HALIKARNASSOS
(Bodrum) Turkey.
City in
Caria on the N coast of the gulf of Kos. Originally one
of the three mainland members of the Dorian hexapolis,
founded according to tradition by Anthes or one of his
descendants from Troezen. Later the city was expelled
from the hexapolis, ostensibly because of the misconduct
of her citizen Agasikles, who took home the tripod he
had won at the Triopian games instead of dedicating it
on the spot to Apollo (
Hdt. 1.144). Strabo (
653) observes that after the death of Kodros, king of Athens,
Knidos and Halikarnassos were not yet in existence,
though Rhodes and Kos were. By the 5th c. the city had
become wholly Ionian; the inscriptions are in Ionic, and
Herodotos and Panyassis wrote in that dialect. At the
same time there was a strong Carian element in the city;
the citizens' names are equally divided between Greek
and Carian, and the two are often mixed in the same
families. Vitruvius (2.8.12) records a tradition that the
Carians, driven to the hills by the Greek settlers, were
later attracted down to the city by the excellence of the
water of Salmakis, a suburb where a Greek had set up
a tavern, and so became civilized.
After the Persian conquest in the 6th c. Halikarnassos
was ruled by a Carian dynasty, represented at the time
of Xerxes' invasion of Greece by the queen Artemisia,
who joined his forces in person and was regarded by
him as one of the wisest of his advisers (
Hdt. 8.68-69,
101-3). She took part in the battle of Salamis in her own
ship (
Hdt. 8.87-88). In the Delian Confederacy Halikarnassos was assessed at one and two-thirds talents, indicating her modest importance in the 5th c. Towards the
middle of the century, as an inscription shows (
SIG 45),
the government was in the hands of the tyrant Lygdamis
II, grandson of Artemisia, but the decree was issued at
the same time by the Council of the Halikarnassians and
Salmakitans, apparently a first step towards a modified
democracy. This Lygdamis was subsequently expelled,
with the help, it is said, of the historian Herodotos.
Halikarnassos became of real importance when Mausolos, satrap of Caria from 377 to 353, made it the capital of his satrapy in place of Mylasa. The city was rebuilt, with a wall over 4.8 m long, and manned by the
forcible transplantation of the inhabitants of six of the
eight Lelegian towns on the Myndos peninsula (Strab.
611). The Carian element in the city was in this way
considerably strengthened. Mausolos was succeeded by
his sister—wife Artemisia II, who built (or at least completed) his tomb, the Mausoleion. When the Rhodians
attacked Halikarnassos in an attempt to take Caria, Artemisia defeated them and retaliated by capturing the
city of Rhodes (Vitr. 2.8.14-15). On her death in 350 she
was followed in quick succession by the other children
of Hekatomnos, Idrieus, who married his sister Ada, and
Pixodaros, who expelled Ada to Alinda and shared the
rule with the official Persian satrap Orontobates.
Halikarnassos was one of the few places which resisted Alexander in 334. After much fierce fighting the
defenders set fire to the city and withdrew to the headlands on either side of the harbor. Alexander sacked the
city and passed on to Lycia, leaving the task of blockading the headlands to Ada, with whom he had previously had friendly dealings. When they surrendered, she
was appointed ruler of the whole of Caria (Arr. 1.20-23;
Diod. 17.24-27). Pliny (
HN 5.107) states that Alexander
incorporated six towns in Halikarnassos; their names
are those of the neighboring Lelegian towns. This however seems to be a confusion with the Mausolean synoecism.
After Alexander's death the city came into the possession of the Ptolemies until 190; after Magnesia she was
left as a free city, and seems to have remained so thereafter. Plundered by Verres in 80 B.C., restored by Quintus
Cicero in 60, plundered again by Brutus and Cassius, the
city prospered less than most under the Empire; the
Imperial coinage is somewhat scanty and the title of
neocorus does not appear. Later the bishop of Halikarnassos ranked 21st under the metropolitan of Staurupolis
(Aphrodisias).
Distinguished citizens included the historians Herodotus and Dionysios, Herakleitos the epigrammatist, and
Phormio the boxer, Olympic victor in 392 B.C. but found
guilty of corruption four years later.
