Next day Amadokos bade farewell to Alkibiades, who, with a force of nearly five hundred fighting men, two hundred of whom were mounted, again crossed the Hebros, and set out in search of the Apsinthii. After two days’ march he came up with that wild tribe as they were returning towards the river, encumbered with the flocks and herds and other treasure they had taken. He routed them without much difficulty, took their booty from them and some hostages, and drove them back across the Hebros. Some of the treasure and all the hostages he sent to his new ally, king Amadokos. When he was about to return to his fastness in the Chersonesos, an embassy arrived from the Greek colony of Abdera, further west, upon the southern coast, praying him to come to the help of that town against an unknown tribe from the north, supposed to be the dreaded Treballi. Abdera was not an Athenian colony, but it had submitted to Thrasyboulos two years before, and Alkibiades could not refuse the summons. With his strange followers, whose love of pillage could be with difficulty restrained, he marched westward through the hill country of the Bistones and the Chorpilli. The marauding tribe from the far north, more ferocious and stronger than any he had yet encountered, were laying waste the territory round Abdera, and threatening the town itself and other Grecian cities along the coast. They withdrew to the neighbouring hills as he approached. It was only after a long and difficult search that he discovered their stronghold, and succeeded in coming to close quarters with them. He heard that they had made a fortified encampment on the summit of a densely-wooded hill nearly twenty miles to the north of Abdera, which they made use of as a sort of rude basis for their freebooting expeditions. Coming up to the foot of the rising ground, under cover of a dark night, he divided his cavalry into two divisions, posting one on the level plain to the north, the other to the south of the barbarians’ camp. His heavy-armed foot he placed in ambush on the western side where the wood was thickest.