In Homer the Paeonians, of a somewhat more western seat
on the Axius, appear under the leadership of Asteropaeus and
Pyraechmes, significant names when we read in independent
authorities that the Paeonians worshipped the sun, of which
their symbol was it small disk on a high ¹ rod.

If there could be any doubt as to the original source of
the legend of the chariot and white horses of Thracian
Rhesus, son of Eïion,--Eïon at the mouth of the Strymon,--
it should be dispelled by Nestor's comparison of the steeds,
as Diomed and Ulysses are bringing them in through the
night, to the solar ² beams. The Magians of the expedi-
tion of Xerxes, by sacrificing white horses to the Strymon,
had recognised the genius and traditions of the ³ locality.

The Thracians gave the sun the name or the epithet Zeux-
ippus, and it is as 'lovers of horses' that the Thracians of the
Tereus of Sophocles invoke the 'holy radiance of the sun.'

Thracians were now in any case in surreptitious possession
of the Persian sacred chariot and its white horses, stolen from
their custody, as the Paeonians professed, by the remoter
tribes about the sources of the Strymon, but purposely
transferred to them according to the belief of Herodotus.

The persistence of local characteristics seems curiously
illustrated by an anecdote of barbarism that the historian
next details--the blinding by a Thracian king of his dis-
obedient sons. We are checked in an inclination to disallow
it as a mere reflection from the mythical atrocities of Thracian
Phineus, by remembering how unnatural cruelty of the like
type repeats itself afterwards, as if ineradicably native to the
region, in the chambers of Byzantine emperors.

Xerxes, then, reached the Straits with extraordinary speed,
and it may be, as regards his immediate escort, with compa-
rative immunity; but the route was marked by the falling-out
of the stragglers and the sick, whom it was a mere formality

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