Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Trachis

TRACHIS, a city of ancient Greece, at the foot of Mount Œta, a little to the north-west of Thermopylæ. As commanding the approach to Thermopylae from Thessaly, it was a place of great military importance. According to Homer, it was one of the places subject to Achilles, and was famed in legend as the scene of Hercules's death—an event which forms the subject of Sophocles's play The Trachinian Women. In historical times it first attained importance on the foundation of Heraclea by the Spartans in 426 B.C. The Thessalians, jealous of the establishment of a Spartan outpost on their borders, attacked Heraclea, and in 420 the Heracleots were defeated by them with heavy loss. In the winter of 409-8 Heraclea sustained another disastrous defeat. In 395 the Thebans expelled the Spartans, and restored the city to the old Trachinian and Œtæan inhabitants. In later times Heraclea was one of the mainstays of the Ætolian power in northern Greece. In 191 B.C., after the defeat of Antiochus at Thermopylæ, Heraclea was besieged and taken from the Ætolians by the Romans under the consul Acilius Glabrio. From Livy's account of the siege (xxxvi. 24), it appears that the citadel was outside the town, which lay on the low ground between the rivers Karvunaria (Asopus) and Mavra-Neria (Melas). There are still traces of the citadel on a lofty rock above.