CLAUDIOPOLIS
(Mut) Cilicia Aspera, Turkey.
In a well-watered plain 80 km N-NW of Seleucea on
the Kalykadnos. Named for the emperor, who gave it
colonial status, Claudiopolis was first a city and later a
bishopric. It was tentatively identified in 1800 with modern Mut by Leake, who noted that “its chief streets and
temples and other public buildings may be easily distinguished, and long colonnades and porticos, with the lower
parts of the columns in their original places. Pillars of
verd-antique, breccia and other marbles, lie half buried
in different parts. . . .” The city's identity was confirmed
from epigraphic evidence at the end of the 19th c.
Little remains of Claudiopolis, apart from reused
building material and inscriptions in Mut and in the walls
of the 14th c. (Karamanoğlu) castle at the town's N
limit. The theater, with fragments of seating and of the
sculpture and column drums of its scaena, may still be
recognized to the W, and S of the ancient ramparts (still
visible in places as a low mound) is the necropolis with
numerous sculptured sarcophagi. Of the latter, one recording the city's name has been removed for safekeeping
to the precincts of Lâl Pasha's mosque.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ptol. 5.7.7; Amin. Marc. 14.2.5.
W. M. Leake,
Journal of a Tour in Asia Minor (1824)
108, 117; A. C. Headlam, “Ecclesiastical Sites in Isauria
(Cilicia Trachea),”
Suppl. Papers No. II of the Soc. for
the Promotion of Hellenic Studies (1893) 23.
M. GOUGH
