Pieres

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The Pieres are a Thracian people, occupying the narrow strip of plain land, or low hill, between the mouths of the Peneius and the Haliacmon rivers, at the foot of the great woody steeps of mount Olympus.¹ This district, which, under the name of Pieria or Pieris, is mentioned in the Homeric poems², was, according to legend, the birthplace of the Muses³ and of Orpheus, the father of song.⁴ When this worship was introduced into Boeotia, the names of the mountains, grots, and springs with which this poetic religion was connected, were transferred from the North to the South. Afterwards the Pieres were expelled from their original seats, and driven to the North beyond the Strymon river and Mount Pangaeus, where they formed a new settlement.⁵ The boundaries which historians and geographers give to this province vary. In the systematic geography of Ptolemy⁶ the name is given to the extent of coast between the mouths of the Ludias and the Haliacmon rivers. Pieria was bounded on the West from the contiguous district of the Thessalian Perrhaebia by the great chain of Olympus. An offshoot from Olympus advances along the Pierian plain, in a North-west direction, as far as the ravine of the Haliacmon, where the mountains are separated by that chasm in the great eastern ridge of Northern Greece from the portion of it anciently called Bermius. The highest summit of the Pierian range called Pierus Mons⁷ and is a conspicuous object in all the country to the East. It would seem that there was a city called Pieria⁸, which may be represented by a tumulus, overgrown with trees upon the extremity of the ridge of Andreotissa, where it ends in a point between Dium and Pydna, the other two chief cities of Pieria. Beyond Pydna was a considerable forest, called Pieria Silva⁹, which may have furnished the Pierian pitch, which had such a high reputation.¹⁰ The road from Pella to Larissa in Thessaly passed through Pieria, and was probably the route which the consul Quintus Marcius Philippus pursued in the third and fourth years of the third Macedonian War (171–168 BC).¹¹