Hamaxitus

Hamaxitus (Ancient Greek: Ἁμαξιτός, romanized: Hamaxitos) was an ancient Greek city in the south-west of the Troad region of Anatolia which was considered to mark the boundary between the Troad and Aeolis. Its surrounding territory was known in Greek as Ἁμαξιτία (Hamaxitia), and included the temple of Apollo Smintheus, the salt pans at Tragasai, and the Satnioeis river (modern Tuzla Çay). It was probably an Aeolian colony.

It has been located on a rise called Beşiktepe near the village of Gülpınar (previously Külahlı) in the Ayvacık district of Çanakkale Province, Turkey.

Name

Hamaxitus first appears in the Athenian tribute lists in the 425/4 BC as hαμαχσιτός [hamakʰsiˈtos]. However, this spelling reflects the influence of Attic Greek and is not a reliable guide to how Hamaxitans would have spelt or pronounced the name of their city. Hamaxitus was located in an Aeolic-speaking area: Aeolic, like other so-called East Greek dialects, was psilotic and so, unlike Attic Greek, had lost the phoneme /h/. This retained /h/ is seen in the Attic spelling of Hamaxitus with an eta, which in Attic unlike other dialects represented [h] rather than [ɛː]. Likewise, the use of the digraph -χσ- (/khs/) for -ξ- (/x/) reflects Attic, not Aeolic usage. The grapheme ξ (xi) originally represented /ks/ (κσ); it was a peculiarity of Attic (consistent with not being psilotic and therefore retaining audibly aspirated consonants) that /ks/ was pronounced /khs/ and so represented by the grapheme χσ, as here in hαμαχσιτός. All other literary and epigraphic sources refer to Ἁμαξιτός and legends on the city's own coinage from the 4th century BC read ΑΜΑΞΙ (AMAXI, i.e. Ἁμαξι(τός), Hamaxi(tos)). The city's name derives from ἅμαξα (hamaxa) meaning 'wagon', hence the adjective ἁμαξιτός (hamaxitos), 'traversed by wagons', 'carriage-road', 'high-road'. Remains of an ancient road have been identified leading away up the coast from the sheltered bay immediately below the rise on which the Classical city was located at Beşiktepe, indicating the name's origin.

Apollo Smintheus

All foundation myths about Hamaxitus in Classical Antiquity were related to the foundation of the nearby temple of Apollo Smintheus (Ἀπόλλων Σμινθεύς). The subject attracted much interest in Antiquity because in the opening of Homer's Iliad the Trojan priest of Apollo, Chryses, addresses the god in the vocative as Σμινθεῦ (Smintheu, 'O, Sminthian') when imploring him to send a plague against the Greeks because Agamemnon had seized his daughter Chryseis and refused to ransom her. The epithet Σμίνθος (Sminthos) caused some confusion to Greek speakers since they did not recognize it as being Greek in origin, and attributed it to the Pelasgian or Mysian languages. The consonantal string -nth- (also found in place names such as Corinth) is considered by philologists to be non-Greek, and possibly Luwian, in origin. The passage of Homer gives no indication as to its meaning, and so myths about Apollo Smintheus primarily arose from attempts to aetiologize the epithet.

The earliest tradition comes from Callinus, an elegiac poet from Ephesus who lived in the mid-7th century BC. He relates that Hamaxitus was founded by a band of Teucrian (i.e. Trojan) Cretans who were told by an oracle to found a city wherever the 'earth-born' (γηγενεῖς) attacked them. When they reached the area of Hamaxitus, a great horde of field mice ate all the leather on their equipment, and so they settled on the spot, interpreting the 'earth-born' of the oracle to have been the mice. This myth thus glosses the term sminthos as 'mouse'. Callinus' aetiology takes into account both Apollo's role as a god of disease and the fact that it was in precisely this role that Chryses had invoked him as 'Sminthian' in the Iliad. However, in discussing the cult, the Augustan Greek geographer Strabo of Amaseia noted that the epithets of gods worshipped at several other Greek sanctuaries were also explained by reference to a god bringing an end to a plague of small animals, and so it is not clear how Callinus arrived at this specific explanation of sminthos as 'mouse'. The term appears again as a poetic word for mice several centuries later in a fragment of the early 5th century BC tragedian Aeschylus, indicating that by this time Callinus' aetiology of 'Sminthian' had been generalized from an explanation of a particular epithet into an independent lexeme.

Callinus' version predominated in Classical Antiquity and is reflected in the local traditions of Hamaxitus. Coins minted by the city in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC feature Apollo Smintheus, and after Hamaxitus was synoecized, coins depicting Apollo Smintheus continued to be produced by the mint of Alexandreia Troas until the reign of the Emperor Gallienus (AD 260–268). In the early 1st century AD, Strabo described the sanctuary of Apollo Smintheus as having a statue of Apollo with his foot on a mouse created by the sculptor Scopas of Paros (c. 395 – c. 350 BC), while the Roman scholar Aelian (c. AD 175 – c. 235) related that mice were kept at public expense in the sanctuary and nested beneath the altar. The extensive remains of the Hellenistic temple can now be seen on the northern outskirts of the modern village of Gülpınar. The most recent Turkish excavations indicate that the Hellenistic temple was constructed c. 150–125 BC, and therefore at about the same time that the main festival of Alexandreia Troas changed from being the Πύθια ἐν Τρωάδι (Pythia en Troadi, 'the Pythia in the Troad') to the Σμίνθια (Sminthia, 'the Sminthia'). The cult spread to the island of Rhodes, where a month was named Σμίνθιος (Sminthios) and a festival known as the Sminthia was held which the scholar Philomnestus discussed in On the Sminthia at Rhodes.