Thasos in 218 B.C.

Thasos — Spring 218 BC · The Gold-and-Wine Island.

A large and wealthy island off the Thracian coast in the north Aegean, a colony of Paros — the poet Archilochus came among its first settlers and fought in its early wars. Thasos draws its riches from two springs. The first is metal: gold and silver from mines on the island itself and across the strait in its mainland possessions, the Thasian peraia, where the rich workings about Skapte Hyle lie. The second, and the more famous, is its wine — the dark Thasian, shipped in stamped amphorae across the whole Greek world under strict laws of trade. A strongly walled city with two harbours, marble quarries by the sea, and the cults of the Thasian Heracles, its chief god, and of Artemis.

No island of the northern sea is richer than Thasos. From its hills and from the mainland coast it holds opposite — the peraia, with the famous mines about Skapte Hyle — come gold and silver enough to have built walls, fleets and temples in the great days. But it is the vine that has made the Thasian name a byword in every market from Egypt to the Euxine: the dark, fragrant wine of the island, sealed in amphorae stamped with the city’s mark and the magistrate’s name, sold abroad under laws so strict that no foreign wine may be imported to be passed off as Thasian. In 218 BC, while the Hellenistic kings war over the mainland, Thasos keeps the watchful neutrality of a trading state — a free city of the north, walled and harboured, living by its mines and its wine.