Tieion in 218 B.C.

Tieion — Spring 218 BC · The Little Port of the Billaios.

Tieion — also called Tios or Tion — a small Greek city of the Euxine shore, planted by colonists of Miletus on the Paphlagonian coast between Heraclea Pontica and Amastris, where the river Billaios comes down to the sea. It is a modest place, little more than a walled harbour-town and its narrow strip of coast, yet it holds an honoured name: men say it was here that Philetaerus was born, the eunuch keeper of Lysimachus’s treasure at Pergamon who broke with his master and founded the line that now rules as kings of Pergamon. A free Ionian polis of the borderland where Bithynia, Paphlagonia and the reach of Pontus meet, Tieion lives by its fishery and its small share of the coasting-trade of the Black Sea.

On the long Paphlagonian coast of the Black Sea, where the Billaios river finds the sea between the great trading-city of Heraclea Pontica to the west and Amastris to the east, sits little Tieion. It is the smallest of the Milesian foundations of this shore — a single town with its harbour, its walls and its fields, holding no inland realm and no fleet of note. Yet it is a free Greek polis, ruling itself by its own magistrates, and it carries a name above its size: the house of Pergamon, now grown into a kingdom under Attalus, traces its founder Philetaerus to this very town. Set in the debatable ground where the kings of Bithynia, the dynasts of Paphlagonia and the distant arm of Pontus all reach, Tieion keeps its freedom by being small, harmless and useful — a port on the coasting-road of the Euxine that no great power yet troubles to swallow.