From 432 to 389 Pantikapaion was ruled by Spartokos’ eldest son, Satyros I. Although evidence for Satyros’ reign is limited to brief notes dealing with events just before his death, it is clear that he had already established the foreign policy framework that his successors would follow for the rest of the century: expanding
Pantikapaian power over the Greek cities and native populations on both sides of the Straits of Kerch while cultivating good relations with Athens by providing grain on favorable terms in times of shortage. Satyros’ success in implementing this policy was, however, limited. Thus, while the Athenians responded to his generous gifts of grain by granting him privileges, which are, unfortunately, unspecified (Burstein 1993: 813), his attempts to extend his influence east and west of the Straits of Kerch ended in failure. Polyainos (8.55) recounts how Satyros’ bid to gain control of the Sindians by forcing their king Hekataios to replace his Maiotian queen Tirgatao with his daughter resulted in a war with the Maiotians that only ended after Satyros’ death, when his son Gorgippos accepted Tirgatao’s terms for peace. Equally unsuccessful was his attack on the city of Theodosia in 389, which ended with his death.
Although Satyros seems to have been succeeded jointly by his sons Leukon I and Gorgippos, Leukon (389/8-349/8) was clearly the dominant figure and his forty year reign was remembered as being of decisive importance for the history of the dynasty, so much so, indeed, that historians named it after him: the Leukonidai (Strabon 7.3.8; Ailianos Varia Historia 6.13). The emphasis on the epochal significance of Leukon’s reign, however, should not obscure the continuities between his policies and those of Satyros, particularly in the area of foreign policy. So his first major foreign policy achievement was the conquest of Theodosia. After an initial failure, most likely in the 370s, caused by the intervention of Herakleia Pontike, which probably feared for the safety of its colony Chersonesos (Burstein 1974: 416), Leukon succeed in conquering the city. The date of Theodosia’s conquest is unknown, but it occurred sometime before 354, when Demosthenes (20.33) refers to it as being under Leukon’s control.
Leukon also resumed his father’s expansionist policy in the Taman Peninsula. A recently published inscription reveals that Leukon, like Satyros, first sought to bring the Sindians under his influence by supporting Hekataios against Tirgatao and her children (Graham 2002: 95-9). Diplomacy soon was replaced by force, and by the end of his reign Leukon had conquered and made himself king of the Sindians and their neighbors, the Toretai, the Dandarioi, and the Psessoi. Unfortunately, epi-graphic evidence indicates only that these important events, which extended Leu-kon’s power over the peoples of the Taman Peninsula and their neighbors immediately to the north and south, occurred sometime after the conquest of Theodosia.
Leukon’s reign was also marked by a dramatic political reorganization that is reflected in his adoption for the first time of a formal titulary for the tyranny: Archon of Bosporos and Theodosia. Although scholars have argued that the title ‘‘Archon’’ as opposed to ‘‘Basileus’’ reflects Leukon’s desire to disguise his real position by claiming to be holding a normal polis office, this is unlikely since none of the cities under his rule used the term ‘‘Archon’’ for their chief political office. Rather, as has long been recognized, Leukon’s new title reflects a political conception similar to that embodied in his contemporary Dionysios I of Syracuse’s title Archon of Sicily, namely, autocratic rule of a territorial state centered at Pantikapaion in which the subject Greek cities had lost their independent identity. Confirmation of this interpretation is provided by three facts. First, in contemporary epigraphic and literary sources all the political decisions of the Bosporan state are treated as the result of personal decisions by Leukon and his successors, and only they represent Bosporos in diplomatic relations with other states. Second, signs of polis sovereignty such as the minting of coins by cities ruled by Leukon cease. Third, and finally, individuals from the region are consistently described as Bosporans and not citizens of a particular polis in non-Bosporan documents. The distinction between the titles used by Leukon to describe his rule of his Greek and non-Greek subjects in the final form of his titulary - Archon of Bosporos and Theodosia and King of the Sindians, Toretai, Dandarioi, and Psessoi - are to be explained, therefore, not so much by a difference in the nature of his rule of the two groups of subjects as by the previous use of the title ‘‘Basileus’’ or its equivalent by the native rulers he supplanted.
As has long been recognized, the effect of Leukon’s reforms was to create a multiethnic quasi-monarchy centered on the Straits of Kerch that foreshadowed the Hellenistic kingdoms in many ways, including treating important aspects of the economy as governmental monopolies - most notably, the export of grain from Bosporan territory. Thus, Demosthenes notes that Leukon and successors personally granted tax exemptions and priority loading ofgrain for ships bound for Athens, while inscriptions attest grants of similar privileges to other cities (Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum3 212: Mytilene). Moreover, although Demosthenes’ claim (20.32-3) that Leukon provided Athens with 400,000 medimnoi of grain per year, or half its annual imports, or Strabon’s (7.4.6) that he made the city a one-time gift of 2,100,000 medimnoi of grain, are controversial, it is clear that Leukon and his successors grew rich on the revenues generated by the grain trade. Archaeological evidence of the growth of the trade and the extent of the wealth it generated is provided by the expansion of agricultural settlements, particularly in the Taman peninsula and by the monumental tombs of the dynasty and extensive building projects undertaken by the tyrants at Pantikapaion and elsewhere in their realm.
