The Odrysians

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On the plain where the Hebrus runs down toward the Aegean, the river the Bulgarians now call the Maritsa, the ground gives up gold. It comes out of the burial mounds that stand in their hundreds across the valley and the hills above it: drinking vessels of beaten gold shaped as the heads of animals, silver greaves worked into a goddess’s face, a king laid in a domed chamber with his arms and his horse and a fresco of the funeral feast painted overhead. The people who put that wealth into the earth were the Odrysians, and the realm they built on the Hebrus was the greatest kingdom the Thracians ever raised — the one power that drew the scattered tribes of Thrace into a single state and stood, for a time, among the great players of the classical world.

The kingdom on the Hebrus

The Thracians were many. Herodotus reckoned them the most numerous nation on earth after the Indians, and judged that if they could be brought under one ruler they would be invincible — but they could not, and so they were weak. They lived in tribes that did not combine: the Bessi in the Rhodope highlands, the Triballi toward the western rivers, the Getae down by the Danube, dozens of names that recur in the Greek geographers without ever resolving into a nation. The land itself was rich in horses and metal and men, and the Greek cities planted along its coasts — Abdera, Maroneia, the Aegean and the Black Sea ports — traded with it and feared it and drew their hoplites’ mercenaries and their slaves from it.

The Odrysians were a Thracian people of the inland plains, of the broad valley of the Hebrus. Their distinction was political. In the first decades of the fifth century BCE, in the years after the failure of the Persian invasion of Greece had loosened the Persian hold on the European shore, a king named Teres drew many of the Thracian tribes together under his own rule. Thucydides, the closest of the witnesses, names him as the first powerful king of the Odrysians and credits him with extending his power over a large part of Thrace, “though there are many Thracian tribes that obey no one.” That is the founding: not a city, not a conquest in the Greek manner, but the gathering of a warrior people’s many lords under one royal house. Modern reconstructions place it around 480 BCE. It was the first kingdom the Thracians had built on that scale, and it would be the greatest.

Teres was a king who married his daughters into the powers around him — one to the Scythian royal house across the Danube — and who died, late in a long life, on campaign. His son Sitalces carried the kingdom to its height. Under Sitalces, in the middle of the fifth century, the Odrysian realm reached from the Aegean coast near Abdera in the south to the mouths of the Danube in the north, where the Getae paid him tribute, and from the Strymon in the west to the Black Sea and the Propontis in the east. It was no longer a tribal hegemony in any loose sense. It was a tributary empire with a court, a treasury, and a reach that the Greek states had to reckon with.

What Thucydides set down

The Odrysian kingdom enters the permanent record of the classical world through Thrace’s greatest external chronicler — the Athenian historian of the Peloponnesian War. In the second book of his History, breaking from the year’s campaigns to describe the realm his Athenian readers were courting, Thucydides set down a measured account of Odrysian wealth and Odrysian extent that has anchored every study since.

He gives the geography first: the kingdom of Sitalces ran, he says, a journey of many days by the shortest routes, both along the coast and inland, and he counts the tribes from the Aegean to the Ister that owed the king obedience or tribute. Then he turns to revenue, and the famous judgment. The tribute from the Greek cities and the Thracian districts, in the reign of Sitalces’ nephew and successor Seuthes when it stood at its highest, came to about four hundred talents of coined money in gold and silver; and gifts of gold and silver brought to the king came to no less again, over and above woven stuffs and other goods given not only to the king but to the lords and nobles of the Odrysians. For it was the custom among them, as the History records, to take rather than to give, and a man who asked and was refused was less shamed than one who was asked and refused. By this revenue and this general prosperity, Thucydides concludes, the Odrysian kingdom “exceeded all the nations of Europe which lie between the Ionian Gulf and the Euxine” — the strip of the continent between the Adriatic and the Black Sea. It was, in his accounting, the wealthiest state in that whole reach of Europe.

The judgment is the load-bearing fact about the Odrysians, and it deserves to be read as what it is: a Greek historian’s estimate, framed for a Greek audience, of a state he admired but viewed from outside. Thucydides is the best of the classical witnesses to Thrace, careful and close to the events; the wealth he describes is corroborated, spectacularly, by the gold and silver the Odrysian ground has since yielded. But the figure and the frame are his. The Odrysians left almost no writing of their own — their language survives in a scatter of names, coin legends, and a few short undeciphered inscriptions — so the political history of their kingdom reaches the present almost entirely through Greek authors writing for Greek ends. That distance is the first thing to hold steady about them.

