Sapaei
Σαπαῖοι
Eth. Sapaei (Eth.Σαπαῖοι or Eth. Σάπαιοι), a Thracian people, occupying the southern portion of the Pangaeus, in the neighbourhood of Abdera. (Strab. xii. p.549.) In this passage, however, Strabo calls them Sapae (Σάπαι), and assumes their identity with the Sinti, which in another place (x. p. 457) he treats as a mere matter of conjecture. The Via Egnatia ran through their country, and especially through a narrow and difficult defile called by Appian (App. BC 4.87, 106) the pass of the Sapaei, and stated by him to be 18 miles from Philippi; so that it must have been nearly midway between Neapolis and Abdera. The Sapaei are mentioned, and merely mentioned, by Herodotus (7.110) and by Pliny (4.11. s. 18). Their town is called Sapaica (Σαπαϊκή) by Steph. B. sub voce (s. v.).
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.