TRACHIS, a city of ancient Greece, at the foot of Mount Oeta, a little to the north-west of Thermopylae. 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 (Etaean inhabitants. In later times Heraclea was one of the mainstays of the Aetolian power in northern Greece. In 191 b.c., after the defeat of Antiochus at Thermopylae, Heraclea was besieged and taken from the Aetolians 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.