Читать книгу The Herodotus Encyclopedia - Группа авторов - Страница 971

CHRISTOPHER BARON

University of Notre Dame

A region west of the STRYMON River in northern Greece, around and north of the Greek city of ARGILUS (BA 51 B3; Müller I, 163–64). The inhabitants, the Bisaltae, were Thracians. XERXES led his Persian invasion force through Bisaltia in 480 BCE and recruited troops there; Herodotus notes that the Thracians still in his day treat the road Xerxes marched on with great reverence (7.115). During his narrative of Xerxes’ retreat after SALAMIS, Herodotus relates a “monstrous deed” (8.116) of the Bisaltian king: he withdrew to the RHODOPE Mountains rather than “become a slave” to Xerxes and forbade his six sons from joining the Persian expedition. They ignored his command; when they returned alive from the war, he gouged out their eyes. Coinage issued by the Bisaltae, dating to the 470s and 460s, refers to a King Mosses (Greenwalt 2015, 341), perhaps indicating a period of independence after the Persian retreat until the expansion of Macedonian power under ALEXANDER I (son of Amyntas). The Bisaltae still inhabited the region, and maintained a fierce reputation, when Roman armies began to arrive in the second century BCE (Livy 45.30.3).

SEE ALSO: Bisaltes; Creston; Macedonia; Punishment; Slavery; Thrace