Monday, 7 December 2026 | θάλαττα and Beyond: Xenophon and the Peoples of the Black Sea Descent

Giorgi Barnabishvili, PhD Candidate, Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University

As the Ten Thousand descend from the Armenian highlands to the Black Sea (Anabasis 4–5), Xenophon's narrative turns to a dense sequence of peoples, the Taochoi, Chalybes, Macrones, Colchians, Drilae, Mossynoeci, and others, for most of whom his account is the earliest extensive, eyewitness Greek report, and a foundational source for the pre-Kartvelian (Pre-Georgian) world of Colchis and the South Caucasus. This paper reads these chapters as ethnography rather than as logistics. Xenophon inherits the Herodotean apparatus, nomos, physis, thōma, xenia, but transforms it through the eyes of a participant who "saw and survived." Within it runs a continuous ethical mirror: from the "good barbarians" (the heroic collective suicide of the Taochian women; the xenia and sworn truce of the Macrones) to the Mossynoeci as anti-model par excellence, "the most barbarous, the furthest removed from Greek nomoi", whose otherness is defined by the inversion of nomos, not by blood. Barbarism thus emerges as a behavioural, context-dependent category. I argue that Xenophon's three innovations, instrumental knowledge, autopsy, and ethnography woven into narrative, position the Anabasis as a bridge between Herodotean ethnography and the Hellenistic and Roman tradition of expeditionary writing later drawn on by Arrian and Strabo.