Chersonesos in 218 B.C.

Chersonesos — Spring 218 BC · A Free City on the Scythian Frontier.

Chersonesos — the Dorian Greek city planted on the south-western tip of the Tauric peninsula by settlers of Heraclea Pontica, a vigorous democracy of the Pontic frontier. Its glory is its chora: a great spread of vineyards and grain-plots laid out in measured lots across the Herakleian peninsula and walled off from the barbarians, the engine of its trade in wine and corn shipped across the Euxine. Every citizen swears the city oath — to guard the democracy, to betray neither the town nor its outlying forts of Kerkinitis and Kalos Limen, and to sell grain abroad from no harbour but its own. Yet the city is hard-pressed: the Scythians of the steppe press ever closer on its land and its daughter-towns, the Tauri haunt the mountains at its back, and Chersonesos holds its freedom by its walls, its oath, and the friendship of the Greek cities of the Pontus, the Bosporan Kingdom among them.

On the south-western horn of the Tauric peninsula, where the steppe runs down into the Euxine, Chersonesos guards its little world behind its walls. It is a colony of Heraclea Pontica, Dorian in blood and democratic in temper, grown rich on a chora unlike any other among the colonies — a whole peninsula divided into measured lots of vine and grain, ringed with field-walls and farm-towers, the orderly source of the wine and corn its ships carry across the sea. To hold all this the citizens bind themselves by a sworn oath, sealing their loyalty to the democracy and to the forts that guard the corn-lands of the plain. But the frontier closes in. The Scythians, once content with tribute, now press hard on the open country and threaten Kerkinitis and Kalos Limen out on the western coast, while the Tauri keep the mountains. Chersonesos stands a free Greek city on a hostile shore, its freedom no older than its vigilance.