Caucones

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:

:"Towards the sea lie the Carians, and Paionians of the bent bow, and the Leleges and Kaukones, and noble Pelasgians."

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." [Strabo. "Geography". Book VII, Chapter 7, Section 2. [http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Strabo/7G*.html LacusCurtius] "As for the Pelasgi, I have already discussed them. As for the Leleges, some conjecture that they are the same as the Carians, and others that they were only fellow-inhabitants and fellow-soldiers of these; and this, they say, is why, in the territory of Miletus, certain settlements are called settlements of the Leleges, and why, in many places of Caria, tombs of the Leleges and deserted forts, known as "Lelegian forts," are so called. However, the whole of what is now called Ionia used to be inhabited by Carians and Leleges; but the Ionians themselves expelled them and took possession of the country, although in still earlier times the captors of Troy had driven the Leleges from the region about Ida that is near Pedasus and the Satnioïs River. So then, the very fact that the Leleges made common cause with the Carians might be considered a sign that they were barbarians. And Aristotle, in his Polities, also clearly indicates that they led a wandering life, not only with the Carians, but also apart from them, and from earliest times; for instance, in the Polity of the Acarnanians he says that the Curetes held a part of the country, whereas the Leleges, and then the Teleboaea, held the westerly part; and in the Polity of the Aetolians (and likewise in that of the Opuntii and the Megarians) he calls the Locri of to‑day then and says that they took possession of Boeotia too; again, in the Polity of the Leucadians he names a certain indigenous Lelex, and also Teleboas, the son of a daughter of Lelex, and twenty-two sons of Teleboas, some of whom, he says, dwelt in Leucas. But in particular one might believe Hesiod when he says concerning them: "For verily Locrus was chieftain of the peoples of the Leleges, whom once Zeus the son of Cronus, who knoweth devices imperishable, gave to Deucalion — peoples picked out of earth"; for by his etymology he seems to me to hint that from earliest times they were a collection of mixed peoples and that this was why the tribe disappeared. And the same might be said of the Caucones, since now they are nowhere to be found, although in earlier times they were settled in several places."] 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.

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