Demetrias — the Northern Lock in 218 B.C.

Demetrias — the Northern Lock — Antigonid Macedon › The Fetters of Greece.

Founded around 294 BC by Demetrius Poliorcetes, who gathered the small towns of Magnesia into one great walled city at the head of the Pagasetic Gulf, Demetrias was a royal residence, dockyard and arsenal in one. Its garrison watched the only road by which an army could pass between northern and southern Greece, and its sheltered gulf cradled the Antigonid war-fleet. It was the lock on Thessaly and the hinge of the whole kingdom’s southern reach.