. Though not isolated, Polybius’ description, as the lengthiest description of the region in a mainstream ancient source, is afforded the most weight by modern authors. As I argue in Chapter 5, it is likely that the central significance given to Byzantium in treatments of the Black Sea was ideologically derived: the Greek Byzantines, worldly benefactors, utilized their nature-given advantages to protect Greek trade from the predatory encroachments of non-Greek pirates.
It is also likely that this view was encouraged by the Byzantines themselves: a competitive local rivalry existed at the Bosporus, in which Byzantium, Chalcedon, and other local communities contested the epichoric myths and legends of the Bosporus.® It is no coincidence that every ancient account of the excellence of Byzantium’s location makes explicit the contrast with ‘inferior’ Chalcedon. Very likely, Polybius’ account and the others derive originally from local sources.
Much more useful is precisely such a source: Dionysius of Byzantium’s treatise the Anaplous Bosporou.’ This text gives few references to specific historical events, and its main concern is with the topographical details of the Bosporus.'© Yet to ask exclusively historical or topographical questions of this source is to ask the wrong questions, and to miss the value of a unique and rich source. Dionysius, a local writer, is in reality only tangentially interested in topographical information, using it as a facade behind which he paints a picture of a legendary, mythological landscape along the shores of the Bosporus.
The epichoric myths and traditions which lie behind his topographical explanations are the true core of the work. Few of these are found in other ancient sources: Dionysius’ sources were therefore either local, now lost writers, or, more likely, his own knowledge of the region, passed down through personal experience and oral tradition."
These stories reveal a region saturated with traces of the voyage of the Argo, the passage of Io, and other less well-known local traditions, as well as a patchwork of extra-urban sanctuaries. Such information tells us much about how these communities, mainly living outside the astu at Byzantium, conceived of their identities and their heroic past, while Dionysius’ unique obsessions with the currents, promontories, the landmarks used by sailors, and the Bosporus’ fishing grounds highlight the issues which conditioned these communities’ responses to life at the strait.
Furthermore, praise of Byzantium was not universal, nor even representative of ancient outside observers. To most, Byzantium remained a backwater at the far northern limit of Greece: a frontier city, surrounded by ferocious Thracians and populated by alcoholic merchants and fishermen; hardly the centre of the universe. Theopompus, speaking of a seizure of Chalcedon by Byzantium, claimed that the Byzantines spent all their time in the agora and the tavern, and he criticized the Byzantine democratic constitution for contributing to the Byzantines’ licentious mode of living and drunkenness; defects which, he claims, were exported to Chalcedon when Byzantium’s democracy was imposed there.” It was a common trope among the ancient sources to make Byzantium the butt of jokes.
The wit Stratonicus referred to the city as the ‘armpit of Greece’.'* Menander composed an epigram on the topic of Byzantine drunkenness.'* While Byzantium’s position on the Bosporus may have created potential natural advantages, the romantic tendencies among modern travellers and historians mean that we rarely get a glimpse of the difficulties or dangers of life in this area. A more realistic view is reflected in these derogatory comments:
Byzantines were thought to live a tough, frontier life at the edge of the Greek world; to have had regular dealings with barbarian chieftains, and to have been forced to contend with shipwrecks and with the sea. All of this drove them to drink and lechery. Stratonicus had visited the city, and Menander was writing jokes which were meant to resonate with people who had perhaps travelled there on business. To most outsiders, Byzantium remained a dangerous, foreign, and smelly place, if a lucrative trading destination.
One reason that I have chosen to examine Byzantium and the Bosporus in this study is the availability of the evidence. Dionysius of Byzantium’s Anaplous permits a vivid reconstruction of the region’s history, of the local identities possessed by the Byzantines, and, most importantly, of the city’s relationship with the strait. Another reason is that Byzantium, the future site of Constantinople, would evolve into a world capital. Yet save for scattered hints (and excepting Polybius’ remarkable digression) the economic importance of the strait during its earlier history rarely surfaces in ancient texts or modern treatments. By structuring this study around the interrelationship between strait and city, and exploring aspects of the Bosporus’ history which were shaped by this relationship, it becomes possible to understand more fully the economic significance of the strait in antiquity.
