049: Barbarians of the Black Sea - The Galatians & Odrysian Thrace

Hi there, you're listening to The Hellenistic Age Podcast, Episode 49, Barbarians of the Black Sea, The Galatians and Odrysian Thrace. The term barbarian is often played fast and loose in the writings of the Greek and Roman authors, whether to simply designate persons or peoples of non-Greco-Roman origin or, with a decidedly negative tilt, indicating inferiority in either a cultural or moral sense. One of the goals of the podcast is to try and expand the horizon in terms of cultures and civilizations that we learn about, versus exclusively focusing on the Greeks or Romans, not only because it gives us a better understanding of the peoples who also lived and died during the Hellenistic period, but also because it allows us to learn more about the Greeks and Romans themselves in the context of their environment, and their interactions within said environment. Please excuse my self-aggrandizement, but I bring up this topic because it has relevancy with today's episode, and our current theme of staying around Asia Minor and the Black Sea region. Though primarily dominated by Greek, Macedonian, and, as we saw in the last episode, Iranian rulers, Hellenistic Asia Minor was also home to two major groups that are almost exclusively labeled as barbarians within our sources. The first are a relatively new peoples on the scene known as the Galatians, but better understood as descendants of the Celtic warbands that invaded Asia Minor in the early 3rd century, and settled the region known as Galatia in today's Central Turkey. The second are the Thracians, a mountain people scattered across much of the northeastern Balkans, and of particular note is the Odrysian Kingdom, which was the most powerful indigenous state to emerge in Thrace around the Hellenistic period. In this episode, we are going to split up our discussion into two parts, in order to learn about how each group managed to adapt themselves to the changing environment, along with their reactions to Hellenization and the accusations of barbarism by their Greco-Macedonian neighbors. As a heads up for those who haven't already listened, back in January of 2019, I did two episodes on the Celtic migrations into Greece and Asia Minor, episode 20, which covered Celtic civilization and its history, and episode 21, which was a narrative of the invasions proper. By virtue of this, I am not going to cover the events of 280-275 BC in much detail, and instead I wanted to go in depth about the Galatians who had established themselves by the 260s, so check those out, since this is essentially a sequel to those episodes. The chaos and instability brought about by the warfare between the successors of Alexander, along with vast amounts of circulated wealth from the Mediterranean and Asia, had proved irresistible to the Celtic warbands that bordered the Hellenistic world. Like a tsunami, they descended upon both Greece and Asia Minor, some as part of extended raiding parties, while others clearly bent upon migration and settlement. Exaggeration, misinformation, and memories of the invasion of Xerxes in the 5th century likely influenced the estimates of the manpower of these armies, but even when taking a conservative approach, it would number in the tens of thousands, as many of the warriors brought with them their families, retainers, and slaves in order to search for a new land to call their own. There was not much in the way of coordination between all of the Celtic tribes who made up this mass migration, as some would remain in the Greek peninsula and flounder the sacred temple of Delphi or ravage Thrace, before finally being contained by the victories of Antigonus II Gonatas in 277. Thanks to the assistance of the Bithynian king Nicomedes, who looked to finish a dynastic dispute with Celtic arms, arrangements were made for some of the tribes to be brought into Asia Minor in 278, some 20,000 in total. The wealthy cities of the Anatolian coastline proved irresistible, and aggressive raiding and plundering soon followed suit, with some of the survivors committing suicide at the horrors inflicted upon them during their captivity with the Celts. At the Battle of the Elephants in roughly 275-274, the Seleucid king Antiochus I inflicted a major defeat against a Celtic army that effectively put an end to any large-scale raiding activities, though incidents of attacks in Asia Minor continued for a number of years afterwards. Instead of massacring the survivors, many of these Celts were settled by Hellenistic kings like Antiochus I and Mithridates I of Pontus. The formation of Galatia did not happen overnight, even with Antiochus' victory and settlement, which more than likely just greatly limited their efforts rather than stopping them outright. For the next fifty years, the settled Celts continued to be quite mobile and active in the political infighting that gripped Asia Minor until the late 230s, where King Attalus I of Pergamon managed to subdue them in battle and formally restricted them to the region that would become Galatia. Much like Caesar's division of Gaul, Galatia was politically divided into three broad parts. The northeastern portion, bordering Pontus and Cappadocia, belonged