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

INTRODUCTORY 7
the most extensive reading, makes them a perfect storehouse of
information ; his judgement is sound when he is deahng with Greek
objects ; and his interpretations of religious representations are
sometimes very happy. But he was never able to understand monuments
that were not purely Greek. Just as he refused to recognize
Mycenaean culture, so his learning, limited to the Greek world, was
incapable of detecting the Oriental and prehistoric elements in the
antiquities of South Russia, and of appreciating the significance of
those elements.
Unfortunately he exercised a very powerful influence on succeeding
generations. Vladimir Stasov and Nikodim Kondakov had divined
the necessity of understanding the native civilization as such, but they
did not succeed in putting their idea into practice, and the book of
Tolstoy and Kondakov, which I have already mentioned, is a mere
repertory, though a very useful one, of archaeological material. But
Kondakov and Stasov stood almost alone. Much has been written
about South Russia, but the writings are always dissertations on the
Greek towns, commentaries on the fourth book of Herodotus, or
studies of one or two isolated objects. Even the great work of Minns,
an extremely useful and an extremely learned book, is but a repertory,
although as a repertory almost faultless : what he gives us is a juxtaposition
of Scythians and Greeks, two separate parts, copiously
illustrated, and no more. The same is true of Latyshev's erudite
works, and of the recent articles by Ernst von Stern. The point of
view is everywhere the same : that of the Hellenist in whose eyes the'
native world has only a relative value, by virtue of its influence upon
Greek life in the Greek cities.
My own point of view in all these questions of South Russian
history is a different one. I take as my starting-point the unity of the
region which we call South Russia ; the intersection of influences in
that vast tract of country—Oriental and southern influences arriving
by way of the Caucasus and the Black Sea, Greek influences spreading
along the sea routes, and Western influences passing down the great
and the consequent formation, from time to time,
Danubian route ;
of mixed civilizations, very curious and very interesting, influencing
in their turn Central Russia on the one hand, by way of the great
Russian rivers, and on the other Central Europe, especially the region
of the Danube.
I shall treat these matters with greater detail in succeeding
chapters : for the present I should like to state in general terms, what
the classical world gave to South Russia, and what it received from
South Russia in return.