Moreover, in this way it is possible to overcome the problems typical of local, city histories. A simple catalogue of events and the uncritical, positivistic assemblage of evidence (‘fact collecting’), as Finley complained, answers few questions other than purely antiquarian ones.'” One alternative approach is to explore what made a region or a city unique. This can only be answered in terms of regional specificity—the local features which separated one area from another and which defined the identities of the local communities, determined the commodities which the region produced and sold, and around which the rhythm of the local economy revolved.
If these were products of their environments, they cannot be understood or uncovered by extrapolation from more well-known examples or by the application of typologies. By appreciating the unique features of a given region, and how they influenced the historical development of human communities living there, it is then possible to use this local perspective to gain fresh insights into topics of wider significance than the purely local.
Though Finley’s disregard for local history is not widely accepted today, the danger of generalization engendered by disregard for local circumstances remains. Alain Bresson’s monumental L’économie de la Gréce des cités (Paris, 2008) provides a useful example.’® Bresson’s neo-institutionalism proposes a structural approach to the ancient economy. In this model, ancient economic institutions responded to unique contexts, and understanding the structures of these institutions makes it possible to understand how they reacted to economic stimuli and pressures (so Lytle).
Yet this and other recent theoretical approaches fail to fully overcome the problem of generalization: in Bresson’s model the structures of institutions are often viewed as universal, operating according to shared assumptions and functioning in similar ways in varied contexts. In fact, the ancient economy was comprised of innumerable and varied economies, each with radically different contexts and constraints which must be taken into account. As Cartledge notes, ‘students of ancient Greek economic life are faced with the problem of generalizing usefully about a world of more than a thousand separate political units, which were on the whole radically self-differentiated’.'”
Attempts to draw conclusions about economic institutions on the basis of evidence from individual regions rest on the assumption that those institutions functioned similarly everywhere, an assumption which cannot always be taken for granted. Bresson’s discussion of ancient fishing, for example, draws on evidence from Byzantium and a few other choice examples (Troezen, Cos, Iasos, Delos) to argue that salting and fishing were routinely the subjects of state monopolies.'* What is not taken into account is the extent to which Byzantium’s fishing industry was atypical, based on specific, local features which were not replicated elsewhere.'
It is difficult, Davies observes, to account for the wide diversity of behaviours and institutional practices of Hellenistic economies.*° One way forward is to begin by identifying appropriate regions; then attempting to understand what features of their local economies were ‘typical’ and which were ‘atypical’, specific to their region. It is the latter with which this study is concerned, and once these features have been established to be unique to their local areas they can be excluded from more general approaches, and used instead to add nuance to our understanding of other phenomena.
The methodology followed here owes much to Horden and Purcell’s Corrupting Sea. Their view of the ancient Mediterranean is that it is characterized by dense fragmentation: a ‘continuum of discontinuities’, which embraces “a definition of the Mediterranean in terms of the unpredictable, the variable and, above all, the local’.*’ In this conception, no two regions functioned in the same way, and the only way to begin to craft anything approaching a comprehensive picture of the ancient Mediterranean is to attempt to fit individual regions into networks of interaction and exchange.
Such a high level of variability from one region to another inhibits attempts to impose models on the ancient economy, or to generalize across regions. It is for this reason that Gehrke’s attempt to uncover the Greek “Third World’, his response to Finley’s criticism of local history, Jenseits von Athen und Sparta: das dritte Greichenland und seine Staatenwelt (Munich, 1986), is not wholly satisfactory. Gehrke, as Hornblower notes, organizes his treatment of ancient poleis according to Finleyan typologies: agricultural states (e.g. Boeotia-Thebes, Chalcis, Thessaly), agrarian states with maritime components (Megara, Chios, Mytilene), maritime states, states with particular special features, such as minerals (Thasos) or marble (Paros), religious centres (Delphi), or trading states (Aegina).