to the Trochmi, reportedly the most powerful of the three tribes. The interior was given to the Tectosages, formerly the territory of the ancient Phrygian kingdom and includes the modern city of Ankara. Lastly, the west was home to the Tolistobogiae near the Ionian coast. It's important to note that each of these regions were politically independent from one another and in a sense there was no such thing as the kingdom-state of Galatia, at least during the earlier period. Treaties would be arranged with each tribe individually, rather than as a collective. If one of the Hellenistic kingdoms was attacked by the Galatians, this could mean one of the tribes, two tribes independently, two working together, and so on and so forth. Each tribe is said to have spoken the same Celtic language, however, or at the very least had mutually intelligible dialects, though we do not have any surviving Celtic inscriptions from Asia Minor to challenge this. Almost all of our information on Galatian government is provided by the geographer Strabo. Though he wrote in the Augustan Age, he was a native of Pontus and a reasonably solid researcher, so it's not unlikely that he had good sources in neighboring Galatia regarding its political system prior to the Roman conquest. It's also likely that the form of government he describes did not properly emerge until the turn of the 3rd century BC, perhaps due to the influence of neighboring Pergamon. In each tribe, there were four further divisions known as the Tetrarchies, headed by an official appropriately known as the Tetrarch. We aren't sure as to how the position of Tetrarch is received, perhaps by merit, birth, wealth, or some combination of the three, but descendants would proudly trace their lineage to their ancestors who held the title. The Tetrarch had four officials that would answer to them, a judge to handle criminal cases, a supreme military commander, and two subordinate commanders. The Tetrarchs from all twelve Tetrarchies, try saying that three times fast, along with a body of officials numbering three hundred in total, would meet at a designated location called Drunemeton once a year. Here they would collectively discuss issues between the tribes and oversee murder cases, and it is very likely that there was some sort of religious element to the meeting. Drunemeton meets Sacred Place in the Celtic tongue, presumably some sort of grove. Whether involved the Druids, the religious figures of Celtic society in Central Europe and Britain is unclear, though certainly not out of the realm of possibility. After all, the organization of the tribes in the yearly council meeting are almost identical to practices in contemporary Gaul, and the involvement of a Druid class in legal and diplomatic matters is not a stretch of the imagination, though no direct evidence exists. To add to the largely decentralized nature of the Galatian government, there are also a significant number of chiefs underneath the Tetrarchs, numbers approaching nearly two hundred in some instances. An early attempt to abolish the Tetrarchies was by a chieftain named Orteagan who had tried to unite Galatia under a kingship, though this proved to be a fruitless effort. In his description of Galatia, Strabo avoids the use of the term town when speaking of the Galatians, instead preferring to say fortress or garrison. It appears that the Galatians preferred to occupy a series of hillforts known in Latin as opida, a shared trait with that of their European cousins, generally avoiding the classical-styled cities that were abound in Asia Minor. Archaeological evidence from the city of Gordion, or Gordium, demonstrates that the Celts were also capable of appropriating existing settlements, as there is a clear discontinuity between the and pre-Hellenistic foundations that were refashioned into the Celtic-style hillfort. Though Galatian is generally understood to mean a person of Celtic origin or descent, a point must be brought up about the ethnic composition of Galatia. You have Anatolian peoples living among the Celts, namely the Phrygians, for the region was their homeland. Along with the Phrygians, there were also Greeks who were recent immigrants or the descendants of Ionian colonists, and also a number of Thracians who had followed or migrated along with the initial wave of Celtic invaders. It is assumed, then, that the Celts were some sort of political elite within Galatia, perhaps acting as lords in the countryside to take advantage of the Anatolian Plateau's prime real estate for animal husbandry and pastoral farming, with the native Anatolians and Greeks acting as either peasants or merchants, as they had always done. Surviving graffiti from Gordion lists about thirty names, with two-thirds of them being Greek and only two being distinctly Celtic. But there are multiple instances of ethnic Celts receiving or adopting Greek names, such as Amentus, son of Geisato Diastes. However, this just further suggests the general avoidance of the cities as a whole by the Celts. One of the principal careers available to a young Galatian man, eager to prove his martial prowess, was to serve abroad as a mercenary in the armies of the Hellenistic Kingdoms, who were always ready and willing to pay for