Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/39

 THRACIASS AND GREEK COLONIES IN THRACE. 21 tions. 1 The Thracian chief deduced his pedigree from a god called by the Greeks Hermes, to whom he offered up worship apart from the rest of his tribe, sometimes with the acceptable present of a human victim. He tattooed his body, 2 and that of the women belonging to him, as a privilege of honorable descent: he bought his wives from their parents, and sold his children for exportation to the foreign merchant : he held it disgraceful to cultivate the earth, and felt honored only by the acquisitions of w.'ir and robbery. The Thracian tribes worshipped deities whom the Greeks assimilate to Ares, Dionysus, and Artemis : the great sanctuary and oracle of their god Dionysus was in one of the loftiest summits of Rhodope, amidst dense and foggy thickets, the residence of the fierce and unassailable Satraa. To illustrate the Thracian character, we may turn to a deed perpetrated by the king of the Bisaltas, perhaps one out of several chiefs of that extensive Thracian tribe, whose territory, between Stry mon and Axius, lay in the direct march of Xerxes into Greece, and who fled to the desolate heights of Rhodope, to escape the ignominy of being dragged along amidst the compulsory auxiliaries of the Persian invasion, forbidding his six sons to take any part in it. From recklessness, or curiosity, the sons disobeyed his commands, and accompanied Xerxes into Greece ; they returned unhurt by the Greek spear ; but the incensed father, when they again came into his presence, caused the eyes of all of them to be put out. Exultation of success manifested itself in the Thracians by increased alacrity in shedding blood ; but as war- riors, the only occupation which they esteemed, they were not less brave than patient of hardship, and maintained a good front, under their own peculiar array, against forces much superior in all military efficacy. 3 It appears that the Thynians and Bithy- 1 Mannert assimilates the civilization of the Thracians to that of the Gauls when Julius Csesar invaded them, a great injustice to the latter, in my judgment (Geograph. Gr. und Rom. vol. vii, p. 23). Plutarch (De Sera Numin. Vindict. c. 13, p. 558) speaks as if the women only were tattooed, in Thrace : he puts a singular interpretation upon it, as a continuous punishment on the sex for having slain Orpheus. 9 For the Thracians generally, see Herodot. v, 3-9, vii, 110, viii, 116, ix. 119 Thucyd. ii, 100, vii, 29-30; Xenophon, Anabas. vii, 2, 38, and the
 * Cicero, De Officiis, ii, 7. " Barbarum compunctum notis Threiciis."