disgust; modern scholars have tried to split the difference between the two accounts of early Abdera's failure by giving the latter as the reason for Timesios's having left Klazomenai. Strabo describes Abdera as "a Thracian city" at the time of Anacreon and the migration of people from Teos to that area. The successful colonisation occurred in 544BC, when the majority of the people of Teos (including the poet Anacreon) migrated to Abdera to escape the Persian yoke. The chief coin type, a griffon, is identical with that of Teos; the rich silver coinage is noted for the beauty and variety of its reverse types. In 513 and 512BC, the Persians, under Darius conquered Abdera, by which time the city seems to have become a place of considerable importance, and is mentioned as one of the cities which had the expensive honour of entertaining the great king on his march into Greece. In 492BC, after the Ionian Revolt, the Persians again conquered Abdera, again under Darius I but led by his general Mardonius. On his flight after the Battle of Salamis, Xerxes stopped at Abdera and acknowledged the hospitality of its inhabitants by presenting them with a tiara and scimitar of gold. Thucydides mentions Abdera as the westernmost limit of the Odrysian kingdom when at its height at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war. It later became part of the Delian League and fought on the side of Athens in the Peloponnesian war. Abdera was a wealthy city, the third richest in the League, due to its status as a prime port for trade with the interior of Thrace and the Odrysian kingdom. In 408BC, Abdera was reduced under the power of Athens by Thrasybulus, then one of the Athenian generals in that quarter. A valuable prize, the city was repeatedly sacked: by the Triballi in 376BC, Philip II of Macedon in 350BC; later by Lysimachos of Thrace, the Seleucids, the Ptolemies, and again by the Macedonians. In 170BC the Roman armies and those of Eumenes II of Pergamon besieged and sacked it. The town seems to have declined in importance after the middle of the 4th centuryBC. Cicero ridicules the city as a byword for stupidity in his letters to Atticus, writing of a debate in the Senate, "Here was Abdera, but I wasn't silent" ("Hic, Abdera non tacente me"). Nevertheless, the city counted among its citizens the philosophers Democritus,