the additional manpower. Having seen the capabilities of Celtic warriors first-hand, virtually all of the kings contemporary to the invasion immediately hired them as mercenaries. Antigonus Canatus, Antiochus, Pyrrhus of Epirus, and even distant Ptolemy in Egypt. They proved to be fierce and loyal fighters in the hands of Antigonus, but their almost stereotypically fickle allegiance led them to staging an insurrection under Ptolemy, who accordingly left them to die on a remote island in the middle of the Nile as punishment. This incident did not dissuade the Ptolemies from recruiting more warriors, and they actually incorporated the Galatians into their system of land-granting in return for military service, as the Fayyum Oasis in Egypt would see a Celtic community for some time. Their fighting style seems to have changed little over the centuries. They are recorded as still wielding the weaponry of their mainland cousins with few, if any modifications, and some even continued the practice of going into battle naked, though the armies of later Galatia would adopt the equipment and organization of the Roman legions. Mercenary work also provided a supply for one of the other great exports of Galatia, slaves, as the region was thought to have been an active slave market at least until the time of the 4th century AD. Galatian religion is relatively obscure, but we can safely assume that there was a blend of Celtic, Greek, and indigenous traditions. Like I mentioned earlier, there was no direct evidence for the existence of a dedicated Druidic class in Galatia, but one macabre religious tradition retained by the Galatians was human sacrifice, attested to both by the ancient authors, most notably by Diodorus who recalls the wholesale sacrifice of Pergamese prisoners of war and by archaeological evidence recovered from the city of Gordian dating to the period. A number of named Celts were priests and priestesses of the Anatolian mother goddess Cybele, or perhaps her Hellenized incarnation as Artemis. A turning point for Galatia came in 88 BC, when, during his wars with the Romans, the Pontic king Mithridates VI had several of the Tetrarchs and chiefs allied with him execute on the grounds of treason, with only one out of a group of sixty managing to escape. This devastated the existing political structure of the tribes, and it inspired such fury in the Galatians that they collectively allied with the Romans instead, driving Mithridates out of the region under the leadership of a man named Deotarus of the Tolisto-Bolgiai. Deotarus, with the blessings of Rome and Pompey the Great, would go on to be declared king in Galatia in 64 BC, and remain a staunch ally and one of the earliest proponents of Romanization, reforming the army in a similar manner to the legions. Following his death in 40 BC, the kingdom would pass to his nephew Amentus, since Deotarus was apparently prone to filicide, but, in time, it would be abolished by the emperor Augustus and formally incorporated into the Roman Empire as the province of Galatia in the year 25 BC. From the perspective of the Hellenistic kings in Greek city-states, the Galatians were the epitome of barbarian, untrustworthy, warlike, and oftentimes terrifying. In fairness, it is not hard to see why. Many of the surrounding states were required to pay a Galatian tax, used to either bribe the Galatians to not attack them, or to pay for the ransom of captured prisoners, those that weren't ritually sacrificed, mind you, and the reports of captives committing suicide following their release are grim. Their reputation for breaking treaties is not entirely warranted, though, since they seem to adhere to the same principles as the Hellenistic monarchs, follow the rules of the treaty until it expires following the death of its signing parties and reopen hostilities. One only needs to look at the behaviors of the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kings during the Syrian wars to see a similar pattern. Galatia under Deotarus was a steadfast ally of Rome, and Cicero openly called him a paragon of loyalty and a friend of the Senate in a speech on his behalf. This leads to the complex relationship between the Hellenistic kingdoms and the Galatians, since the former was more than willing to incorporate Celtic troops in their armies, or use them as pawns for their own political ends. Attalus of Pergamon imported the Aegosages tribe from Europe in 218 to help recover his territories from the Seleucid Empire, and when they started to cause some trouble near the Bosporus, Prusias I of Bithynia had every last man, woman, and child massacred following his victory in the battle with the tribe. Victory over the Galatians was seen as the representation of civilization triumphing over barbarity, and the kings were quick to exploit it. Antiochus I received the title Soter, Savior, for his defeat of the Tolistobogiae tribe in the Battle of the Elephants, while Antigonus Canatus was able to take the throne of Macedon for the same reason. Perhaps the most extravagant propagandist would be Attalus I, a theoretical subordinate to the Seleucid Empire who managed to bolster his claims of independent kingship by defeating the armies of Galatian mercenaries on two separate