The march against Macedon

In 429 BCE the Odrysian kingdom made the single great intervention that fixed it in the narrative of the Peloponnesian War. Sitalces, allied to Athens, led an enormous army out of Thrace against Macedon and the Greek cities of the Chalkidike. Thucydides, who reports the campaign at length, describes a host drawn from the whole breadth of the kingdom — the settled Odrysians and the independent mountain tribes, foot and the famed Thracian light cavalry, a force he numbers in the scores of thousands. It was, he writes, the largest army that had yet been gathered between the Ionian Gulf and the Black Sea.

The campaign showed both the reach and the limit of the Odrysian state. Sitalces could put a vast army into the field and march it where he chose; the Macedonian king Perdiccas could not meet him in battle and fell back behind his strongholds. But the great host could not be held together. The expected Athenian fleet did not appear, supply failed in the cold, and after some thirty days Sitalces, persuaded by his nephew Seuthes — whom Perdiccas had quietly won over with the promise of a marriage — turned the army around and went home. The march had demonstrated that the kingdom of the Hebrus was a power Macedon and Athens alike had to handle as a state among states. It had also shown that its strength was the strength of a coalition under a king, formidable in the field and difficult to sustain.

Sitalces himself died a few years later, in 424, fighting the Triballi on his own northwestern frontier. His nephew Seuthes — Seuthes I — succeeded him, and it was under Seuthes that the tribute reached the height Thucydides recorded.

The kings and their gold

The Odrysian state was a thing of kings and a warrior aristocracy. Its rulers bore a small stock of names that recur down the generations, fathers and sons and rivals reusing them until the historian must number them to keep them apart: Teres, Sitalces, Seuthes, Cotys, Amadocus. They held court, levied tribute, kept Greek secretaries and Greek luxuries, and married into the royal houses around them. Below them stood the lords whose gifts and plunder made up so much of the king’s revenue, the mounted nobility whose grave-goods now fill the museums of Bulgaria.

A generation after Sitalces, the soldier-historian Xenophon met that aristocracy in the field. In the Anabasis, his account of the long march of the Ten Thousand back from Persia, Xenophon and the surviving Greek mercenaries took service in the winter of 400 BCE with an Odrysian prince named Seuthes — Seuthes II — who hired them to win back the lands of his fathers in eastern Thrace. Xenophon’s narrative is the closest a Greek author comes to living inside the Odrysian world: the night feasts where men brought gifts to the chief and drank from horns, the cavalry and peltasts riding with the hoplites against the hill tribes, the hard bargaining over pay when the prince proved short of funds. It is a portrait of a Thracian dynast from very near, and it confirms from the Greek side what the tombs confirm from the Thracian: a society of mounted lords, of the gift and the feast, of the war-band held together by a generous king.

Later still came Cotys I, who reigned from about 384 to 359 BCE and held the kingdom together through a vigorous, contested generation before he was murdered. After him the realm broke. It divided among rival kings — at one point three at once, ruling the coast, the center, and the inland — and the division was its undoing. To the south the rising power of Macedon under Philip II pressed in, and across a long campaign in the 340s Philip absorbed the Odrysian lands. A last revival came under Seuthes III, around the end of the fourth century, who founded a new capital, Seuthopolis, on the upper Tundzha in the Valley of the Roses — a planned town on the Greek model, with an agora and a palace, named for its king. But the day of the great independent kingdom had passed.

What survived the fall of the kingdom, and what now speaks loudest, is the gold. The Odrysian aristocracy buried its dead under great mounds, the king or the lord laid in a stone or brick chamber with his weapons, his armor, sometimes his horse, and the precious vessels of the feast. The most famous of these treasures came out of the ground near Panagyurishte in 1949: nine vessels of pure gold, a phiale and an amphora-shaped rhyton and seven drinking-horns worked as animal heads, more than six kilograms of metal, made around the turn of the fourth and third centuries BCE for a Thracian royal table.

The Panagyurishte Treasure — nine vessels of pure gold made for a Thracian royal table around the turn of the fourth and third centuries BCE, found near Panagyurishte in 1949. Ann Wuyts, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

Other hoards — the silver of Rogozen, the Letnitsa plaques, the painted tholos tomb at Kazanlak near Seuthopolis — fill out the same picture: a court culture of immense material wealth, Greek in much of its craftsmanship and its imagery yet Thracian in its use, the feasting gear and the funeral splendor of mounted kings. The painted dome of the Kazanlak tomb, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1979, shows a Thracian couple at the funeral banquet, the best-preserved wall-painting of the Hellenistic age in Bulgaria, set in the necropolis of the Odrysian capital.