The ruins have been almost entirely obliterated by the
town of Bodrum, though much of the city wall is still
standing; the masonry varies between polygonal and a
somewhat irregular ashlar. On the W side two solid towers remain from the tripylon mentioned in Arrian's account of the siege by Alexander; the present road to
Myndos passes this point. On the NE, outside this line
of wall, is a stretch of exterior wall apparently belonging
to an earlier scheme of defense that was soon abandoned;
this was probably the wall attacked by Alexander. The
Mylasa gate must have been in this region, but has not
survived. The acropolis hill, now called Göktepe, rises to
a height of 160 m; on its SE slope is the theater, still
fairly well preserved in 1815 but now completely denuded, with only a few blocks of the seats remaining.
In 1857 the substructures of the Mausoleion and some
of the sculptures were discovered; the site was subsequently buried, but recently excavation has begun again.
Apparently the peribolos and associated buildings were
never completed. Of the other buildings investigated in
the 19th c. virtually nothing remains, though the modern
town is full of ancient stones, many of them sculptured
or inscribed. Tombs are mostly rock-cut chambers; these
are numerous on the slopes of Göktepe, frequently arranged in groups.
Vitruvius gave a picture of the city in antiquity in the
passage already cited. He compared it to the cavea of
a theater, with the agora by the harbor representing the
orchestra, and a wide street running across halfway up,
like a diazoma; at the middle point of this was the Mausoleion. On the summit of the acropolis was a shrine
of Ares with a colossal statue, on the right horn, by the
fountain of Salmakis, a temple of Aphrodite and Hermes,
and on the left horn the palace of Mausolos. From this
palace there was a view to the right over the agora, harbor, and wall circuit, while below it on the left, “hiding
under the hills,” was a secret harbor, to which the king
could issue commands from the palace without anyone
being aware of it.
Apart from the Mausoleion, no building mentioned
in this passage has been located. The shrine of Ares
(fanum, which need not have been a full-scale temple)
should be on the summit of Göktepe, where there is nothing now but an oblong platform. Salmakis is placed with
near certainty on Arsenal Point on the W side of the
harbor. The fountain is now under water; fresh water
rises in the harbor a short distance off the point, but
there is no sign of the temple. The street and agora have
long since been obliterated, and no trace of the palace
has been found on or near the headland (originally called
Zephyrion) which forms the E horn of the harbor and
now carries the castle of the Knights of St. John. The
smaller secret harbor played a part in Artemisia's defeat
of the Rhodians; hiding her ships in it, she led them by
a canal (fossa facta) into the main harbor to seize the
Rhodian ships. This canal is apparently the river referred
to by Pseudo-Skylax (98); there is no river, or even
stream, at or near Bodrum. The position of this second
harbor is a puzzle. “Under the hills” is in any case
unintelligible, and sub montibus has been emended to
sub moenibus, but even so no secret harbor is discoverable in the region of the castle headland. There is a line
of submerged wall on the E side of the main harbor
which has been attributed to it, but a situation actually
inside the harbor is obviously inappropriate. It seems that
the secret harbor must be merely the open roadstead on
the E side of the headland, with a canal across the isthmus to the main harbor. Mausolos' palace would then
have stood on the landward side of the isthmus; looking
S, the main harbor would be on the right and the second
harbor on the left.
The territory of Halikarnassos adjoined that of the independent cities of Myndos on the W and Theangela on
the E, but the exact boundaries are not determinable.
The great castle of the Knights of St. John was built
in the 15th c., largely of materials taken from the Mausoleion and other ancient buildings; much of the stone
came from quarries still to be seen at Koyunbaba a few
miles N of Myndos. The castle houses three small museums containing objects from the surrounding countryside, including some from recent underwater explorations.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
W. J. Hamilton,
Travels in Asia Minor
(1842) 32ff; C. T. Newton,
A History of Discoveries at
Halicarnassus, Cnidus and Branchidae (1863)
MI; id.,
Travels and Discoveries in the Levant (1865); L. Ross,
Reisen auf den griechischen Inseln IV (1852) 33-39; G.
E. Bean & J. M. Cook,
BSA 50 (1955) 85-171
MI; Bean,
Turkey beyond the Maeander (1971) 101-14. Mausoleion: W. B. Dinsmoor,
Architecture of Ancient Greece
(1950) 257-61.
G. E. BEAN