occasions. Indeed, Attalus and his descendants made sure to cultivate this image. The author Pausanias recalls an oracle allegedly predicting the rise of a bullhorned champion who would defeat the Galatians, explicitly naming Attalus in the process. The physical manifestation of Attalus' glory would be the Great Altar of Pergamon, an enormous monument placed in the Sanctuary of Athena at Pergamon, of which only the base survives in its original form. However, I can almost guarantee that you might have seen one of the marble copies of the original sculptures that adorned the altar as individual pieces. The dying Gaul is a Galatian warrior, nude but for only his weaponry and signature gold torc necklace, stoically succumbing to his wounds. The other is the Ludovici Gaul, a Galatian man in the act of committing suicide after killing his wife, presumably to prevent themselves from suffering a terrible fate at the hands of the Pergamese. I've included the images of each one in the episode notes on my website, and they're absolutely incredible works. It also leads us to question the intent of the sculptor and the commissioner. Did they purposefully give a sympathetic portrayal of the Galatians out of some sort of respect? Perhaps the term noble savage might be appropriate. Or is it a sobering reminder of how alien and brutal the values and ethics of the ancient world were that they would celebrate the lamentation of the defeated? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Yet, despite its dissolution and absorption, Celtic culture persisted in Galatia for centuries afterwards. The region remained an enclave for the Celtic language, based upon an observation by Saint Jerome in the late 4th century AD. A more famous example is to be found in the New Testament, where a letter to the peoples of the 1st century Galatia, written by Saint Paul the Apostle, outlines his efforts to convert them to Christianity, relying on accusations of licentiousness and drunkenness that were commonly used to stereotype the Celts, along with sprinklings of calling them fools. Yet, Paul also appeals to the Celts' love of freedom and independence as his argument as to why they should follow suit. The story of the Galatians is one of cultural resilience, a diaspora of Celtic peoples far away from their homelands that managed to largely retain their identity despite being a minority population, in the face of both Hellenization and Romanization. A recent and accessible work on the Celtic invasions and the Galatians as a whole is The Galatians, Celtic Invaders of Greece and Asia Minor, written by John D. Granger and published by Pen and Certain Books, who gave me early access to a copy to help with my research for this episode, so special thanks to them, and the book should be released by the end of August of 2020. With the first half done, let's turn to the other group, as we'll be heading across the Bosporus back into Europe, and visit the lands of Thrace. Are you interested in ancient history and the occasional pun? If so, Ancient History Hound is for you! Hi, my name's Neil, and I'm the host of Ancient History Hound, a podcast which covers a range of topics across Ancient Greece and Rome. Whether you're someone new to it all, or a seasoned veteran, I've got you covered. Find Ancient History Hound wherever you get your podcasts from. Alternatively, visit my website, ancientblogger.com, or find me on Twitter, at AncientBlogger. Dotting the landscape of the Kazanlak Valley in central Bulgaria are hundreds of earthen mounds, an area affectionately referred to by Bulgarian archaeologists as the Valley of the Lords, the Balkans' answer to the Egyptians' own Valley of the Kings. Each of these earthen mounds, known as tumuli, are actually artificial constructs built over two millennia ago by the peoples of antiquity known as the Thracians, to act as tombs for the nobility and political elite of the various tribes that dwelt within the region historically known as Thrace. One particular tomb, unearthed in 2004, was loaded with many artifacts like weaponry, coins, and even the skeleton of a horse, reminiscent of the Kurgans of the Scythians, and a magnificent bronze bust of a heavily bearded man with a striking gaze, still retaining his original artificial eyes and eyelashes. The person after whom the bust was modeled can almost certainly be identified as the same individual whose name repeatedly was inscribed on the coinage and treasures inside. Suthes, more specifically, Suthes III, who ruled from approximately 330 to 300 295 BC, one of the last major kings of the Adrysian kingdom residing in eastern Thrace. Thrace in antiquity was a broad, densely populated region that encompassed the eastern Balkans to the European Bosporus, approximately modern Bulgaria, along with parts of Greece, Romania, and Turkey. The concept of a uniform Thracian peoples, or Thracian ethnicity, a label crafted largely by the Greeks themselves, has been under scrutiny thanks to the complex environment of the Balkans in antiquity, with peoples like the Illyrians, Paeonians, and Macedonians occupying a region of fluid borders and cultures. Herodotus described the Thracians as the second most populous peoples in the world, but extremely fractious