Agathopolis in 218 B.C.

Agathopolis — Spring 218 BC · A Harbour on the Strandzha Shore.

Agathopolis — anciently Aulaiouteichos, "the courtyard-wall" — a small Greek harbour-town on the south-western shore of the Pontus, set among the wooded hills of the Strandzha coast of Thrace between Apollonia Pontica to the south and the cities of the Bosphorus beyond. It is a modest fishing-and-trading port, a stopping-place for vessels that hug the Thracian coast, with its own civic identity but small means. Greek by foundation, it lies hard against the lands of the Odrysians and the other Thracian tribes of the interior, and looks for its prosperity and its safety to the greater Pontic Greek cities and to the goodwill of Byzantium, master of the strait to the south.

Where the wooded ridges of the Strandzha come down to the south-western corner of the Pontus, Agathopolis keeps a small harbour on the long Thracian coast that runs north from the Bosphorus toward Apollonia. It is no rival to the great emporia: a modest fishing-and-trading town, walled about and bearing the old name Aulaiouteichos, "the courtyard-wall", that still clings to it. Ships coasting between the cities of the strait and the Pontic colonies put in here for shelter and for trade, and the town lives by the sea and by what the wooded hinterland yields. Behind it press the Thracian tribes of the interior, Odrysians and their neighbours, among whom a Hellenised native nobility holds coastal estates; before it lies the open road of the Euxine trade, on which a small place such as this depends for its living and its peace.