Philippopolis (ancient city in Thrace)

formerly Pulpudeva and also known as Eumolpia and Trimontium (Plovdiv)

A city in Thrace (Bulgaria), situated on three rocky hills overlooking the right banks of the river Hebrus (Maritza, Meriç) and one of its tributaries, and commanding the principal route from Macedonia to the Euxine (Black) Sea and the Thracian Bosphorus. A settlement and probably the royal capital of the Thracian people of the Odrysians, with the name (according to Jordanes) of Pulpudeva, the place was refounded in 342 BC by Philip II of Macedonia as a northern outpost of his kingdom, and renamed Philippopolis, receiving a mixed collection of settlers which earned it the appellation of `Poneropolis’ (Crookstown). Thereafter it passed again under Thracian control, which was only temporarily interrupted when Philip V reoccupied the city in 183. Thereafter Philippopolis resumed its existence as a royal Thracian capital, while at the same time remaining, despite its varied population, an outpost of Hellenism in alien territory; and it survived a siege in AD 21 when the Odrysians and other tribes revolted against King Rhoemetalces II of western Thrace.

Under the subsequent rule of the Romans, who sometimes gave the city the additional name of Trimontium because of its three hills, it became the capital of their province of Thrace (46). Issuing coins from the time of Domitian (81–96) onward, it was divided into four artificially constituted tribes. Philippopolis was granted Roman colonial status, and fortified by the Roman emperor Philip the Arab (244–49). In 250, during the reign of Trajanus Decius, his provincial governor Titus Julius Priscus, besieged by the Goths, allowed himself to be proclaimed emperor and joined the besiegers' side, although this did not save the city from extensive destruction, imprisonments and butcheries. However, a further German siege of the city, recorded by Dexippus and perhaps attributable to the year 268, proved unsuccessful. In the later empire it was the capital of one of the five provinces (Thrace) into which the administrative diocese of the same name was divided. An episcopal see since the fourth century, Philippopolis was destroyed by fire before 400, captured by Attila the Hun in 441, and ravaged c 473 by the Ostrogoth Theoderic Strabo (`squinter’).

Its coinage during imperial times, before elevation to colonial status, depicts Mount Rhodope (which lay to its south) and two river-gods recumbent beneath three mountain peaks. Coins also mention the provincial assembly (koinon) of the Thracians, which met at the city, and stress the Games that this assembly conducted, including festivals known as the Alexandreia Pythia—revived in the cities of Thrace by Caracalla (211–17), who adopted Alexander the Great as his model—and the Kendreiseia Pythia, named after a Thracian god Kendreisos, identified with Apollo. A coin of Elagabalus (218–22) depicts a temple, or its model, held in the hands of Apollo and the emperor. The site of the city itself contains the ruins of a temple of Asclepius. Recent excavations have also revealed successive town plans of the mid- and late second century, and have uncovered a stadium, an amphitheater, the outline of the fortress, and the city's forum in which three successive phases of construction are detectable; the first stage was pre-Roman, and the others were Roman before and after the devastations of 250.