The Machelones (Georgian: მახელონები) (Machelônes, Machelonoi; Greek: Μαχελῶνες) were a Colchian tribe located to the far south of the Phasis (modern-day Rioni River, western Georgia).
His contemporary author, Arrian, lists on a west to east orientation the Sannoi, Drilae, Machelonoi, Heniochoi, Zudreitai, and Lazoi (Perip.
Writing in the early 3rd century about an event a hundred years earlier (AD 117), Dio Cassius (68.19) relates that the Machelonoi and the neighboring Heniochoi were ruled by a single "king", Anchialos, who submitted to the Roman emperor Trajan.
The country called Machelonia, a client state of the Sassanid Persian Empire, figures in the so-called Res Gestae Divi Saporis (Ka'ba-i Zartosht), the mid-3rd-century AD trilingual inscription concerning the political, military, and religious activities of Shapur I, and appears, in this case, to be synonymous to Colchis.
[1] The Machelones were closely related ethnically to the neighboring Macrones (a tribe believed to be the ancestors of present-day Mingrelians, a subethnic group of the Georgian people), known since at least the 5th century BC.