The fundamental problem with such typologies is inflexibility. Each city or region is far too complex to be safely categorized under one heading or another. Was Thasos a polis with special features (mines), an agrarian polis, a trading city, or some other ideal type (so Hornblower)??? The case for each typology could legitimately be made for virtually every polis: Byzantium could be classified as a trading city, an agrarian state, a city with a fishing-based economy, or a polis with special features (the ability to impose tolls on shipping). Instead, perhaps it is necessary to embrace the high level of variability in the ancient world, and to engage closely with the realities of life before superimposing generalizing schema and typologies.
By establishing these ‘realities of life’, it is possible to get a picture of what commodities the region could and could not produce, the level to which it was integrated with neighbouring regions, and to build from this basis awider picture. Peculiar local features, especially the dangers and difficulties of life at the Bosporus, were, I shall argue, much more important in influencing the economic and social development of Byzantium than its oft-cited natural advantages. These peculiar local features, deeply buried in hidden and out-of-reach contexts, escape any generalizing schema.
Over a long period of time, similar recurrent and observable patterns apparent in the Bosporus’ history reveal long-term historical continuities deriving from regionally specific features in and around the strait. The contention of this study is that these historical continuities, deriving from the interplay between strait and city, played a significant role in Byzantium’s historical development and the character of the identities projected by its inhabitants. This is not the same thing as citing the city’s geographical advantages as an explanatory tool, as Gibbon did, without further comment. Not every aspect of Byzantium’s history can be reduced to geography, and I make no effort to do so. By sacrificing comprehensiveness, it is possible to focus only on those topics which can be usefully understood through the lens of local specificity. The Bosporus, I shall attempt to show, was a ‘machine like no other’, and its history can perhaps only be understood properly through a close analysis of its local features.
Throughout the first half of Chapter 1, I outline what I understand to be the most important of the local conditions specific to the Bosporus, and which created a series of observable historical continuities: the currents and winds of the Bosporus, the dangerous promontories, the deceptive shallows and harbours. These combined to make the strait a treacherous place for sailors, generating a peculiar rhythm for shipping in the region, as sailors were forced to bulk at certain ports and natural indentations along the Bosporus while awaiting changes in the currents or winds.
This in turn created a guaranteed, seasonal through-trade of large fleets of ships which allowed the city and other sites to serve as the locations of customs houses designed to tax Black Sea trade. Furthermore, the great number of merchants passing through the strait attracted opportunistic predators, generating in turn the demand for a benefactor or protector. This role was filled in the first place by imperial powers, and later by the city itself, as it assumed responsibility for maintaining the safety of this passage for shipping. In short, as a consequence of these features the region developed into an economic resource, since control of the strait brought with it the ability to tax or to protect Greco-Pontic trade.”
Precisely how the region was exploited as an economic resource is then explored in Chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 2 consists of an examination of the Athenian Empire’s attitude toward the Bosporus and Propontis, the Hellespontine tribute district, which situates the Athenians’ activities within their historical and geographical contexts. The earlier actions of Pausanias and Histiaeus, and later of Clearchus and Philip II at the Bosporus, I argue, can be usefully understood when these individuals are explored in their immediate geographical context, and in relation to the Athenian Empire: each used piracy or the monopolization of force in an attempt to exploit the unique potential of the region, to cut off or control the strait, and to further their own interests.
