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TLOS Lycia, Turkey.

Near the village of Dilver, 24 km N of Xanthos on the E side of the Xanthos river. One of the six cities possessing three votes in the Lycian League; the name appears in the Lycian language as Tlava or Tlave, and eight or ten Lycian inscriptions have been found on the site. Panyassis mentions Tlous as one of the sons of Tremiles, Termilae (Tremili) being the name by which the Lycians called themselves. At an uncertain date in the 2d c. B.C. a certain Eudemus attempted to establish a tyranny at Tlos, but was suppressed by the forces of the League. Otherwise the city has no recorded history. The citizens were divided into demes, named mostly after local heroes, Bellerophon, Iobates, Sarpedon. Coinage, of League types, begins after 168 B.C.; imperial coinage, as elsewhere in Lycia, is confined to Gordian III.

The ruins consist chiefly of a theater and tombs. The theater, outside the city on the E, is of very fine Roman work excellently preserved, but at present badly overgrown. It is large and purely of Roman type, standing on almost level ground with a surrounding wall of masonry; the cavea is an exact semicircle, except that the ends of the retaining wall are straight for a few meters. Much of the stage building survives. Numerous Lycian rock tombs, of house and temple types, are cut in the N and E faces of the hill on which the city stands; the most remarkable is a temple tomb carrying a number of reliefs, one of which represents Bellerophon on Pegasos.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. Fellows, Lycia (1840) 132-37; T.A.B. Spratt & E. Forbes, Travels in Lycia (1847) I 32-36; E. Petersen & F. von Luschan, Reisen in Lykien (1889) 138-40; TAM II.2 (1930) 204-5.

G. E. BEAN

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