Transcript
Chapter 1: Introduction to the Scythians
So on the last video, I got a comment about the different peoples along with the Phoenicians who also lived in Athens, and one of you mentioned the Scythians, which itself is a fascinating topic. There were Scythians living in Athens. So I thought I’d make a quick video about it. A little story time with Cy. First, let’s go over who the Scythians broadly were. How they got to Athens. What they actually did and why the most famous democracy of the ancient world handed some of its most coercive jobs to people who had no political rights at all. Scythian was the name the Greeks gave to a wide set of mostly Iranian-speaking peoples who lived across the grasslands north of the Black Sea and far beyond.
Chapter 2: Who were the Scythians?
Our richest ancient account of them is book four of Herodotus, written in the second half of the fifth century BC. In the very decades when Scythian archers were actually standing guard in Athens, Herodotus was, by his own admission, not really a great admirer of the Scythians and their way of life. But there was one thing about them that he just couldn’t get past, and that was they couldn’t be conquered because there was nothing fixed to conquer. He tells us,
“For when men have no established cities or forts, but are all nomads and mounted archers, not living by tilling the soil, but by raising cattle and carrying their dwellings on wagons, how can they not be invincible and unapproachable?”
That reputation was well-earned. When the Achaemenid Persian king Darius I marched into the Scythian lands around 513 BC, the Scythians simply withdrew ahead of him, refusing battle, and his enormous army ended up retreating. To a Greek audience, the Scythian was above all a horseman and a bowman. From the seventh and sixth centuries BC, Greek colonies ringed the northern Black Sea.
Chapter 3: Trade and arrival in Athens
Through these cities flowed grain, fish, timber, and slaves. The Black Sea region was one of the great sources of enslaved labor for the Aegean world, and Athens was tied tightly into that trade. However, not all Scythians who came to Athens were slaves. Herodotus tells us a story of a certain Anacharsis, a Scythian prince who traveled widely in the Greek world. When he returned home and was caught performing a Greek religious rite, his own brother, the Scythian king, Saulius, shot him dead with an arrow. Herodotus uses the episode to make a point about how fiercely the Scythians guarded their own customs. Later Greek writers turned Anacharsis into a sage. Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius have him in Athens conversing with the great lawgiver Solon. Anacharsis, though, was an exception. Our clearest statement about how men from Scythian lands arrived in Athens comes from an orator named Andocides.
Chapter 4: Purchasing public slaves
In 392 or 391 BC, near the end of the Corinthian war, Andocides came back from negotiating with Sparta and tried to persuade the Athenians to accept peace. His argument was historical. Every previous peace with Sparta, he claimed, had made Athens stronger. And to prove it, he ran through what the city had done with an earlier peace in the fifth century BC, fortifying the port of Piraeus, building walls and warships, us something important about their status. The Athenians weren’t simply paying these Scythians for their services, as might have been done with hired mercenaries. Rather, they had purchased the men themselves, making them publicly owned slaves who served the Athenian state. Now that said, scholars today point out that Andocides was making a political argument, not writing history. And so his sketch of fifth-century BC events is, well, not always historically accurate. So take what he says with a bit of salt. There is, however, some older scholarship that places their arrival to just after the main parts of the Persian war, specifically in the years after the battle of Salamis. The modern consensus is that they were bought around the middle of the fifth century BC and served in Athens from then until the early 4th century BC.
Chapter 5: The role of public slaves
To understand what “bought by the state” means, we need a category that has no real modern equivalent: the public slave. In Greek, the word is dēmosios, literally meaning belonging to the people. Athens owned slaves collectively the way it owned ships or buildings, and it used them for all types of jobs. Some of these jobs were surprisingly skilled. Public slaves in Athens kept records and archives, assisted magistrates, and served as clerks. Under a coinage law of 375 or 374 BC, a public slave sat in the Agora, testing silver coins and confiscating counterfeits. The fact that he was trusted to judge the city’s money, they were still slaves nonetheless. They could be bought and sold like property, and they had no political rights in the world’s most famous ancient democracy.
Chapter 6: Enforcing order in Athens
So what did Scythians in Athens actually do? Their most visible job was crowd management at the assembly. Meetings of the assembly were run by the prytaneis, the 50 members of the council from whichever tribe was serving its turn as the executive committee. The so-called archers were at their disposal. When the officials wanted a disruptive speaker removed, it was the archers who did the removing. In Plato’s dialogue, Protagoras, Socrates describes such a scene almost in passing, as if it were an everyday occurrence. by them to have any skill in the art, even though he be good-looking and rich and noble, they will not listen to him, but laugh and hoot at him until either he is clamored down and retires of himself, or if he persists, he is dragged away or put out by the constables at the command of the prytanes.
Interestingly, Scythian archers also made appearances in Greek comedies, particularly the plays of Aristophanes, where they show up as guards and enforcers of public order, sort of like ancient versions of today’s event security guards or nightclub bouncers. They were also played as comical figures, clumsy, easily fooled, and in one play speaking Greek with an exaggerated accent. These were comic caricatures rather than accurate representations of the Scythians themselves, but their appearances suggest just how familiar these men had become in everyday Athenian life.
Chapter 7: Life and logic of the force
So, where did the Scythians in Athens actually live? Here, our only source is the Suda, a Byzantine encyclopedia compiled in the 10th century AD, more than 1300 years after the fact. It says that the Scythian archers were the public attendants and guards of the city and claims that they first lived in tents set up in the middle of the Agora and later moved to the Areopagus, that is, the rocky hill just below the Acropolis. It’s a great image, but it can’t be confirmed by any earlier source, and the same entry puts their number at a thousand rather than 300 in the classical sources.
So we should treat this source with some caution. Why Scythians of all people? No ancient author tells us. So here we’re in the realm of interpretation. There may have been a few reasons. First, their reputation. To the Greeks, the Scythian was the archer par excellence, the fierce mounted bowman Herodotus described. So if you were going to create a force to keep order, Scythians were probably among the best choice. Second was supply. Through the Greek colonies of the Black Sea, men from the steppe were already flowing into Aegean slave markets. The Athenians didn’t have to look very far.
And third, and perhaps most important, they were outsiders. In a democracy of equals, one citizen seizing another and dragging him off the speaker’s platform was awkward. Who gave him that power over a fellow citizen? But a Scythian had no relatives in the assembly, no deme, no old feuds, and no stake in Athenian politics. He could be the people’s hands without becoming anyone’s master.
Chapter 8: Disappearance and conclusion
Then after at least six decades of service, they vanish from the written record. Aristophanes’ play Assemblywomen from around 391 BC is the last clear mention of them in Athens. By the 4th century BC, the orator and politician Aeschines describes order in the assembly as the job of the presiding officers and the presiding tribe, with not a word about archers. Most scholars think the Scythian force was gone by the early 370s BC. So what happened to the men themselves? Were they sold again as slaves? Were they freed? Did some stay in Athens, marry, and leave descendants among its ordinary residents? We have little to no idea. Our sources simply fall silent. And I suppose now I will, too.
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