The actions of the Athenians in the region should not be kept distinct from the activities of these ‘illegitimate’ powers, for although the Athenians legitimated their activities by their naval dominance and the establishment of an imperial ‘bureaucracy’, or something approaching it, their motives and methods were essentially the same. The mechanisms put in place at the Bosporus by the Athenians built on earlier precedents, and were in turn emulated by Thrasybulus, the Byzantines themselves, and Philip of Macedon. Such policies could be put in place at the Bosporus because conditions around the strait encouraged an extraordinarily high level of imperial involvement—the massed ships passing through the strait, regularly and in convoy, required the protection which only Athens’ naval empire could offer.
The intensity of the Athenians’ involvement at the strait would serve as the Byzantines’ own precedent in the following centuries. In Chapter 3, I continue my exploration of the financial exploitation of the region by examining the economic history of Byzantium and Chalcedon in the third and second centuries zc. The numismatic evidence reveals a peculiar historical episode: the apparent existence of a complex monetary system and alliance established by both cities during this period, which utilized Attic coinage alongside lower-weight local issues in concert with countermarks to derive a profit from the exchange of currency. This appears to have been, similar to the Attalid cistophoric coinage or the currency system in Ptolemaic Egypt, a ‘closed’ economic system. Yet while the Attalid and Egyptian systems were imposed from above, by a ruling power over a large kingdom, this system was limited to the relatively small area around the Bosporus, and was confined to this region and to Byzantium’s overseas possessions.
The role of the Ptolemies in creating this system is considered in connection with third-century Ptolemaic ambitions in the north Aegean, and the chapter builds upon the previous chapter to argue that the Ptolemies in cooperation with the Byzantines attempted to revive the old policies of the Delian League. Their anomalous position in the Hellenistic period and the capacity for the cities of the Bosporus to establish a closed-currency system, with the help of a Hellenistic kingdom, was another symptom of the Bosporus’ regional specificity. Whereas anywhere else a ‘closed’ currency system needed to be enforced by royal edict, the geographical features of the Bosporus permitted the cities to do the same without coercion, relying instead on the merchants who by necessity had to bring their coinage through the strait.
Chapter 4 explores the fishing industries along the strait. In the chapter, I argue against Gallant’s minimalist assessment of ancient Mediterranean fishing, and against David Braund’s suggestion that fish referred to as ‘Byzantine’ fish by literary sources were, in fact, caught in the Black Sea by non-Greeks but called ‘Byzantine’ in an attempt to ‘Hellenize’ the fish trade.* Instead, I argue that the availability of fish in the Bosporus was, like the ability to tax the strait or establish a controlled currency system, another of the peculiar local commodities of the area. Using epigraphic evidence for local fishing guilds, modern traveller accounts, and Dionysius of Byzantium, I identify areas in the Bosporus where fish shoal en masse, on regular, seasonal migrations, driven into gulfs by the currents, and argue that the regularity and availability of these fish permitted large-scale exports from Byzantium. This was, as the chapter contends, exceptional, supporting Lytle’s argument that fishing was not routinely subject to state monopolies, a move possible only in a few specific areas, such as enclosed straits where fish shoal, like the Bosporus.”
These case studies are designed to explore Byzantium’s relationship with the Bosporus, and the role this played in the city’s history and the Propontic economy: quotidian realities deriving from the Byzantines’ existence along the Bosporus. However, this study also explores the ‘identity’ of the local communities of the Bosporus, especially as this was determined or conceived in connection with their physical environment.
The ‘identity’ of a Greek city or community, I argue, must be viewed as multi-layered and highly artificial. It is not enough to point to similarities between cities founded during the periods of Greek colonization, and to classify their cultural identities in colonial terms. The very notion of colonial identity and the data used by modern scholars to support it are cultural constructs, artificially preserved by the communities themselves for specific reasons. Aside from the colonial heritage of a Greek city, I therefore attempt to understand other, equally important, facets of Byzantium’s ‘identity’, especially as this was shaped by the city’s physical environment.