Nor was their role in the trade passive. As already mentioned, Demosthenes (20.33) also remarked that Leukon transformed Theodosia into a major grain exporting center, and he probably also encouraged expansion of agricultural settlement in the hinterlands of the Greek cities of his realm, particularly in the Taman peninsula. It is unfortunate, therefore, that neither the date nor the circumstances in which Leukon’s reforms took place are known. The fact that Leukon is still called a Pantikapaian and not Bosporan in a decree of the Arkadian League ( CIRB (Struve 1965) 37) may, however, provide a terminus post quem of 369 for their completion, while Polyainos’ (6.9.2-3) references to conspiracies against Leukon by his ‘‘friends’’ and ‘‘trierarchs’’ and his reliance on non-Greek troops during the war with Herakleia Pontike suggests that his plans met strong resistance among his Greek subjects.
Leukon was succeeded in 349/8 jointly by his sons Spartokos II (349/8-344/3) and Pairesades I (349/8-311/10), who followed their father’s policies, exploiting their control of the export of Bosporan grain to maintain good relations with Athens, while continuing to extend Bosporan power eastward until by the end of Pairesades’ rule it included all the Maiotians and the Thateis and reached, according to a Bosporan poet, the Caucasus Mountains (CIRB 113). Pantikapaion was not the only Greek city to build an empire by conquering other Greek cities. Another was Chersonesos, which carved out a place for itself in the grain trade by annexing Kerkinitis and Kalos Limen in the western Crimea, and reorganizing their choras by dividing them into regular plots protected from Scythian and Taurian raids by rural fortresses. Even more successful was Chersonesos’ mother city, Herakleia Pontike.
Herakleia’s emergence as the pre-eminent Greek city on the south coast of the Black Sea was delayed until the late fourth century. Although the city did intervene on the side of Theodosia in its struggle with Leukon and founded a colony at Kallatis in the Dobruja, severe stasis dominated Herakleia’s political life for much of the first half of the century. The problem was rooted in the unequal division of the land conquered from the Mariandynoi and led to increasingly serious agitation for cancellation of debts and redistribution of land. By 364 the situation had become so threatening that in desperation the leaders of Herakleia’s ruling oligarchy invited a political exile named Klearchos, who was serving as a mercenary commander for a nearby Persian military official, to return and bring order to the city. Once in the city, however, Klearchos turned on his putative employers and used his mercenaries to become tyrant. The estates of the oligarchs were confiscated and their slaves freed, while those members of Herakleia's aristocracy who managed to escape Klearchos' purge, and their descendants, were to remain in exile until 281.
The dynasty founded by Klearchos lasted for eighty years, until it was overthrown and Herakleia was annexed by Lysimachos in 284. After a period of consolidation under the rule of the first two tyrants, Klearchos (364-352) and Satyros (352-346), Herakleote foreign policy became openly expansionist during the reigns of Timotheos (346-337) and Dionysios (337-305), resulting in the creation of an empire that extended eastward along the north Anatolian coast from the Rhebas River in Bithynia to central Paphlagonia and included the cities of Tieion, Sesamos, Kromna, and Kytoros, giving Herakleia control of the principal ports along the route followed by grain ships sailing from the Crimea to the Hellespont. Numismatic evidence indicates that the expansion of Herakleote territory in northern Anatolia was accompanied by an extension of the city’s diplomatic influence beyond the limits of its empire to include Amisos in northern Anatolia and the cities of the western Crimea, while the abundance of Herakleote amphora stamps found on sites throughout the Black Sea attests to the city's emergence as one of the principal wineexporting centers in the region.
The Greek cities were not the only powers to take advantage of the withdrawal of Athens from the Black Sea. Pressure on the Greek cities of the region by the nonGreek states of their hinterlands also revived in the fourth century. As was true a century earlier, the greatest of these states was that of the Royal Scythians, which threatened Bosporos and Chersonesos and its neighbors from its center north of the Crimea. Unfortunately, the sources preserve only scattered references to hostilities between the Scythians and Bosporos and Chersonesos, with little indication of their scale or seriousness. A clearer indication of the magnitude of the threat posed by the Scythians is provided, however, by the elite residences, monumental tombs, and spectacular gold and bronze art works that were created by Greek craftsmen for Scythian kings and aristocrats (Tsetskhladze 1998: 55-92).
