Rhoiteion

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Coordinates: 40°0′33″N 26°18′0″E / 40.00917°N 26.30000°E / 40.00917; 26.30000
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Rhoiteion
Ῥοίτειον
Rhoiteion is located in Turkey
Rhoiteion
Shown within Turkey
Locationİntepe, Çanakkale Province, Turkey
RegionTroad
Coordinates40°0′33″N 26°18′0″E / 40.00917°N 26.30000°E / 40.00917; 26.30000
TypeSettlement
History
FoundedLate 8th century BC at the latest

Rhoiteion (

Latin: Rhoeteum) was an ancient Greek city in the northern Troad region of Anatolia, also known as Ῥοίτιον ἄκρον.[1]
Its territory was bounded to the south and west by the Simoeis river and to the east by Ophryneion. It was located on the Baba Kale spur of Çakal Tepe north of Halileli and west of İntepe (previously known as Erenköy) in Çanakkale Province, Turkey.[2]

Foundation

According to the Greek geographer

Surface surveys conducted in 1959 and 1968 suggest that the site was occupied by Greeks from at least the late 8th century BC.[5]

History

The earliest source to mention Rhoiteion is the 5th century BC historian

Persian army on his way to Greece in 480 BC.[6] At a similar period to when Herodotus was writing, the Mytilenaean logographer Hellanicus referred to Rhoiteion's history in Book 1 of his Τρωϊκά (Troika, a history of Troy), stating that following the sack of Ilium, Rhoiteion and nearby Sigeion had divided the fallen city's territory between them.[7] Rhoiteion was one of the Actaean cities which Mytilene lost control of following the end of the Mytilenean revolt in 427 BC.[8] In spring 424 BC, the exiles from Mytilene seized Rhoiteion, but returned control of it to Athens when they were paid a ransom of 2,000 Phokaian staters.[9]

Rhoiteion's greatest asset was the suitability of its coast for harbouring ships and its location on the

Peloponnesian fleet put in here in the summer of 411 BC, and in 409 BC the Athenian fleet beached along these shores, sheltering from the winter storms.[11] The promontory of Aeantion in the west of Rhoiteion's territory was commonly used as a harbour in Roman times:[12] in Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana, written in the late 2nd century AD, Apollonius finds many ships at anchor here and takes passage on one, and in AD 324 the fleet of Licinius spent the night at anchor here before going into battle against Crispus.[13] In modern times, locals have referred to most of the bays along this coast at one time or another as Karanlık Limanı (Turkish ‘concealed harbour’).[14]

Outside myth (see below on The Tomb of Ajax), Rhoeteion is rarely mentioned after the

proxenos in an inscription from Delos.[16] In 190 BC, the Roman commander Livius captured Rhoiteion from the Macedonian forces.[17] Soon after, in 188 BC following the Treaty of Apamea, Rhoiteion was part of the Hellenistic Kingdom of Pergamon, and under the sway of Ilium.[18] At the beginning of the Hellenistic period Rhoiteion may have moved 1.8 km to the south-west from the Baba Kale spur to a site known as Tavolia (40°00′03″N 26°16′53″E / 40.00083°N 26.28139°E / 40.00083; 26.28139) and remained there throughout the Roman period.[19]

The Tomb of Ajax

Rhoiteion was best known in Antiquity for the Tomb of

Jupiter the oracular, god of the thunder".[25]

The geographer Strabo, writing in the latter half of Augustus' reign, relates that the Emperor Augustus returned to the Rhoiteians a statue of Ajax which had adorned the top of his burial tumulus until Mark Anthony had stolen it to give to his lover Cleopatra. Strabo then explains, "For Anthony took away the finest dedications from the most famous temples to gratify the Egyptian woman (i.e. Cleopatra), but Augustus gave them back to the gods".[26] Following the reign of Augustus, this became the dominant version of the myth for the rest of Antiquity.[27] In Pliny the Elder (mid-1st century AD) we hear of the promontory near İn Tepe referred to as Aeantion meaning 'the place of Ajax' (from Ancient Greek Αἰάντειον).[28] Prior to this, the only mention of this promontory was in an Athenian inscription from 375 BC referring to a military action by the general Chabrias and honouring "the soldiers who were allies at Aianteion on the Hellespont".[29] In the 2nd century AD further details appear: the Greek travel writer Pausanias claimed that a local Mysian had informed him that the sea washed away the entrance to Ajax's tomb, and when locals looked inside, they discovered the bones of a giant man 11 cubits (or 5 metres) tall.[30] This story recalls a common view in Graeco-Roman Antiquity that heroes of a previous age were much larger than present-day men; a famous example is the story of the discovery of the bones of Orestes, the son of Agamemnon, which the 5th century BC historian Herodotus relates.[31] It was also in this period (probably during the reign of the philhellenic emperor Hadrian) that the tumulus of Ajax was renovated and given its present vaulting, suggesting local investment in what had become Rhoiteion's great attraction.[32]