The gods of their world

The kings of the Hebrus carried their gods in their very names. The royal name Cotys is the name of a goddess — Kotys, whose worship the Greeks knew and whose night-festival the Athenian comic poets seized on and caricatured; the Thracian dynasts who bore her name bore it as a claim on her. The hunting goddess the Athenians installed at the Piraeus under her own Thracian name, Bendis, with a torch-race on horseback through the night, came from this same Thracian religious world, and the Greeks set her beside their own Artemis. Above all there was the rider. The Thracian Horseman — the Hero, the Heros of the dedications — appears on thousands of votive reliefs across Thrace, the god on horseback approaching the altar by the tree where the serpent coils, and the Greeks who lived among the Thracians read him through their own gods, identifying the rider now with Apollo, now with the healer Asclepius. The ecstatic god the Greeks called Sabazius and equated with Dionysus was reckoned a Thracian and Phrygian god; the whole Greek tradition that made Thrace the homeland of Orpheus and the cradle of Dionysiac and Orphic mystery belongs here too — though that tradition is a Greek-facing reception, the way the Greeks imagined the religious north, and not the Odrysians’ account of themselves.

These were the powers of the Odrysian world, but they reach the present at one remove. The gods are known through the interpretatio of the Greeks who named them with Greek names, through the silent reliefs and the grave-goods read by archaeologists, and through the recurrence of a divine name in a royal one. What the Odrysian kings themselves said of their gods, in their own tongue, is almost wholly lost. The other great Thracian peoples are known the same way and kept distinct by the same thin record: the Getae of the lower Danube, with their belief that they did not die but passed to Zalmoxis; the Dacians of the Carpathian mountains, whose kingdom Rome would destroy. The Odrysians are the third of these, and theirs is the Athens-facing story — the classical kingdom of the plains, the state Thucydides weighed and Xenophon served.

The Odrysian kingdom at its height under Sitalces, 431–424 BCE, reaching from the Aegean to the Danube. Alexikoua, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The afterlife of a kingdom

The Odrysian kingdom outlived its own greatness by some centuries, but as a lesser thing. After Philip II it lay within the Macedonian orbit, and after Alexander it passed through the hands of his successors and a renewed line of Thracian kings who ruled at the sufferance of larger powers. With Rome’s advance into the Balkans the surviving Odrysian house became a client dynasty, kings of Thrace by Rome’s leave, useful and watched. The arrangement ended in dynastic murder and Roman patience: in the 40s CE, after the last client king was killed, the emperor Claudius set the matter aside and made the land a Roman province. Thrace was annexed as the province of Thracia around 45 to 46 CE. The kingdom of the Hebrus was finished as a state, six centuries of independent Thracian kingship closed under the Roman administration.

What the Odrysians left was not a literature and not a continuous polity but a record assembled from three kinds of evidence, each at its own remove. There is the testimony of the Greek and Roman authors who watched the kingdom from outside and wrote for their own purposes — Thucydides above all, weighing its revenue; Xenophon, who marched with one of its princes; the later compilers who copied them. There is the archaeology, abundant and largely silent: the royal mounds and their chambers, the painted tombs, the hoards of gold and silver that confirm in metal the wealth Thucydides described in talents. And there is the slow comparative study of the names — the dynasts’ names, the gods’ names, the river and the places — that links Thracian to the wider Indo-European family and recovers a little of what the Greek translations buried.

Set against the other Thracian peoples, the Odrysians hold a particular place. The Getae are remembered for a god and a doctrine of the deathless soul; the Dacians for a mountain capital and a war with Rome. The Odrysians are remembered for the thing the Thracians were so rarely able to do — for having built a kingdom. On the plain of the Hebrus, for the span of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, the most numerous nation Herodotus knew found, briefly, a single roof; and the gold still coming out of that ground is the measure of what the gathering was worth.

→ Related: Thrace · The Thracian Horseman · Bendis · Kotys Goddess · Derzelas · Gebeleizis · The Dacians · The Getae · Zalmoxis · Dacia · Dionysus · Sabazius · Artemis · Apollo · Asclepius · Orpheus · Perperikon · Starosel · Tatul · Sarmizegetusa Regia