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Miletos  AS elsewhere in Turkey, Balat, the name of the modern village which used to stand on the site, betokens the presence of a Byzantine fortress, Palatia, which stands on a hill above the theatre. Occupied since Mycenean times in the second millennium BC, Miletos became one of the great cities of antiquity, famed for its wool, and, in the sixth-fifth centuries BC, for its extraordinary intellectual vitality based on natural scientists and philosophers such as Thales, Anaximenes and Anaximandros, and the geographer Hekataios. Its prosperity depended on its several harbours, grouped around the north-facing peninsula on which the city lay. However the Maeander river has done its work here, as at Priene and Herakleia by Latmos, and the peninsula now lies several kilometres inland surrounded by alluvial silt. The island of Lade, witness to the naval battle in which the Persians crushed a Greek revolt in 494 BC, now lies like a beached whale in the fl ood-plain to the west. The decline caused by silting probably began in the third century AD.


After its destruction by the Persians in 494 BC, Miletos was rebuilt on a gridiron plan favoured by its native architect Hippodamos, traces of which can still be discerned. The site, still under excavation by German archaeologists, is too big to encompass in a single visit, and we have to be selective. The great theatre on the south-west fl ank of the acropolis hill was originally a smallish 4th century BC structure, but substantial alterations in the Roman period increased its capacity to some 20,000; the sculptured reliefs in the orchestra and stage building are from the 2nd century AD. The tower above the auditorium belongs to the Byzantine citadel, whose wall caused the demolition of the stage-building.


The other particularly well-preserved building on site is the baths complex built, according to an inscription, by Faustina the younger, wife of the emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 161-180). It was evidently intended to service the nearby gymnasium and stadium, both built in the 2nd century BC by Eumenes II, king of Pergamon, who controlled most of western Asia Minor at the time. Many smaller baths have only three basic rooms, the cold room (frigidarium), warm room (tepidarium) and hot room (calidarium); in Faustina’s luxurious establishment we can also see clearly a changing room (apodyterium) and two steam rooms (sudatoria - ‘sweat-rooms’). The heating system - hot air circulating
through wall-flues and under the fl oor - is clearly visible. Around a swimming-pool in the middle section of the frigidarium are several statues, one representing the river-god Maeander in traditional reclining pose.


If there is time we head east from the theatre past a Hellenistic heroon to the 1st century BC harbour monument, and then past the north agora to the open-air sanctuary of Apollo Delphinios, Apollo of the dolphins, protector of seamen and ships. This seems to have been the religious and administrative heart of the ancient city, where the state archive was kept (some 200 immensely important inscriptions were found there), and whence the Sacred Way led to the temple of Apollo at Didyma. Nearby are the large baths of Capito. An Ionic stoa partly destroyed by the construction of Turkish baths in the fourteenth century leads towards the huge south agora, whose entrance gate is now in the Pergamum Museum in Berlin. Nearby lie a 1st-3rd century AD nymphaion with part of the aqueduct which fed it, an essentially 6th century basilical church with a martyrium in the shape of a clover-leaf, a 2nd century BC bouleuterion, and a Serapeion.

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