Crenides29. The city of Philippi is now seated close to the Pangaeum Mount. And the Pangaeum Mount too has mines of gold and silver, and so has the region both on the other side of and on this side the Strymon as far as Paeonia. And they say likewise that those who plough the Paeonian land find some morsels of gold.”
It was in a struggle with a Thracian tribe, the Edonians, for the possession of the mines at Datum that Sophanes, the son of Eutychides of Decelea, who had distinguished himself above all other Athenians at the battle of Plataea, was killed30. The possession of Thasos and the coast of Thrace was not the least important means by which Athens held her supremacy in Greece, and when Philip (360-336 B.C.) finally got supreme control over all this region, and built his new capital of Philippi, his path of conquest was henceforward made easy by the golden Philippi, the regale nomisma of Horace,
Passing on now to Southern Asia we find that there gold was found in Carmania (the modern Kerman) on the Persian Gulf. Strabo states on the authority of Onesicritus that in Carmania a river carries down gold-dust, and that there is likewise a mine of dug gold and of silver and of copper31.
That there was gold in Arabia is placed beyond doubt by various notices in antiquity. “He shall live and unto him shall be given of the gold of Sheba (Saba32),” says the Psalmist (Ps. lxxii. 13), showing that the inhabitants of Palestine regarded that country as a source from which the gold-supply came.