HERAKLEIA UNDER LATMOS
Caria, Turkey.
Though a Carian town, it was on the Ionian coast. It
is some 25 km W of Miletos and about 10 km N of the
village of Bafa. Now at the W end of Lake Bafa it was
on a gulf of the Aegean at least until Early Imperial
times (
Strab. 14.1.8). The town lay on a fairly steep
lower slope of Mt. Latmos (Beş Parmak, ca. 1400 m)
where it met the gulf. First called Latmos, and a member of the Delian League, it fell to Mausolos in the 4th
c. B.C. and his philhellene policy accounts for its change
of name. In time Miletos overshadowed it, and the gulf
on which it stood was gradually converted into a lake
by the action of the Maeander. Herakleia was celebrated
as the locale of Endymion (
Paus. 5.1.5). There are
several Early Christian monuments in and near the site,
including a Byzantine fortress at the S end of the town.
Either Mausolos or, less probably, Lysimachos in the
280s B.C. built the 6.5 km of walls which still stand in
great part (later the enclosed area was reduced by about
a third). There were 65 towers, and the maximum dimension of the city, N-S, was slightly more than 2 km.
The walls, one of the major monuments of Classical fortification, were carefully built. Cuttings in bedrock were
often made for the foundation courses and can be seen
where the wall has fallen. All of the detail of such a
system can be observed: access stairs, parapets, windows,
and roofs. Several of the gates and posterns are preserved, particularly in the S portions. At the N the walls
follow the terrain to a height of some 500 m above the
level of the lake, marching up the stony site in a manner
reminiscent of the Byzantine-Venetian walls of Kotor.
The port lay on the SW side of the town. Within the
walls, at least in the S half of the city, the plan was
orthogonal on the Hippodamian model rather like the
plan of Miletos. The streets were oriented to the cardinal compass points, and the resulting rectangular blocks
determined the orientation and alignment of most of the
public buildings. An exception to this is the Temple of
Athena (an inscription identifying it survives), which
stood in a commanding position on a hill above and behind the harbor area. It was a carefully built structure
of simple plan: a cella with a pronaos, the two of approximately equal dimensions (the walls of the cella
stand nearly intact). To the NW of the Temple of
Athena, beyond the agora, are the remains of the bouleutenon, which was similar in plan to that at Priene—a
rectangle with the seats, on three sides, parallel to the
enclosing walls. Apparently the upper part of these walls
featured engaged Doric columns; fragments of a more
or less canonical Doric entablature have also been found.
The agora, of Hellenistic date, measures about 60 x
130 m. Its S retaining wall is well preserved, and one can
see there two levels of shops, the lower entered from the
outside below the agora. Details of windows, doors, and
structural niceties are all visible. Farther to the NW are
a nymphaeum and a theater, neither well preserved; the
latter is of Roman date. There are also the remains of a
Roman bath building, between the bouleuterion and the
theater, and there are at least three temples in addition
to that of Athena; none of these has so far been identified.
In the S part of the site, about 200 m on a line from
the Byzantine fort to the Athena temple, is an unusual
building which has been identified as a Sanctuary of
Endymion. Over-all the building measures about 14 x 21
m. It consists of pronaos of six unfluted columns set
between two square piers at the ends of the facade; behind this porch there was an almost horseshoe-shaped
cella intruded into by the natural rock and featuring two
widely but irregularly spaced internal columns. The
building faces the SW and thus is oblique to the orthogonal grid; its design reminds one of certain later sanctuaries and temples in Roman North Africa.
At the very S end of the site, where the walls nearly
reach the water, is a cemetery of tombs cut from the
living rock along the steep slopes. These tombs had separate lids in the Carian fashion; some are now submerged,
as the level of the lake has risen since ancient times.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
RE VIII (1913) 431-32; F. Krischen,
Die Befestigungen von Herakleia am Latmos (1922);
=
Milet III.2
PI; G. E. Bean & J. M. Cook in
BSA 52
(1957) 138-40; id., Aegean Turkey (1966) 252-58
MPI;
EAA 3 (1960) 390-91 with bibliography
PI; E. Akurgal,
Ancient Civilizations and Ruins of Turkey (3d ed. 1973)
240-41
P.
W. L. MACDONALD