Gothic Raids on Thessalonica and Thermopylae Defense

While Rome reeled from plague and political churn, the Balkans and Aegean flared. In 267, large Gothic and allied groups took to land and sea. Thessalonica, the crucial port on the Thermaic Gulf, faced assaults the city had not imagined a generation earlier. The Vienna palimpsest fragments—most likely preserving Dexippus’ Scythica—speak of raiders driving south, and of Greeks organizing at the ancient gate of the south: Thermopylae [7][9].

Athens assembled men; Boeotia sent arms. The pass itself—steep Kallidromos on one side, marsh and sea on the other—compressed numbers into courage. Shields pressed edge to edge. Bronze helmets thudded as men settled into ranks. The sound here was intimate: the scrape of sandal on gravel, the hiss of breath, the shouted count. At Thessalonica, walls took arrows; in the Aegean, allied raiders rowed past Euboea’s dark coast, oarlocks creaking in rhythm.

Dexippus, an Athenian officer and historian, appears in the fragments as a voice of urgency and strategy. His Greek perspective is rare for this period, and modern analysis uses it to refine the chronology and routes. He tells us of alarmed cities, defensive improvisation, and the way a narrow path can equalize the terror of “mega‑raids” [7][9]. Rome’s central government, hampered by revolts and usurpations, could not direct every response. Local elites did. The empire’s mosaic held because its tesserae—Thessalonica, Athens, the pass—still interlocked.

Back north, in Moesia and Dacia, raiding columns probed river crossings. The Danube line—never quiet—buzzed with scouts and dispatches. Claudius II, soon to be called Gothicus, emerged from this theater, learning the habits of enemies who could sail into the Aegean one season and cross the Danube the next [14][18].

The raids subsided not because the Goths lacked will but because defenders found points of leverage: city walls like Thessalonica’s; mountain gates like Thermopylae; inland counterstrokes by Balkan commanders. The crisis did not permit elegant campaigns, only elastic ones. And it taught officers—Aurelian among them—the value of buying time with stone and terrain while striking for decisive battles when the chance appeared.