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The campaign of Alexander the Great in the Balkans... 417
with his own shield and fended off the triballian attackers, according to
the Cleitarchus Vulgate. now it was Alexander’s turn to avenge this insult
and he marched on with his army against their territory. he arrived on the
river lyginus, at a three days march between the Danube and the Balkans;
however, he found out that a detachment of triballian warriors, commanded
by their king Syrmus and along with their women and children, took shelter
on a Danube island that Arrian mentioned (An.1.2.1-3, esp. An.1.2.2); this
island was named in Greek the pine tree (island)/Peuce (peuvkh). All other
ancient Greek and latin narrative sources understand by Peuce the Danube
Delta. As the context later reveals, it is highly probable that the toponym
Peuce in Arrian’s text is a late interpolation or error made by a copyist; if
it were true, Alexander’s expedition on the Danube and beyond took place
north of the Danube Delta, in the Budjak steppe of nowadays Southern
Bessarabia. It is not at all impossible as an event, but there is one fact
that contradicts it: the meeting between Alexander and the Celts, which is
improbable in itself to have taken place in 335 BC somewhere in Southern
Moldavia 5 .
5 pârVAn, Vasile, Getica, Bucureşti, 1926, 44 ff. considered that Alexander
crossed the danube against the Getae in the Bărăgan steppe, near today’s town of
zimnicea (a Getic dava was located there); MEdElEţ, Florin, “În legătură cu expediţia
întreprinsă de Alexandru Macedon la dunăre în 335 î. e. n.”, Acta Musei Napocensis
xIx/1982, 13-22 thought that Alexander’s crossing of the Danube was somewhere near
the Iron Gates (my interpretation is that it was maybe at Drobeta-turnu Severin or perhaps
near orşova?; or even upstream from the iron Gates, somewhere in the today region of
romanian Banat, as Florin Medeleţ himself assumes in his above quoted article), region
that was nearer to the lands occupied by the Central-european Celts in 335 BC. For
philip’s lameness due to the spear wound in the thigh during his return from the Scythian
campaign through the triballian land, vide Green, peter, Alexander of Macedon 356-
323 B.C. A Historical Biography, Berkeley, los Angeles, oxford, California university
press, 1991, 69 and 89. the meeting point between Alexander’s army and Alexander’s
fleet that started from Byzantium the crossing into the Black Sea and then the sailing on
the Danube, was probably near today’s town of rushchuk on the Danube (Green, peter,
Alexander of Macedon 356-323 B.C. A Historical Biography, Berkeley, los Angeles,
oxford, university of California press, 1991, 125). It is not impossible, if the expedition
aimed at the central zone occupied by the triballians, a land located to the west of river
oescus (Isker/Iskar) that the meeting between Alexander’s land army and his navy took
place somewhere near the Iron Gates, be it to the east or to the west of this famous point
(vide MEdElEţ, Florin, “În legătură cu expediţia întreprinsă de Alexandru Macedon la
dunăre în 335 î. e. n.”, Acta Musei Napocensis xIx/1982, 13-22). Although the coming
of the Celtic envoys is not in itself impossible to have taken place in the steppes far
east from the Iron Gates (in the Wallachian plain or into the steppes of southern-eastern
Moldavia), it would have been tough for the Celtic riders to cross the lands of so many
foreign and probably also hostile or at least not so friendly populations.