The evil reputation of the Bessi lasted on till Christian days, till they bowed beneath the yoke of a greater than Dionysos. Towards the end of the fourth century A.D. the good Bishop of Dacia, Niketas, carried the gospel to these mountain wolves and, if we may trust the congratulatory ode written to him by his friend Paulinus, he carried it not in vain. Paulinus celebrates the conversion of the Bessi as follows: ‘Hard were their lands and hard those Bessi bold, Cold were their snows, their hearts than snow more cold, Sheep in the fold from roaming now they cease, Thy fold of peace. Untamed of war, ever did they refuse To bow their heads to servitude’s hard use, ’Neath the true yoke their necks obedient Are gladly bent. They who were wont with sweat and manual toil To delve their sordid ore from out the soil Now for their wealth with inward joy untold Garner heaven’s gold. There where of old they prowled like savage beasts, Now is the joyous rite of angel feasts. The brigands’ cave is now a hiding place For men of grace[938].’ Thucydides[939] in his account of Thracian affairs is silent about the Bessi and his silence surprises us. It is probably accounted for by the fact that in his days the Odrysae had complete supremacy, a supremacy that seems to have lasted down to the days of Roman domination. The autochthonous tribes were necessarily obscured. He mentions however certain mountain peoples who had retained their autonomy against Sitalkes king of the Odrysae and calls them by the collective name Dioi. Among them were probably the Bessi, for we learn from Pliny[940] that the Bessi were known by many names, among them that of Dio-Bessi. It seems possible that to these _Dio_-Bessi the god may have owed one of his many names. * * * * * In the face of all this historical evidence, it is at first a little surprising to find that, in the _Bacchae_ of Euripides, Dionysos is no Thracian. He is Theban born, and comes back to Thebes, after long triumphant wanderings not in Thrace but in Asia, through Lydia, Phrygia to uttermost Media and Arabia. On this point Euripides is explicit. In the prologue[941] Dionysos says: ‘Far now behind me lies the golden land Of Lydian and of Phrygian—far away The wide, hot plains where Persian sun-beams play, The Bactrian war-holds and the storm-oppressed Clime of the Mede and Araby the blest, And Asia all, that by the salt sea lies In proud embattled cities, motley-wise Of Hellene and Barbarian interwrought, And now I come to Hellas, having taught All the world else my dances and my rite Of mysteries, to show me in man’s sight Manifest God.’