Byzantium in 218 B.C.

Byzantium — Spring 218 BC · The Toll-Gate of the Pontus.

Byzantium — the great Greek city the Megarians planted where the Bosphorus narrows, holding the sole gateway between our sea and the Pontus beyond. No ship passes from the Aegean to the Black Sea or back without its leave, and through its harbours flows the whole trade of the Euxine: grain, salt-fish and the famous tunny, honey, wax, hides, timber and slaves. Yet its riches are matched by its torments. The Thracian tribes hem its territory from shore to shore and ravage its fields the moment the corn ripens, while the Gauls of Tylis in its hinterland wring from it a yearly tribute of eighty talents. To pay it Byzantium laid tolls on every ship that passed the strait — and so brought down on itself the wrath of Rhodes and a war (220–219 BC) it could not win. Hoping in vain for help from Attalus of Pergamon and from Achaeus, and pressed by Rhodes and Prusias of Bithynia together, it gave up the tolls and made peace, mediated by Cavarus the Gaul.

Byzantium holds, says Polybius, the most secure and advantageous site by sea of any city in our quarter of the world — and the most wretched by land. It sits astride the Thracian Bosphorus, the narrows only fourteen stades across between itself and Calchedon, and through that choke-point passes everything the Pontic lands send south and everything the Greek world sends north. The Byzantines are thereby absolute masters of a trade the rest of Greece cannot do without. But the same position that makes them rich leaves them ringed by enemies on shore: the Thracians whose chiefs are too many to beat in one battle, and the Gauls of Tylis whose tribute bleeds the treasury white. It was to meet that tribute, two years ago, that Byzantium dared to tax the strait itself — and learned that the masters of the Pontic gate are not strong enough to defy Rhodes, the acknowledged mistress of the sea.