In the summer of 429 BCE, Athens was dying. Plague had come in through the port, bodies were stacked in the streets, and the city that believed it needed no one went looking for help from a goddess it had spent a century calling barbarian.
Her name was Bendis. She came from Thrace, the wild country north of Greece, and she came by sea, carried in the memory of merchants, mercenaries, and enslaved women who had been taken from their homes and sold in the Athenian market. She was a huntress. She carried two spears, and the ancients could never quite agree on what the second one was for.
Athens gave her land. Athens gave her a sanctuary on the hill above the harbor. And Athens gave her something it had never given any god before: a race of torches, run at night, on horseback, with fire passed hand to hand through the dark.
This week, we follow Bendis from the Thracian highlands to the Piraeus waterfront, through Plato's strangest opening paragraph, through the fox-skin cap and the fawn skin, through an etymology that may mean the one who binds and we ask what it means when a city in crisis opens its gates to a goddess it doesn't understand.

REFERENCES & FURTHER READING
Ancient sources

• Plato, Republic 327a–328b — the Piraeus opening, the two processions, the mounted torch relay.
• Herodotus, Histories 4.33 (wheat straw offering to "Queen Artemis" by Thracian and Paeonian women); 5.7 (the gods of the Thracians).
• Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.47–2.54 — the plague at Athens, including the collapse of religious observance.
• Strabo, Geography 10.3.16 — Bendis among Thracian ecstatic rites, alongside Cotys.
• Cratinus, Thrattai (Thracian Women), fragments — the dilonchos / two-spear epithet.
• Scholia to Plato, Republic 327a — ancient explanations of the twin spears.

• Robert Parker, Athenian Religion: A History (Oxford, 1996) — chapter on foreign cults at Athens; the standard treatment of how Bendis got in.
• Robert Parker, Polytheism and Society at Athens (Oxford, 2005) — festival calendar, the Bendideia.
• Christopher Planeaux, "The Date of Bendis' Entry into Attica," Classical Journal 96.2 (2000–2001) — the core article on the contested chronology. Read this one if you read only one.
• Zofia Archibald, The Odrysian Kingdom of Thrace (Oxford, 1998) — Thracian religion and material culture on its own terms rather than through Greek eyes.
• Jan Bremmer, Greek Religion and Culture, the Bible and the Ancient Near East — useful on ecstatic cult and Greek anxieties about it.