Geography

​As for the city of the present Ilians, they say that for a time it was only a village, having a small and cheap temple of Athena, but that Alexander, going up after his victory at the Granicus, adorned the temple with votive offerings, called it a city, ordered the overseers to restore it with buildings, and judged it free and exempt from tribute; and later, after the overthrow of the Persians, he sent down a favorable letter, promising to make it a great city, to build a most famous temple, and to establish a sacred contest. After his death, Lysimachus took the greatest care of the city, constructed a temple, surrounded it with a wall of about forty stadia, and settled into it the surrounding ancient cities which were already in a bad state, at which time he also took care of Alexandria, which had already been settled by Antigonus and called Antigoneia, but changed its name; for it seemed to be a pious thing for the successors of Alexander to found cities named after him first, and then after themselves; and indeed it survived and grew, and now it has also received a Roman colony and is one of the illustrious cities.

​And the Ilium which now exists was a kind of village-town when the Romans first set foot in Asia and expelled Antiochus the Great from the region within the Taurus. At least Demetrius of Scepsis says, having visited the city as a young man at those times, that he saw the settlement so neglected that its roofs did not even have tiles; and Hegesianax says that the Galatians, having crossed over from Europe, went up to the city desiring a stronghold, but immediately abandoned it because it was unfortified; later, however, it received much restoration. Then the Romans under Fimbria damaged it again, taking it by siege in the Mithridatic War. This Fimbria was sent along as a quaestor with the consul Valerius Flaccus, who had been appointed against Mithridates; but having raised a mutiny and slain the consul in Bithynia, he himself became master of the army, and having advanced to Ilium, since the Ilians would not receive him as a robber, he applied force and took it on the tenth day; and when he boasted that the city which Agamemnon with his thousand-ship fleet and all Greece fighting alongside had scarcely taken in the tenth year, he himself had subdued on the tenth day, one of the Ilians said, “For there was no Hector fighting for the city.” Now Sulla, coming upon him, destroyed him, and sent Mithridates back to his own country under treaty, and comforted the Ilians with many restorations. In our time, however, the deified Caesar took much greater forethought for them, emulating Alexander at the same time; for the latter had started to take care of them in renewal of their kinship, and at the same time being a lover of Homer; indeed, a certain revision of Homer’s poetry is in circulation, called “the one from the casket,” Alexander having gone over it with Callisthenes and Anaxarchus and marked certain parts, and then deposited it in a casket which he found in the Persian treasure, luxuriously constructed. So both because of his emulation of the poet and because of the kinship derived from the Aeacidae who ruled among the Molossians, among whom they report that Andromache, who had been the wife of Hector, ruled as queen, Alexander treated the Ilians with favor; but Caesar, being both a lover of Alexander and having clearer proofs of kinship with the Ilians, was encouraged to beneficence with youthful vigor; and clearer proofs, first because he was a Roman, and the Romans regard Aeneas as their founder, and secondly because he was a Julian from a certain ancestor Iulus; and that ancestor got this name from Iulus, being one of the descendants of Aeneas. So he allotted land to them and preserved their freedom and immunity from public services, and they remain in these privileges until now. But that the ancient Ilium was not established here, as those who investigate according to Homer infer, is proven by such arguments as follow. But first we must sketch the places, beginning from the coast which we left.