and politically divided into dozens of tribes. The most powerful of these tribes would be the mountainous Tribulae, just north of Macedon, the Getae, bordering on the Eurasian steppe and western Black Sea coast, and the most relevant to our discussion, the Odrysiae, who dwelled within the plains between the Hamos and Rhodope mountains on the Bosporus. Virtually all of our written information on the Thracians comes from outside observers, for although the Thracians later adopted the Greek script for their own language, which is attested to by surviving inscriptions, they never wrote anything about themselves in neither Greek nor their native tongue. Some of our earliest mentions of Thrace come from the time of Homer, who lists them among the allies of the Trojans as mighty warriors and masterful metalworkers, which might be a perfect generalization for the Greek perception of the Thracian peoples as a whole. Herodotus visited the Black Sea while writing his Histories in the 5th century, and more than likely observed the Thracians firsthand. He describes them as heavily tattooed, idealizing a life of warfare tempered by feasting and drinking, and actually makes reference to the great tumuli that were built to house the dead. The martial prowess of the Thracians made them attractive mercenaries to the Greeks and the Romans, usually employing them as light infantry in the form of peltasts, men armed with javelins and a crescent-shaped shield to screen their own line and harass the enemies, but the nobility were also able to provide effective cavalry. Their usefulness is most obviously demonstrated during the campaigns of Alexander the Great, as they took part in virtually every battle, and perhaps formed up to one-fifth of all of his non-Asian troops. A common article of clothing associated with the Thracians was the distinctive headwear known as the Phrygian hat, which can either be in the form of a felt cap or a metal helmet. A crude comparison would be to the hats worn by the Smurfs from the cartoon of the same name, but also a feature shared with the peoples of the steppe. Indeed, much of the Thracian image bears influences from a wide array of cultures. Wealthy Thracian noblemen have been found buried with Greek-styled armor and indigenous weaponry. Thracian metalwork, especially with silver, was of phenomenal quality, and their drinking goblets were highly prized items, as suggested by both Homer and the treasure hordes found in the tumuli. Images often depict hunting scenes and animals, reminiscent of the so-called animal style popular among the Scythian and other steppe nomads. From the Near East came silver and gold ritan, drinking vessels in the shape of animal heads or eastern motifs that were the legacy of Thrace's contact with the Persian Empire. The image of the Thracians was not always a particularly positive one. Diodorus refers to the Gitae as living a bestial and barbarous existence, and Herodotus makes note of their licentiousness and petty squabbling. Political disunity was a common feature of Thracian society, and Herodotus even makes a comment saying that it would be the most powerful nation in the world if they ever got their act together. While the perception of your average Thracian by the Greeks was about as crude and warlike as you can get, the relationship between the Greeks and the upper nobility of Thrace was considerably different. The political elite had adopted Greek as their diplomatic language, and were quite involved with the affairs of the Greek colonies of the Black Sea by virtue of close contact. Athens was very interested in maintaining good relations with the Thracians, as they established several colonies in the Chersonese, and sought to keep the steady supply of grain and timber for ship construction flowing into the mother city. One famous Greek of at least partially Thracian descent was none other than the historian Thucydides, whose father Alloris was descended from Thracian royalty. Partially the reason why Thucydides was able to own gold mines in the region, and resided there following his exile in the Peloponnesian War. With his connections in Thrace, he is able to provide us a reasonable account of the political developments among the tribes at the time. During the events of the late 5th century, the campaigns of the Persian king Darius I along the Black Sea led to the conquest of European Thrace. This occupation persisted for almost 40 years, before being driven out by both Greeks and Thracians sometime during the 470s or 460s. But the legacy of Persian rule could be felt in two different ways. The first being in the development of administration, as the Thracians would soon adopt what are called peridynasties, which are thought to be near identical to the satrapy system implemented by the Achaemenids. The second was the power vacuum that was left behind following the collapse of Persian authority within the region. The tribe that took the most advantage of this situation would be the Adrysiae, led by a man known as Teres, who would go on to unite much of Thrace under a kingship that hitherto had not been seen before the middle of the 5th century. We have very little information about Teres' activities, besides his name appearing in the