Salamis

The principal city of the island of Cyprus, situated beside its east coast (five miles north of the modern Famagusta), where an acropolis standing on a plateau overlooked a wide sandy bay containing a natural harbor—now wholly silted up—at the mouth of the river Pediaeus or Pedias (Pidias)

This town succeeded an important Bronze Age (Mycenaean) settlement at Enkomi (a mile and a half inland but connected to the estuary at that time by a navigable channel), at about the end of the first quarter of the eleventh century BCE, to which finds of a tomb and fragments of pottery can be dated. According to Greek mythology, the founder of the city was Teucer, son of Telamon, king of the island of the same name off the coast of Attica; the first settlers are believed to have been Mycenaean refugees.

Magnificent finds from royal tombs of the mid- and later eighth and seventh centuries BCE strongly recall Homeric burial descriptions and probably owe this character to the knowledge of the Iliad which was spreading at the time. A place bearing the name of Sillua or Sillume, mentioned among tributaries of the Assyrian king Esarhaddon (672), seems to be identifiable with this Salamis. Its King Euelthon (c 560–525) claimed to be the ruler of the entire island and inaugurated the issue of Salaminian coinage, inscribed with his name in syllabic script.

After Cyprus had come under the control of the Persians (545), Euelthon's grandson Gorgos refused to join the Ionian revolt (499/8) and was overthrown by his brother Onesilus, whose defeat outside the city (497), as Herodotus recounts, enabled Persian domination to be restored. In the waters off Salamis, and on land nearby, the Athenians won a double victory over Persia's Phoenician and Cilician forces in 450/449. The most powerful of all the city's kings was Euagoras I (410–374); he inaugurated a Hellenic revival and, although compelled to submit to Persia, remained a friend of the Athenians, whose orator Isocrates devoted a speech to his posthumous praise (c 365). Salamis provided ships to Alexander the Great at the siege of Tyre (332) and served as his mint. In 306 it was the scene of a great naval battle between his successors Demetrius I Poliorcetes (the Besieger) and Ptolemy I Soter of Egypt, in which the former was victorious, although not long afterward the island passed into Egyptian hands.

At first Salamis was the capital of this Egyptian Cyprus, but in 200, owing to the silting of its harbor, the seat of government was moved to Paphos instead. Nevertheless Salamis continued to flourish, and still did so after Roman annexation (58), despite initial difficulty (recorded by Cicero) in repaying a Roman loan with an annual interest rate of 48 percent. A Christian community was founded by St. Paul and Barnabas, himself a Cypriot, whose reputed tomb is to be seen in the neighborhood. Under Vespasian (CE 69–79) an earthquake severely damaged the city, which also suffered severe devastation in the time of Trajan, during a large-scale revolt organized by the large local Jewish community (116–17) and forming part of a wider rebellion of the Diaspora.

Partially destroyed by further earthquakes in 332 and 342, Salamis was rebuilt by Constantius II, and under the name of Constantia resumed its position as capital of Cyprus, serving as its metropolitan episcopal see.

Remains of earlier Salamis are so far lacking. But an unusually elaborate, multiple system of later fortifications has come to light. Within these walls, the remains of a Greco-Roman agora display rows of shops behind two long colonnades; the agora is flanked by a temple of Olympian Zeus, who is depicted on coins of an Augustan proconsul (c 15 BCE). Beside the sea, a colonnaded gymnasium of Hellenistic date, remodelled on a grandiose scale in Roman times, was shattered in the earthquakes of the fourth century CE, and subsequently rebuilt as a bathing establishment, of which the installations, including large halls with niches decorated with mosaics, are well preserved. Much of the stone work employed for this purpose came from the theater, which, twice remodelled, had possessed accommodation for 15,000 spectators. An extensive reservoir was supplied by a thirty-mile-long aqueduct. In the neighborhood are the remains of a large basilica, with three aisles on either side of its nave, which St. Epiphanius started to build during his bishopric (376–403) but left uncompleted at the time of his death.

Bibliography

Hill, George Francis. A History of Cyprus. 4 vols., Cambridge UP, 1940-1952.

Karageorghis, Vassos, et al. Salamis. 6 vols., Dept. of Antiquities, Cyprus, 1974.

Panteli, Stavros. A New History of Cyprus, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day. East-West Publications, 1984.

Strauss, Barry. The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter That Saved Greece—and Western Civilization. Simon & Schuster, 2004.

Taylor, Martha Caroline. Salamis and the Salaminioi: The History of an Unofficial Athenian Demos. Brill Academic, 1997.