These wonderful objects have primarily been viewed as works of art and ethnographic documents since they were first discovered in the eighteenth century. They have been and continue to be admired for their superb craftsmanship and their illuminating depiction of Scythian life, and treated as evidence for the closeness of cultural interaction between Greeks and Scythians, with little concern for their political implications. All of this is undeniably true, but such interpretations ignore an important fact: the most likely mechanism by which these objects reached the
Scythians is diplomatic gift exchange. Their abundance and richness is, therefore, also clear evidence of the high price Bosporos and the other Greek cities that provided them had to pay for protection against raiding by their Scythian neighbors.
Although the price the north Pontic Greek cities paid for protection from Scythian raiding was high and the security they gained was precarious, it was still worth the expense. Safety for the new settlements in the cities’ hinterlands was essential to the expansion of agricultural production that fed the growing grain trade with the Aegean and the trade in wine between the cities that is well documented both archaeologically and epigraphically. Even more important, however: it opened the interior of Scythia to trade with the Pontic cities. How far into the interior that trade actually reached is suggested by the remarkable discovery of a boat that had sunk with its cargo of fifteen fine bronze vessels and the body of its owner about 350 km north of the coast of the Black Sea on one of the tributaries of the Dnieper River (Graham 1984: 8). Unfortunately, the ethnicity of the boat’s owner cannot be determined, but the existence at major Scythian settlements scattered between the Dnieper and the Don of what can only be called Greek quarters, complete with Greek-style fortifications and houses and large amounts of Greek pottery, is clear evidence that Greek traders settled for long periods in the Scythian interior (Tsetskhladze 2000: 236-8). Unfortunately, what they traded for is nowhere made clear, but the recognition that the prime source of grain for the grain trade was the Pontic cities’ own hinterlands suggests that it probably consisted of typical steppe products such as animal hides and tallow, fine textiles, and especially slaves for which the Black Sea is known to have been a major source (Finley 1962: 51-9).
Similar conditions faced the Greek cities elsewhere in the Black Sea cities. Most difficult was the situation of south-coast cities such as Herakleia Pontike and Sinope, which attempted to maintain a delicate balance between local independence and loyalty to Persia in an environment dominated by ambitious satraps freed from central control by the chronic instability that characterized the long reign of Artaxerxes II. Equally complicated but far more dangerous was the situation of the cities of the west coast, which found themselves after the withdrawal of Athens increasingly serving as both pawns and prizes in an ongoing struggle for domination between the Odrysians in the south and recently emerged Getic and Scythian states in the north. Because of the lack of sources it is impossible to reconstruct in detail the history of this struggle, but the fact that by the middle of the century major cities throughout the area were ruled by non-Greeks - Apollonia Pontike by the Odrysians, Istria by the Getai, and Kallatis by the Scythians - strongly suggests that most had lost their independence by that time. What the ultimate result of these developments would have been is, however, unknown, because the political environment of the Black Sea was changed fundamentally by the sudden and forceful intervention of a new power into the region in the 340s: Macedon.
Two factors induced Philip II of Macedon (360-336) to intervene in the Black Sea: his hope of finally ending Odrysian meddling in Macedonian affairs and his desire to secure the rich land and mineral resources of Thrace for Macedon. By the late 340s Philip had decisively defeated the Odrysians and annexed Thrace, thereby extending Macedonian power north to the Danube, where it threatened both the Getai and the Scythians. Divide and conquer had been the key to Philip’s success in northern and central Greece, and the same policy served him well in the Black Sea. Finding the
Scythians and Getai at loggerheads over control of the city of Istria, Philip initially responded favorably to the Scythian king Atheas’ offer to make him his heir in return for his support against the Getai, only to betray his would-be ally’s hopes by agreeing to an alliance, brokered by the city of Apollonia Pontike, that was sealed by marriage to the Getic king’s daughter. Philip then followed up his diplomatic success with an equally decisive military campaign against now isolated Atheas in 339 that left the Scythian king dead on the field and Macedon the dominant power in the northern Balkans and ruler of the west coast Pontic cities from the Bosporos to the Danube.
Philip’s triumph was short-lived, however. Less than a decade later his achievements were undone as a result of his son Alexander’s dramatic conquest of the Persian Empire. The south-coast cities suddenly found themselves in a new and particularly threatening environment, since the collapse of Persian power in Anatolia freed their non-Greek neighbors from the last vestiges of Persian authority and facilitated the emergence of new and potentially dangerous states such as the kingdoms of Bithynia and Pontos. A similarly unstable situation was created on the west and north coasts, where the death of Zopyrion, Alexander’s governor of Thrace, and the destruction of his army under the walls of Olbia in 326 by the Scythians (Vinogradov 1997a: 322-35), was followed by a major Thracian revolt and the reestablishment of an Odrysian kingdom by Seuthes III (c. 326-300) that was to last well into the Hellenistic Period, and once again to threaten the independence of the west Pontic cities (Burstein 1986: 21-4). Although some of his ancient biographers suggested that Alexander may have intended to campaign in the Black Sea after returning from India, his sudden death in 323 aborted any such plans, leaving it to his successors to try to restore Macedonian power in the region; but that is another story.
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