Gelonus
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Gelonus, (also transliterated Helonus), was the capital in Scythia (now in Ukraine) named for the Geloni In his account of Scythia Herodotus (Inquiries book 4) writes that the Gelonii were formerly Greeks, having settled away from the coastal emporia among the Budini, where they "use a tongue partly Scythian and partly Greek":
- "The Budini for their part, being a large and numerous nation, is all mightily blue-eyed and ruddy. And a city among them has been built, a wooden city, and the name of the city is Gelonus. Of its wall then in size each side is of thirty stades and high and all wooden. And their homes are wooden and their shrines. For indeed there is in the very place Greek gods’ shrines adorned in the Greek way with statues, altars and wooden shrines and for triennial Dionysus festivals in honour of Dionysus...
- "The language of the Budini is quite different, as, indeed, is their culture generally: they are a pastoral people who have always lived in this part of the country (a peculiarity of theirs is eating lice)..."
The fortified settlement of Gelonus was reached by the Persian army of Darius in his assault on Scythia, and burnt to the ground, the Budini having abandoned it in their flight before the Persian advance. Recent digs in Belsk, Ukraine uncovered a vast city identified by the Kharkov archaeologist Boris Shramko as the Scythian capital Gelonus [1] (http://antiquity.ac.uk/reviews/taylor.html).
There still exists in the Poltava region of the Ukraine a brewery that produces "HELON" brand beer.
In Greek mythology, according to Herodotus ((iii.108), Hercules had three children by the monstrous Echidna, one of whom was Gelonus. [2] (http://www.ancientlibrary.com/smith-bio/1346.html).
Gelonus is also a genus of true bug (Hemiptera: Coreidae) in Tasmania, one of the few that feed on eucalypts.
See also Gelon.