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The Gelonians (Geloni) are mentioned as a nation in northwestern Scythia by Herodotus (Histories 4.102, .108). Herodotus says that they were originally Hellenes who settled among the Budinoi, and that they are bilingual in Greek and the Scythian language.^[1] Their capital was called Gelonos or Helonos, originally a Greek market town. Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Gelonus, (also transliterated Helonus), 50. ... Scythian warriors, drawn after figures on an electrum cup from the KulOba kurgan burial near Kerch. ... Bust of Herodotus at Naples Herodotus of Halicarnassus (Greek: , Herodotos) was a historian who lived in the 5th century BC (484 BC-ca. ... The Greeks (Greek: Έλληνες – Hellenes) are an ethnic group mostly found in the southern Balkan peninsula of southeastern Europe and are primarily associated with the Greek language. ... Gelonus, (also transliterated Helonus), 50. ... Emporium is an old-fashioned term for a Department store and for marketplaces or trading centers in ancient cities. ...

The name according to Herodotus, who took his mythology from "the Greeks who dwell about the Pontos", derives from their eponymous mythical founder, Gelonus brother of Scythes, sons of Heracles, an expression of observed cultural links in genealogical terms.^[2] Herodotus also mentions that the Greeks apply the ethnonym both to the actual Gelonians of Greek origin and by extension to the Budinoi. Map of the Black Sea. ... An eponym is the name of a person, whether real or fictitious, which has (or is thought to have) given rise to the name of a particular place, tribe, discovery or other item. ...

Gelonians are mentioned by Herodotus (4.102) among the tribes who allied with the Scythians to repel the invasion of Darius the Great. Seal of Darius I, showing the king hunting on his chariot, and the symbol of Ahuramazda Darius the Great (Pers. ...

At the end of the fourth century AD, Claudian in his Against Rufinus (book 1) polemically portrays the tribes of Scythia as prototypical barbarians: Claudius Claudianus, Anglicized as Claudian, was the court poet to the Emperor Honorius and Stilicho. ... // The word barbarian generally refers to an uncivilized, uncultured person, either in a general reference to a member of a nation or ethnos perceived as having an inferior level of civilization, or in an individual reference to a brutal, cruel, insensitive person whose behavior is unacceptable in a civilized society. ...

There march against us a mixed horde of Sarmatians and Dacians, the Massagetes who cruelly wound their horses that they may drink their blood, the Alans who break the ice and drink the waters of Maeotis' lake, and the Geloni who tattoo their limbs: these form Rufinus' army.

Sidonius, the cultured Gallo-Roman poet of the sixth century, includes Geloni among tribal allies participating in the Battle of Chalons against Attila in AD 451 (Carmina 7.321-325). E.A. Thompson expresses his suspicions about some of these names: Sarmatia Europæa separated from Sarmatia Asiatica by the Tanais (the River Don), based on Greek literary sources, in a map printed in London, ca 1770. ... Dacian kingdom during the reign of Burebista, 82 BC The Dacians (Lat. ... Massagetae were an Iranian people of antiquity. ... Flavius Rufinus (c. ... Gaius Sollius Modestus Sidonius Apollinaris (c. ... Combatants Western Roman Empire, Visigoths Huns and allies Commanders Flavius Aetius Theodoric Attila the Hun Strength 30,000–50,000 30,000–50,000 The Battle of Chalons, also called the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields or the Battle of the Catalun, took place in 451 between the allied forces... For other uses, see Attila (disambiguation). ...

The Bastarnae, Bructeri, Geloni and Neuri had disappeared hundreds of years before the times of the Huns, while the Bellonoti had never existed at all: presumably the learned poet was thinking of the Balloniti, a people invented by Valerius Flaccus nearly four centuries earlier.^[3].

Gaius Valerius Flaccus (late 1st century AD) was a Roman poet, who flourished under the emperors Vespasian and Titus. ...

Notes

1. ^ "For the Geloni are by their origin Greeks, who left their trading ports to settle among the Budini; and they speak a language half Greek and half Scythian. But the Budini do not speak the same language as the Geloni, nor is their manner of life the same." The modern reader can infer from this that the Geloni were Hellenized by the mid-fifth century, in spite of their wooden architecture, which Herodotus notes.
2. ^ "...[the serpent-maiden] put her sons to the test. Two of them, Agathyrsus and Gelonus, proving unequal to the task enjoined, their mother sent them out of the land; Scythes, the youngest, succeeded, and so he was allowed to remain. From Scythes, the son of Hercules, were descended the after kings of Scythia."
3. ^ E.A. Thompson, The Huns, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 149.