Trapezus in 218 B.C.

Trapezus — Spring 218 BC · The Table Above the Sea.

Trapezus — "the Table" — the easternmost of the great Greek colonies that string the southern shore of the Pontus, a daughter-colony of Sinope planted on a table-like plateau above the sea where the land begins to climb toward the Colchian and Tibarenian highlands. A fortified trade-port and emporium, it gathers the goods of the interior — the metals of the Chalybes, the timber and produce of Armenia and the Caucasus — and passes them out by sea, taking in return the wares of the Greek world. It was the first Greek city the Ten Thousand reached on their long march from the heart of the Persian empire to the sea, where, climbing the last ridge, they raised the cry "Thalatta! Thalatta!" — "The sea! The sea!" In 218 BC it is a free city, holding its own beneath the great mountain at its back, sister to Cerasus along the coast and kin to its mother Sinope.

Where the Pontic shore runs east toward Colchis and the wall of the Caucasus, Trapezus marks the farthest reach of the great Greek colonisation of the Euxine. It sits on a flat, table-shaped height above the sea — whence its name, "the Table" — shut in at its back by a mountain of vast size, with the country of the Tibareni and the Chalybes and the Colchian highlands rising beyond. A daughter-colony of Sinope, it lives as that mother-city does: by the carrying-trade, channelling between the Black Sea and the Armenian and Caucasian interior the metals, timber and produce of the hinterland. Strong of site and small of territory, it keeps its freedom by its walls and its harbour rather than by any great power on land — the last Greek voice on a coast that fades, eastward, into barbarian country.