The second half of Chapter 1, which deals with the relationship between geography and cultural identity, illustrates the numerous ways in which the communities of the Bosporus connected themselves with the strait and its epichoric traditions, leading to an intense but friendly civic rivalry between Byzantium and Chalcedon, in which the two cities each attempted to outdo the other’s connection with the strait. Association with local mythologies—the passage of the Argonauts or the crossing of Io—legitimated the cities’ dominance of and control of the strait, permitting them to portray it as the preservation of free shipping through the dangerous narrows. This local perspective then enables a fuller understanding of the rationale behind other identities projected by the Byzantines, explored in Chapters 5 and 6.
In Chapter 5, I examine how Greek identity was defined and preserved in a polis located at the entrance to the Black Sea, and which had a notoriously complicated relationship with its non-Greek neighbours. By examining the city’s cults and festival calendar, and by analysing the potentially distorting effects of our literary and epigraphic sources which deal with the relationship between Greeks and non-Greeks in the Black Sea, I argue that the anachronistic assumptions about the local non-Greek peoples of the Black Sea— Thracians, Scythians, Getae, Heniochi, etc.—reflect a deep-rooted anxiety about the city’s status.
The dubious honour of being the ‘first’ city of Greece naturally meant that the city was also the last, and, I argue, the Greeks of Byzantium actively attempted to define themselves in opposition to their non-Greek neighbours. How, if they could not prevent barbarian enemies, real or imagined, from reaching the strait and endangering Greek shipping, could the Byzantines deserve their reputation as “common benefactors’?
Developing this theme, in Chapter 6 I question whether it is possible to reduce Byzantium’s local identity to the institutional and cultural relationship between a mother-city and its colony.”° Institutions, cults, legends, even script and dialect—what Thucydides would call a city’s ‘nomima’—far from acting as objective, neutral pieces of evidence, represent instead conscious attempts to forge a colonial identity, so important to a Greek city in the Black Sea. Though the nomima of Byzantium, its closest neighbour Chalcedon, and the other Pontic Megarian cities show undeniable traces (‘footprints’) of their founder, can we truly use this evidence to posit a specific moment of foundation by a particular founder?
I argue that Robin Osborne’s model of Greek colonization, which views it as a long process rather than as a specific event, may offer a more appropriate way to interpret the contradictory stories in the literary sources for Byzantium’s early settlement than the traditional view of a Megarian ‘foundation’, while appreciating the undeniable involvement of Megarians (among others) in this process.”’ If correct, difficult foundational traditions provide very little evidence of the historical period of colonization, since many of them were invented at a much later date; instead, they carry great value in showing how the Byzantines conceptualized their city’s birth at a later date—how they chose to view their past, and from whom they chose to claim descent. From this perspective, the Megarian nomima themselves need not reflect a specific ‘moment’ of foundation.
They show that many of the people who came to settle on the Golden Horn came from Megara, but whether they came at once or if they arrived over a long period of time and in a haphazard manner, mixed in among people from other places, is unclear. It is for this reason that this is the final chapter. Foundational stories become, viewed in this way, another method by which the city determined its identity, this time in terms of stereotypical foundational stories incorporating familiar ‘ktistic tropes which tied Byzantium to the heroic age and to the great colonizing poleis of central Greece, reinforcing the city’s Hellenic, and specifically Megarian, credentials.
By approaching the history of Byzantium in this manner, from the perspective of the city’s relationship with its environment and the ways in which its inhabitants presented themselves, I have attempted to differentiate this study from earlier works on the city. Heinrich Merle’s Die Geschichte der Stadte Byzantion und Kalchedon (Kiel, 1916), written at the start of the last century, is the most accessible of modern monographs on Byzantium.
However, it is now outdated. Moreover, its preoccupation is with military and political narrative, and no pretence is made to have accomplished anything more than to reconstruct as well as possible a narrative history of the city from the surviving literary sources. Narrative does not strictly concern me except as far as it can illustrate Byzantium’s relationship with the strait: the manoeuvres of Alexander’s successors around Byzantium or the course of Philip IT’s siege tell us nothing specific about Byzantium; much more informative is the fact that Philip and the successors were attracted to the region in the first place, and Philip’s siege of Byzantium and seizure of the grain fleet at Hieron are treated here as evidence for the regional economy of the Bosporus rather than in military or political terms.”
