Kytaion: reflections on the “small bosporan town”

Kytaion was a small Bosporan town. It originated in the process of internal colonization by the Hellenes of the lands of Eastern Crimea. Literary sources, starting with the Periplus of Ps.-Scylax (3rd quarter of the 4th century BC), call it πόλις. At the same time, settlements similar to it in size and urban appearance in Strabo’s “Geography” (and in later sources) are attributed to the number of κῶμαι. (Some of them were probably founded as independent apoi kiai as a result of the Great Greek Colonization, but lost the polis’ status due to their entry into the power of the Spartokids.) In Russian historiography the term κῶμαι is usually translated and understood as “villages”, “rural settlements”, although it is polysemantic (settlement; the Dorian equivalent to Attic demes; urban area, quarter). The author of the article, relying on the testimony of Polyaenus (Strat. VI. 9, 3) about appointment by Leucon I to relatives of suspected treason of trierarchs in the management of κῶμαι, tried to prove that here we are not talking about individual “villages”, but about rural districts – the lowest district in the administrative-territorial system of the Bosporus state. From this angle, he analyzed information about these κῶμαι in Strabo, descended from writing of Artemidorus of Ephesus. As a result, the author concluded that, unlike the larger cities that retained elements of polis’ form organization (Pantikapaion, Phanagoria, Theodosia, Nymphaion, Kepoi, Hermonassa, Gorgippia), the so-called “small Bosporan towns” (Strabo’ κῶμαι) were mainly urban centers of territorial districts. The formation of such a structure dates back to the reign of Leucon I, although the beginning of this process must apparently be dated back to the last decades of his father’s life. Probably, these districts were named after their urban centers, and the demoticon of their inhabitants remained used, at least as early as the 3rd century AD (CIRB 942).

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