This article is about the country "Thrace" and its people. For a list of Thracian characters, see Thracian (category list). For the gladiator class based on this race, see Thraex.
Thrace is the homeland of Spartacus and Sura, as well as Drenis and Byzo. It is a country filled with multiple villages of what Romans would consider barbarians, living in their own communities without larger cities. One is who is from Thrace is often called a Thracian, which later becomes a nickname for Spartacus himself. The specific location of the homeland of the Thracian tribe of the Maedi, Spartacus' people, is found in the modern Bulgarian Blagoevgrad Province, along the banks of the the Strymon River between Rupel Pass and Kresna Gorge. Thrace, in the lifetime of Spartacus, was divided into several tribal kingdoms that arose from the division of the old Odrysian Kingdom under the Sapaean and Astean dynasties. All these kingdoms, given their proximity to the Roman Province of Macedonia, were clients of the Republic of Rome, and would frequently supply contingents of warriors to fight in the Roman Auxilia.
In the 270's BCE, an army of Gauls of Boii and Volcae extraction, known as the Aegosage tribe, were defeated in a war with the Macedonian King Antigonos II Gonatas. After their defeat at the Battle of Lysamachia in 277 BCE, many retreated inland in Thrace, where, under kingship of a chieftain named Comontorius, established a settlement east of the Haemus Mountains that would become the centre of the Kingdom of Tylis, in what is now the Stara Zagora Province in south-central Bulgaria. This Celto-Thracian state survived until 212 BCE, when it destroyed during the reign of King Cavarus in a raid by neighbouring Thracian tribes.
