The Caucones (or Kaukones) were an autochthonous tribe of Anatolia (modern-day Turkey). According to Herodotus and other classical writers, they were displaced or absorbed by the immigrant Bithynians, who were a group of clans from Thrace that spoke an Indo-European language. Thracian Bithynians also expelled or subdued the Mysians, and some minor tribes, the Mariandyni alone maintaining themselves in cultural independence, in the northeast of what became Bithynia.
The Kaukones make the briefest appearance in the Iliad Book X, when the Trojan Dolon reveals the array of Trojan allies, ranged among their neighbors like a lesson in geography:
There are brief uninformative references in the Odyssey too. In Book III, Athena, having taken the guise of Mentor, tells Nestor at Pylus: "I'll lie down on the black hollow ship tonight and in the morning go to the Caucones, where there's an old debt they still owe me, not a small amount." By the time of Strabo the name had not persisted: "now they are nowhere to be found, although in earlier times they were settled in several places."[1] What kind of language the illiterate Caucones spoke is a ludibrium of opposing camps of modern-day linguists, who tend to align themselves according to their modern ethnicities. The Caucones are not to be confused with the Cicones (also mentioned in the Iliad and the Odyssey) who were a Thracian tribe on the south coast of Thrace.