Bosporan Kingdom

The Bosporan Kingdom, the realm of the Cimmerian Bosporus, was the Greco-Scythian state of Crimea and Taman, lasting from 437 BC to about 370 AD. Greek colonists and Scythian nomads fused there into something antiquity never repeated: under the Spartocid house the rulers showed two faces, archons to their Greek cities, kings to their barbarian tribes, and grew rich shipping wheat, fish and slaves to Athens. Mithridates of Pontus swallowed the kingdom, Rome inherited the claim, and Bosporus settled into its long second act as Rome's most faithful client kingdom, restored after Nero's brief annexation and flourishing through a golden age in the first two centuries AD. King Sauromates II even rolled back the Scythians and took the whole Crimea. Wheat paid for everything until the Huns came: late in the fourth century the Gothic and Hunnic storm broke the kingdom, and the longest Roman clientage in history ended on the strait of Kerch, where Panticapaeum's kings had ruled a thousand years.