earliest coinage of the Adrysian kingdom. But we know a lot more about his son, Satalkes, who ruled from about 431 to 424. Satalkes expanded the borders of his father's kingdom to the Danube, and instituted a series of internal reforms, including road building which facilitated the extensive trade between the Black Sea and the Greek peninsula, giving access to tax levies that greatly enriched his treasury and made the Adrysian realm an extremely powerful state, larger than any of the Greek city-states of the south. Through tribute and income, the Adrysians were able to amass about 400 to 800 towns a year, an impressive amount compared to the annual revenues of contemporary Athens, which were between 600 and 1000 towns. During the Peloponnesian War, Athens acquired an alliance with Satalkes in order to counter the hostility of the Macedonian kingdom under Prodicus II, attempting to appeal to him with public gestures of friendship, like making Satalkes' son an Athenian citizen. An abortive Thracian expedition would be launched against Macedon without any real results, and Satalkes would later be killed in action in 424 while campaigning against the Triboli, the throne passed into his nephew, Suthes I. The Adrysian realm never achieved quite the same level of prosperity as it had under Satalkes, and following the assassination of King Cotus in 360-359 BC, the kingdom had effectively divided into three parts to be ruled over by competing family members. This was probably one of the worst times to plunge the kingdom into anarchy, because a new ruler had taken the throne in neighboring Macedon, namely Philip II. We covered Philip II and the rise of Macedon in a bonus episode in December of 2019, but suffice it to say that Philip was able to use diplomacy and warfare to restore the divided and weakened Macedonian kingdom into a superpower of the Balkans. Philip took advantage of the Adrysian division, and proceeded to beat back each territory one by one, until about 341-340, when Philip overthrew the last Adrysian ruler, Curso Bleptes, turning much of the former Adrysian kingdom into an administrative zone and home to several Macedonian settlements, such as Philippopolis. Despite the bleak outcome, this did not spell the end for the Adrysian kingdom. Thrace in general continued to be a headache for both Philip and his son Alexander, and following the death of the former in 336, the latter had to launch a campaign into the Balkans to pacify the Getae and Triboli tribes that were in revolt. Alexander would eventually make his journey into the heart of the Persian Empire, but in the meantime, one Thracian nobleman had been slowly building up a network to restore the Adrysian kingdom to its former glory, despite its Macedonian domination. His name was Suthes III, a son of Curso Bleptes, and although we don't have an exact date of his reign, we can reasonably say that it began before the year 330, probably acting as a dependent king or some sort of vassal to Philip and Alexander. Athenian inscriptions from 331 indicate that there was some sort of politicizing between the Adrysians and Athens, perhaps Suthes was trying to rekindle memories of the alliance with Satalkes during the Peloponnesian War. The Athenians were always eager to undermine Macedonian power, and Thrace had already lost two Macedonian commanders in the region, one known as Memnon, who unsuccessfully led a revolt, likely with Suthes assistance, in 331, and the other was Zoperion, who had died along with a large force while campaigning along the Black Sea. The revolt of Memnon inspired Suthes to openly declare his own rebellion in 330, making his first confirmable appearance in the written record. We have almost no idea as to what happened in Thrace between 330 and Alexander's death in 323, but we can assume that Suthes was acting independently, and is specifically referred to in the sources as the Thracian King. His first real test would come in 322, in the form of Lysimachus, Alexander's former bodyguard and a newly appointed satrap and soon-to-be king in Thrace. It wasn't that great of an assignment, since it meant that Lysimachus had to effectively reconquer the Adrysians and deal with the Embryonic Kingdom of the Getae to the north. Shortly after his arrival, Suthes and Lysimachus had engaged in a battle that would cause massive casualties to both sides, but no real victor could be declared with merely a mutual ceasefire put into place, while Lysimachus retained control of the Sea of Marmara to the south. The Thracian King would make a further attempt to destabilize Lysimachus' authority by aiding a revolt of Pontic cities in 313, perhaps at the behest of Lysimachus' chief rival, Antigonus Monophthalmus, the nearly-stranded Macedonian warlord in the territory of the hostile Getae and Scythians before being beaten back. The rebellion is the last event Suthes is known to have been involved in during the Wars of the Diodohoi, and from this point on, we lose his presence in the historical narrative. We have uncovered a fair amount of information about the changes that the kingdom was undergoing during the remainder of Suthes' reign, primarily the archaeological record. The Odrysian king has been marked by many scholars to have