Triballi Erotic

The Triballi were an Iron Age people of the central Balkans, attested from the fifth century BC to the early Roman era, who held the Morava valley and the plain south of the Danube in today's Serbia and northwestern Bulgaria until Celtic and Dardanian pressure wore them down and Rome absorbed the remnant into the province of Moesia. No Triballian wrote a line that survives. Everything known about them comes from Greeks and Romans who met them as raiders, as enemies of Macedon, or as a name on a provincial map, and those writers could not agree whether they were Thracians, Illyrians, or something of their own. Modern scholarship tends to treat them as a distinct Paleo-Balkan people wedged between Illyrian country to the west and Thracian country to the east, speaking a language that left no inscriptions. What made them identifiable to the ancients was a reputation for violence. Athenians used them as a byword for the uncouth in 414 BC, when Aristophanes put a gibberish-spouting Triballian god on stage in The Birds, a decade after the Odrysian king Sitalces died campaigning against them. In 376 BC a Triballian host said to number 30,000 pushed through Thrace to the Aegean coast at Abdera. In 339 BC they ambushed Philip II of Macedon on his way home from the Scythian steppe, took his loot, and put a spear through his thigh that left him lame.

Alexander opened his reign in 335 BC by settling that account. He beat the Triballi on the Lyginus river, chased their king Syrmus onto an island in the Danube, then crossed the river to make the point to the Getae as well. The Triballi submitted, and within a year several thousand of them were marching into Asia among his light infantry, which says something about how fast a beaten enemy became a useful one. The third century BC was less kind. Celtic Scordisci settled around the Sava and Danube confluence, the Dardanians pressed from the south, and the Triballi shrank eastward toward the Timok and Iskar rivers, where Rome found them and folded them into Moesia. After the third century AD the name goes quiet. Archaeology adds a little: tumulus burials in the Morava basin holding weapons, gold, amber, and imported Greek pottery point to a warrior aristocracy that traded south long before it raided there. A thousand years after they vanished, Byzantine writers, who liked antique names for new nations, revived Triballoi as their learned word for the Serbs and used it into the fifteenth century. The Triballi have no demonstrable descendants, and it is in that borrowed name, not in any living community, that they persist.