Amastris in 218 B.C.

Amastris — Spring 218 BC · The City of the Foundress-Queen.

Amastris — a handsome Greek harbour-city set on a peninsula of the Paphlagonian coast of the Euxine, made within living memory by Queen Amastris, who gathered into one city the four small towns of Sesamos, Kytoros, Kromna and Tieion and gave the new foundation her own name. Tieion soon broke free again, but the rest hold together as one polity on its fine twin-faced promontory. The city is famed for the boxwood of Mount Kytoros that rises behind it — the finest in the world, men say — and for the beauty of its situation between the mountains and the sea. The foundress was niece to Darius the Great King and had been wife to the tyrant of Heraclea Pontica before she ruled here in her own right. In 218 BC Amastris keeps its place among the small powers of the Paphlagonian shore, within the orbit of the rising houses of Pontus and the Black Sea coast.

On the Paphlagonian shore of the Euxine, where a bold peninsula thrusts into the sea between Heraclea and Sinope, stands Amastris — a young city as Greek cities go, made scarcely four generations past. Where once lay four small and separate towns — Sesamos on its rock, Kytoros, Kromna and Tieion — Queen Amastris drew their peoples together into one walled city and called it for herself. Tieion would not long endure the yoke and slipped away again, but Sesamos, Kytoros and Kromna remain joined as the body of the city. Behind it rises Mount Kytoros, clothed in the boxwood that is the wonder and the wealth of these parts; before it spread two harbours on the twin faces of the peninsula. A handsome and well-placed town, Amastris counts itself among the lesser Greek powers of the coast, holding its own between the Paphlagonian princes of the interior and the great kingdom of Pontus that grows along this sea.