Iranians and Greeks in South Russia - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian ...

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of elders, no boule : a popular assembly, without power ; finally,
constitutional fictions to disguise the reality.
Still more interesting, the social structure of the Bosphoran state
hardly differed from that of the states which we have compared with
it. The state was based on an agricultural native population, attached
to the soil : a class of great landowners, friends and kinsmen of the
king, who was himself a landed proprietor, owning the soil of the
and a very powerful class of Greek merchants, some
whole kingdom ;
citizens of the cities in the kingdom, others foreigners, who owned
ships and who organized the traffic with the neighbouring semiindependent
tribes as well as with the Scythian kingdom. The king
himself was undoubtedly one of these merchants. He exported the
grain which he received as tribute from his vassals and as contribution
from his serfs. We must also reckon with a numerous lower middle
class residing in the towns, artisans and small tradesmen ; and with
a numerous population of slaves, who loaded and unloaded the vessels,
laboured in the factories, and so forth.
The same structure is observable wherever a Greek population
was obliged to submit to a native, Hellenized, or Greek dynasty whose
rule was based on a native population not barbarous but accustomed
to monarchic government. Peculiar to the structure of the Bosphoran
state is the historical evolution, more easily apprehended here than
elsewhere : an Ionian Greek city transforming itself into a Greco-
Maeotian state with the Greeks in a privileged position, and gradually
changing into a Hellenistic monarchy in which the two elements are
confounded, the natives becoming Hellenized and the Greeks
gradually adopting the spirit and the habits of the natives . The dualism
can be noticed in every department of life. In religion, purely Greek
cults are replaced by various forms of native cult, particularly that
of the Great Goddess whom we have already mentioned. Nearly
every Greek town in the Taman peninsula had a temple of this pre-
Hellenic divinity. Two of these sanctuaries have been excavated,
one near Phanagoria, where the Great Goddess was identified with
the Greek Aphrodite, the other on a promontory in one of the lakes
of the Kuban delta, that of Tsukiir, where she was worshipped, as in
Asia Minor and in Macedonia, under the name of Artemis Agrotera.
We have every reason to suppose that there were temples of the same
deity near Hermonassa and in the vicinity of Gorgippia, the modern
Anapa. The same cult gradually became predominant at Panticapaeum,
and it is well known that the patron goddess of Chersonesus was the
Parthenos, who is represented, in the guise of Artemis, on the coins
of that city. A significant testimony to the popularity of the Great