- Halizones
The Halizones (Greek `Αλιζωνες, also Halizonians, Alazones, etc.) are an obscure people that appear in Homer's
Iliad as allies of Troy during theTrojan War . Their leaders were Odius andEpistrophus , said byApollodorus to be sons of a man named Mecisteus. According to Homer, the Halizones came from "Alybe far away, where is the birth-place of silver,..."Strabo (in his "Geography") speculates that "Alybe far away" may originally have read as "Chalybe far away", and he suggests that the Halizones may have beenChalybes , as well asKhaldi .There has been much speculation since as to the origin of the name 'Halizones', with connections to both '
Amazons ' and the RiverHalys both suggested. It is not even clear that the Halizones ever existed, or even if Homer knew they existed.Homer's scholiast derived the name from "hals", sea, explaining that they lived in a land surrounded by the sea. However he stated elsewhere that Odius was chief of the
Paphlagonians . Herodotus (4.17, 52) placed the Halizones among theScythians in the region of modernVinnytsia Ukraine, whileEphorus , equating them with Amazons, located them near Cyme in Asia Minor. A later scholiast to Homer calls them a Thracian tribe [ [http://books.google.com/books?id=Mwpyc-QmhnwC&pg=PA74&dq=halizones "The Greek Colonization of the Black Sea" p. 74] ] . Meanwhile,Pliny the Elder ,Hecataeus of Miletus ,Menecrates of Elaea, andPalaephatus placed the Halizones or Alazones inMysia .References
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