Gortyna in 218 B.C.

Gortyna — Spring 218 BC · A City Divided.

Gortyn — the second great power of Crete, set in the fertile Mesara plain of the south on the river Lethaios, and old partner of Knossos in the mastery of the island. But the Lyttian War has split the city against itself: the elder men side with Knossos and the Aetolians, the younger men with Lyttos. The elders seized the citadel and let the Knossians and Aetolians in, expelling or killing the young men; the surviving younger faction, driven out, has seized Phaestus and the harbour of Gortyn and now makes war on its own town from those two bases. In the hills of its land lies the Idaean Cave where the Cretans say Zeus was reared, and in the city itself the great inscribed law-code by which Gortyn is famed through all the Greek world.

Gortyn is a city at war with itself. When the Lyttian War split Crete, the quarrel ran straight through the Gortynian people: the elder men espoused Knossos, the younger Lyttos, and the two generations stood in arms against each other. The elders struck first — seizing the citadel of their own city, throwing open the gates to the Knossians and the thousand Aetolians, and either driving out or putting to death the young men, so delivering Gortyn into Knossian hands. But the exiled younger faction did not scatter. By a sudden, bold stroke they seized Phaestus and then the very harbour of Gortyn, and from these two strongholds they carry the war back against the party in the town. So the richest land of Crete is divided between a town held for Knossos and a coast held against it — the fertile Mesara turned into a battlefield of fathers and sons.