He first attacked Abdera and Maronea, on the Thracian sea-board, and then took Methone, which belonged to Athens.
In the settlement of the Latin empire after the truce with Lascaris, Villehardouin received the fief of Messinople (supposed to be Mosynopolis, a little inland from the modern Gulf of Lagos, and not far from the ancient Abdera) from Boniface of Montferrat, with the record of whose death the chronicle abruptly closes.
The air of Abdera was proverbial as causing stupidity; but among its citizens was the philosopher Democritus.
The products of the interior were conveyed by the native Iberians to the maritime colonies, such as Abdera (Adra), Calpe (Gibraltar) or Malaca (Malaga), founded by the foreign merchants.
Towards the middle of the 5th century, however, Protagoras of Abdera, taking account of the teaching of the first, and possibly of the second, of the physical successions, and Gorgias of Leontini, starting from the teaching of the metaphysical succession of Elea, drew that sceptical inference from which the philosophers had shrunk.