After travelling through many of the Aegean islands, through Sicily, Sardinia and Magna Graecia, everywhere conferring benefits and receiving divine honours, Aristaeus reached Thrace, where he was initiated into the mysteries of Dionysus, and finally disappeared near Mount Haemus.
For the purposes of this article it will be taken in its most restricted sense, as signifying the Roman province which was so called after the district that intervened between the river Ister (Danube) and the Haemus Mountains (Balkan) had been formed into the separate provinces of Moesia, and the region between the rivers Strymon and Nestus, which included Philippi, had been added to Macedonia.
The greater part of the country is hilly and irregular, though there are considerable plains; but besides Rhodope two other tolerably definite chains intersect it, one of which descends from Haemus to Adrianople, while the other follows the coast of the Euxine at no great distance inland.
With the consent of the emperor Constantius he led them across the Danube, "a great body of the faithful," and settled in Moesia at the foot of the range of Haemus and near the site of the modern Tirnova (349).
His dwelling-place was on Mount Haemus in Thrace, or at Salmydessus, near the country of the Hyperboreans.