Apart from Merle, another monograph on Byzantium falls short on entirely different grounds. W.P. Newskaja’s Byzanz in der klassischen und hellenistischen Epoche (Leipzig, 1955; transl. from the original Russian edition: Moscow, 1953), written during the Cold War, displays all the superficiality and aggressive ideological bias of the Soviet era. Newskaja’s dismissal of ‘bourgeois scholarship’ (‘die biirgerliche Wissenschaft’), referring to western scholarship, undermines the effort. Beyond an ideological agenda, Newskaja (like Merle) produced precisely the kind of local history which Finley cautioned against. Any and all evidence available was included and treated uncritically, but no effort was made to explore the city’s relationship with its surroundings or the nuances of the inhabitants’ identities. As the Roberts noted, Newskaja made no effort to familiarize herself with the territory of the city, with the local village communities, or the natural resources available in the hinterland.”
A disclaimer on the sources used throughout this study is necessary here. Aside from Dionysius of Byzantium, who comes with his own unique problems, there exists no other detailed ancient treatment of Byzantium or the Bosporus, and the ancient literary sources naturally only deal with the city in passing.*° My chronological termini span a millennium and the chapter arrangement is thematic rather than chronological, meaning that literary sources ranging from Herodotus to Byzantine Patria accounts are utilized, sometimes simultaneously. The epigraphic evidence is likewise scanty and incomplete. Most importantly, very little archaeological evidence has survived from ancient Byzantium, since the site of the city has been in continual occupation until the present day.*’ I endeavour to pay due attention to the problems with using late evidence, comparative material, or traveller accounts whenever these problems arise.
Despite these problems, fresh treatment of the Bosporus is demanded by advancements in the source material in the last fifty years. A synthesis of the coinage of Byzantium is now available: E. Schénert-Geiss, Die Miinzprdgung von Byzantion I-II (Berlin, 1970-2). Schénert-Geiss omits the posthumous Lysimachi minted by the city during the Hellenistic period, but taken in conjunction with the thesis of Constantin Marinescu, Making and Spending Money along the Bosporus (1996), the numismatic sections of Chapter 3 are possible.
Moreover, a collection of the inscriptions of Byzantium has now been produced: A. Lajtar, Die Inschriften von Byzantion (Bonn, 2000).*? Taken with the epigraphic corpora of other neighbouring cities, especially those in or around the Bosporus (Chalcedon, Perinthus, Heraclea, Apameia, and the Bithynian cities), the local inscriptions offer a view of village life, cult and ritual practices, and information on local institutions. Finally, I draw on modern traveller accounts, primarily Pierre Gilles’ sixteenth-century De Bosporo Thracio (1561), and J. von Hammer’s Constantinopolis und der Bosporos (1822), both of which provide geographical description and anecdotal evidence of the region following the course of Dionysius’ itinerary.
In what follows, I hope to show that the history of Byzantium should not be considered in isolation from the city’s geographical context. Throughout, the pervasive impact which the Bosporus strait had on the city’s history, on the rhythm of the region’s economy, and on the creation of the communities’ identities is revealed. This is not, of course, the only way to approach a history of Byzantium, and has no pretensions of being anything like a final word on the city.
I hope, however, that the long-term historical continuities which this monograph reveals illustrate how ancient history, especially economic and cultural history, must appreciate the little details. In this way, I attempt to show that through local history it is possible to build a picture of the ancient world from the ground up, beginning with the intricacies and unique features of the regions themselves, before fitting each altogether exceptional region into the complex and kaleidoscopic fabric of interactions which comprised the ancient Mediterranean. Though this local perspective can never be fully comprehensive, it can, occasionally, be used to shed new light on wider topics.
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