Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

the scythians as others saw them
settled by Sarmatians, a nomadic horse-riding people who had moved westwards
from a homeland to the east of the Don and would soon confront the Roman empire.
Ovid hated the place:
The Scythian marshes lie behind, a handful of names in a region scarcely known. Further
there is nothing but uninhabited cold. Ah, how near I am to the ends of the earth.
(Tristia iii. 4)
Tristia was written for his friends back home in Rome in the hope that they would
intercede with the emperor on his behalf: it is drenched in self-pity and no doubt
exaggerated. Of the town’s inhabitants he writes, ‘They are more cruelly savage than
wolves … . They keep off the evils of cold with animal skins and baggy trousers …
and have shaggy faces hidden by long hair.’ He goes on to observe that those who still
spoke some Greek did so with grotesque accents and laments, ‘I, the Roman poet—
forgive me Muses—am forced to speak Sarmatian … . The place is hateful and nothing
could be sadder on earth.’ The emperor did not relent and Ovid died at Tomis
after ten years of exile.
While his account may lack objectivity, it captures something of the frontierlike
quality of life in the old Greek colonies and the attitudes of the Graeco-Roman
world to the barbarians. The intellectual enthusiasm with which Herodotus and
Pseudo-Hippocrates had written about the Scythians in the fifth century bc was
now replaced with disdain tinged with fear. A century and a half later the Sarmatians
would pour across the Roman frontier—a prelude to the barbarian onslaught which
was to follow.
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