been a man eagerly Hellenizing and emulating his contemporary Macedonian kings, both in presentation and in diplomatic affairs. This is a pattern that had already been emerging to some degree within the Odrysian royal family since at least its very inception. See my earlier comments about the adoption of Greek as an administrative language. Suthes clearly wanted to be seen as a political equal to the Hellenistic kings that emerged following Alexander's death. His coinage was nearly identical in style to those minted by Philip and Alexander. He took a Greek wife with a Macedonian royal name, Berenike, who was probably a daughter or relative of either Antigonus Monophthalmos or Lysimachus, perhaps as part of the peace settlement with the latter in 312 BC. But perhaps the most commonly attested to evidence from his reign is Suthes' building program. The most studied of the cities of the Odrysian Thrace would be its capital, Suthopolis, found at any time between the 320s to the 300s BC, and is unfortunately located at the bottom of the Koprinka Reservoir near modern Kazanlak. From first glance, it bears all of the features of a Hellenistic city, nearly identical to the great city founding that was widespread at this time. It was built upon a Hippodamian grid with defense systems popularized after Alexander and bore the name of its founder, much like neighboring Lysimachia to the east. Suthopolis, despite being heralded as the poster child of Suthes' ambitious Hellenizing program, was not quite the Alexandria of Thrace that people have hoped for. The settlement is believed to have been able to house around 500 to 1,000 people at a time, as it only measures about 5 hectares in diameter, and possesses no accommodations for the lower classes or rooms for workshops and crafting. What it did possess was strongly fortified walls and housing for the elite, both royal and non-royal, along with their retainers, and perhaps it should be seen as more of a blend of traditional Thracian political life with elements of Greek expression, rather than the wholesale transplant of a Hellenistic settlement. No other urban areas are comparable to Suthopolis, and as such, it should be seen as an exception rather than a rule. Thracian and traditional Macedonian kingship bore very similar hallmarks, with the emphasis on hunting, feasting, and personal connections that bound the king to his subjects in lesser nobility. It's possible that Suthi saw more of the similarities than differences, but needed to further remove himself from the decidedly Thracian elements in order to be taken more seriously by his competitors. Despite his success in maintaining his independence, Suthi's aim for a restored Odrysian kingdom was likely but a fleeting moment. We have garbled evidence for his death, though it transpired sometime after 300, as a lengthy inscription from the period recovered from Suthopolis indicates that Berenike and her four sons had assumed control of the Odrysian government likely upon his death. Based upon numismatic evidence, it appears that control had rapidly decentralized, with several cities under independent dynasts minting their own currency throughout Thrace by 280. Without patronage and the backing of Odrysian wealth, which had never been as great as it was under Seutopolis, Suthopolis would quickly fade into irrelevancy following its founder's demise, inhabited for perhaps a century at best, and Thrace would largely return to its traditional way of living and settlement. The question of whether there was even an Odrysian kingdom following Suthi's death has been raised, though the name Odrysian appears a few times here and there within the sources, but it may be just as much a synonym for Thracian. In the 280s, Celtic invaders would swarm into Thrace, and cause significant havoc there before occupying much of Odrysian territory, founding the kingdom of Tylos in its stead. Whatever was left of the Odrysian royal family would become steadfast supporters and allies of the Romans, ruling as but a small client kingdom among other Thracian families well into the first century before finally being absorbed as a Roman province under the reign of the Emperor Claudius in 46 AD. With that, we can conclude this week's show. Once again, I have provided a copy of the transcript in PDF format for this episode, which can be found in the podcast description or the episode notes on my website, but I also decided to add the show's bibliography in the PDF file as well for your convenience. As a brief outline of what's to come, episode 51 will be in the regular show format, and will be released a few weeks from now, but episode 50 will be released in the next few days since it's going to be our celebratory Q&A episode. I've received a lot of interesting questions from listeners, ranging from podcasting in general to discussions on particular historical topics and hypotheticals, so I'm not sure how long it's going to be, but it should be pretty fun regardless. As per usual, thank you for all your support for the podcast, and if you like what you've heard, consider subscribing and leaving a review or by following me on any of my social media accounts. So, until next time, you've been listening to The Hellenistic Age Podcast.