Hi there. You're listening to The Hellenistic Age podcast. Episode 49, Barbarians of the Black Sea, the Galatians and Odrysian Thrace.

Thank you. 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 myself 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 war bands 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 a 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

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