Illyrians Erotic

The Illyrians were the Indo-European tribes of the western Balkans, holding the eastern Adriatic coast and its mountainous hinterland, roughly modern Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Albania, from the early Iron Age until Rome finished conquering them in AD 9. They were then Romanized over a few generations, overrun by Slavs in the sixth and seventh centuries, and survive today as a name on old maps and as an argument. The argument concerns the Albanians, who speak the only Paleo-Balkan language still alive and are widely, though not conclusively, held to descend from them. The Illyrians never wrote. Everything known of their speech comes from personal and place names copied down by Greeks and Romans, so its relation to Albanian, to Messapic across the sea in Apulia, and to Thracian stays unsettled.

Illyrian was an outsiders' label for dozens of tribes who never saw themselves as one nation: the Dalmatae in the hinterland of the central coast, the Ardiaei and Labeatae in the south around Lake Scutari, the Taulantii near Dyrrhachium, the Autariatae with their mound cemeteries on the Glasinac plateau, the Iapodes and Liburni in the north, the Dardani inland, whose membership is disputed. They lived in hillforts, herded cattle and sheep, worked iron, and buried their dead under tumuli. The coastal tribes built the lembus, a light, fast galley that made them the pirates of the Adriatic and gave Rome its liburna. Rome's first campaign across the Adriatic, in 229 BC, was against Queen Teuta of the Ardiaei, who had told Roman envoys that Illyrian kings did not interfere with private plunder at sea. The kingdom ended in 168 BC when Gentius lost Scodra in a war that took about thirty days.

The interior held out far longer. The revolt of AD 6 to 9, led by two chieftains both named Bato, drew in ten legions and was called by Suetonius the gravest foreign war since Carthage. Afterward Illyricum was split into Dalmatia and Pannonia, and the hills that had fought Rome became its recruiting ground, then its emperors: Diocletian came from near Salona, Constantine from Naissus, Justinian's family from Dardania. What the Illyrians believed is dimly visible in Roman-era inscriptions: a horseman god Medaurus at Risan, a spring god Bindus among the Iapodes, Vidasus and Thana equated with Silvanus and Diana, serpents throughout the iconography, spirals and sun disks hammered into bronze. Strabo says the Iapodes tattooed themselves like the Thracians. Theopompus says the Ardiaei drank hard and kept a subject population he compared to Spartan helots. One small piece of them survives in church: the wide-sleeved tunic Romans associated with Dalmatia, the dalmatica, is still worn by deacons as the dalmatic.