LEBEDOS
Turkey.
City in Ionia, on the Kisik
(formerly Xingi) peninsula 36 km NW of Ephesos.
Founded according to tradition by a son of Kodros
named variously as Andraimon or Andropompos. The
city was among the poorest of those in the Ionian
League; in the Delian Confederacy it was assessed at
first at three talents, but this was soon reduced to one.
Antigonos, ca. 303 B.C., planned to transfer the inhabitants of Lebedos to Teos and to merge the two cities into
one, but the plan was never carried out; instead, Lysimachos used the populations to man his new city at
Ephesos. About 266 B.C. Ptolemy II refounded Lebedos
under the name of Ptolemais, but the old name soon
revived. The Ionian branch of the Artists of Dionysos,
originally settled at Teos, moved finally to Lebedos in
the 2d c. B.C. Horace's reference to Lebedos as a deserted
village is plainly an error; the coinage continues down
to the time of M. Aurelius, and a bishop of Lebedos is
recorded in the Byzantine lists.
The little peninsula, low and flat, is surrounded by a
wall of regular ashlar 2 m thick, with four towers and
three gates; a rock-cut ramp leads up from the water to
the SE gate, but little else survives. Some foundations of
buildings may be discerned on the peninsula, but the
acropolis hill is on the mainland opposite. Here sherds
are abundant, and there are numerous fragments of unidentifiable walls and foundations.
There are thermal springs on the shore W of the city
and at a spot called Karakoç to the N, where substantial
ruins of ancient baths are still standing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
G. Weber,
AthMitt 29 (1904) 228;
SIG
344; G. E. Bean,
Aegean Turkey (1966) 149-53.
G. E. BEAN