References

  1. ^ Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), Rhoeteum
  2. ^ Cook (1973) 77–90 with Fig. 3.
  3. ^ Strabo 13.1.42.
  4. ^ Scholia on Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica 1.929 (ed. Wendel), cf. Scholia on Lycophron 583, 1161; Bürchner, RE IA col. 1006.
  5. ^ Cook (1973) 80–1.
  6. ^ Herodotus, 7.43.2.
  7. ^ Hellanicus, FGrHist 4 F 25b = Strabo 13.1.42.
  8. ^ IG I3 71.III.126 (restored), IG I3 77.IV.16. See Carusi (2003) 32–3.
  9. ^ Thucydides 4.52.2, Kallet-Marx (1993) 155–9.
  10. ^ Tryphiodorus, Iliou Persis 216, Libanius, Orationes 1.15, Scholia on Homer, Iliad 7.339b1, 14.36, 23.365, Scholia on Lycophron 276, 581.
  11. ^ Thucydides 8.101.3, Xenophon, Hellenica 1.1.2.
  12. ^ Cook (1973) 86–7.
  13. ^ Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana 4.13, Zosimus 2.23–4.
  14. ^ Cook (1973) 83.
  15. ^ Diodorus Siculus 17.7.10.
  16. ^ IG XI (4) 582. Further citizens of Rhoiteion have been identified by Louis Robert: L. Robert, Etudes de Numismatique Grecque (1951) 10 n. 5, L. Robert, Monnaies antiques en Troade (1966) 19 n. 1.
  17. ^ Appian, Syriaca 23.
  18. ^ Strabo 13.1.39.
  19. ^ Cook (1973) 83–6. This may explain a curious passage in Aelian, De Natura Animalium 25.16, in which the population of Rhoiteion is driven out by a plague of millipedes: Cook (1973) 86, Carusi (2003) 32.
  20. ^ Cook (1973) 82 n. 6, 88–9.
  21. Hellenistic poet Apollonius of Rhodes
    (early 3rd century BC) without any mention being made of a connection with Ajax.
  22. Hellenistic poet Callimachus
    .
  23. ^ Catullus Carm. 65.8.
  24. ^ Virgil, Aeneid 6.505; Bleisch (1999) 194–6. The poem Culex in the Appendix Vergiliana, which at lines 311ff contains an allusion to Telamonian Ajax being buried at Rhoiteion and which, like the rest of this collection, purports to be genuine juvenalia by Virgil, has long been recognized as spurious and is likely to date to the reign of Tiberius.
  25. ^ Ovid, Metamorphoses 11.196–8, cf. Ovid, Ibis 283.
  26. ^ Strabo 13.1.30.
  27. Ajax
    Hypothesis scholion 4.
  28. Naturalis Historia
    5.125. From the 2nd century AD onwards, Αἰάντειον was also spelt Αἰάντιον.
  29. ^ SEG 19.204 fr. b.2–3: [οἱ στρατι]ῶται οἱ ἐν τ[ῶι Αἰ]αντε[ί]ω̣ι τῶι [ἐν Ἑλλησπό]ντωι σ[υμμαχ]εσά[με]νοι, 'the soldiers who were (our) allies at Aianteion on the Hellespont'.
  30. ^ Pausanias 1.35.3.
  31. ^ Herodotus 1.67–8.
  32. ^ Cook (1973) 88–9.

Bibliography

  • L. Bürchner,
    RE
     IA (1914) s.v. Ῥοίτειον, coll. 1006–7.
  • L. Robert, Etudes de Numismatique Grecque (Paris, 1951).
  • L. Robert, Monnaies antiques en Troade (Geneva, 1966).
  • J.M. Cook, The Troad (Oxford, 1973) 77–90.
  • L. Kallet-Marx, Money, Expense, and Naval Power in Thucydides' History, 1–5.24 (Berkeley, 1993).
  • P. Bleisch, 'The Empty Tomb at Rhoeteum: Deiphobus and the Problem of the Past in Aeneid 6.494–547' Classical Antiquity 18.2 (1999) 187–226.
  • C. Carusi, Isole e Peree in Asia Minore (Pisa, 2003) 32–3.
  • S. Mitchell, 'Rhoiteion' in M.H. Hansen and T.H. Nielsen (eds.), An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis (Oxford, 2004) no. 790.
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