Odrysian Kingdom in 218 B.C.

Odrysian Kingdom — Spring 218 BC · The Horse-Lords of Thrace.

The Odrysian Kingdom — the leading royal house of the Thracians, ruling the inland tribes between the Haemus mountains, the Aegean and the Euxine Sea. The Odrysae are heirs to the great kingdom that Teres first gathered and that Sitalces led, in the old days, against Macedon with an army said to number in the hundreds of thousands. That empire is long broken: the Macedonians of Philip and Alexander shattered it, and what remains in 218 BC is a patchwork of horse-lords and fortified residences, the Odrysian king first among many chiefs rather than master of them all. The land is pressed on every side — by Macedon in the west, by the free Greek cities of the coast, and above all by the Galatian Gauls of Tylis, who from their hill-capital lord it over the whole region and wring tribute even from mighty Byzantium. Yet the Thracians remain a people of warriors and gold: their peltasts and horsemen are prized as mercenaries across the Greek world, and their tombs are heaped with worked gold and silver beyond the dreaming of richer realms.

Thrace in 218 BC is a land divided. Where once the Odrysian kings ruled from the Haemus to the Aegean, now a hundred chiefs and tribes share the inland country, and the royal house of the Odrysae is foremost among them but no longer their undisputed lord. To the west looms Macedon, whose kings broke the old Odrysian power and still claim authority over the marches. Along the coast the Greek cities — Byzantium, Ainos, Maroneia and the rest — keep their own counsel and their own walls. And over all hangs the shadow of the Gauls: bands that came down with Brennus, survived Delphi, and settling about the Hellespont raised a capital at Tylis, from which they harry the Thracians and squeeze a yearly tribute of eighty talents from the Byzantines themselves. The Odrysian king holds his fortresses and his river-valleys, fields his famed peltasts and cavalry, and bides his time amid the wreck of a greater age — for within a generation the Thracians will turn upon the Gauls of Tylis and annihilate them utterly.