Lemnos

An island in the northeastern Aegean, containing a volcano that was reputed to be the force of Hephaestus (Vulcan), but had become extinct in historical times

Although rugged, the island was fertilized by its lava, and grew a considerable quantity of wheat. It displays remains of a Bronze Age culture (connected with Troy) at Poliochni on the east coast—the site of seven successive building phases—and is described in the Iliad as a provisioning center for the Achaeans during the Trojan War.

Herodotus describes the early inhabitants of Lemnos as `Pelasgians,’ a term used for northern, immigrant elements as opposed to Greeks. He tells how they had been obliged to emigrate from Athens (an unlikely tale intended to justify the later Athenian claim to the island), and how they had vengefully returned to kidnap and murder Athenian women and children at Brauron in Attica, thus giving rise to the Greek description of acts of violence as `Lemnian deeds.’ However this may be, the Hellenization of Lemnos had reached an advanced stage by the eighth century BC.

But the influence of the far-off Etruscans also seems to have been present. For a gravestone (stele) of the early sixth century, found at Camina in the southeastern part of the island (and now in the National Museum at Athens), displays not only a relief of a warrior somewhat reminiscent of sculptures from northern Etruria but also a long inscription which, although indecipherable, displays letters and language possessing evident Etruscan affinities. And Thucydides, too, testifies to `Tyrsenians’ (Etruscans) on Lemnos. These cryptic pieces of evidence do not, as has sometimes been supposed, justify the view that the earliest Etruscans were immigrants from the east, but suggest that one of their city-states later possessed a trading post or market on the island. Moreover, the Lemnians, like (other) Etruscans, had a reputation as kidnappers and pirates (see above). Their island lay close to the approaches to the Euxine (Black) Sea, where Etruscan pots and bronzes have been found near the Russian coast.

The Athenian Miltiades the Younger, ruler of the Thracian Chersonese (Gallipoli peninsula), seized Lemnos c 500 and planted colonists there, and with brief intermissions of rule by Persia, Sparta (404–393), and Hellenistic monarchies the island remained in the hands of the Athenians, whose ownership the Romans confirmed (166). The principal Lemnian city, Hephaestia, stood on a peninsula beside the north coast, above a nearly landlocked harbor; excavations have revealed pre-Greek, archaic and classical material, and a Greco-Roman theater remains above ground. The soil in the neighborhood, notably at Mosychlos (near Repanidhion), includes a quantity of `Lemnian earth,’ highly esteemed for curative purposes, and extracted on only one day in each year, to the accompaniment of religious ceremonies. Across the bay, at Chloe (Khloi), was a terraced sanctuary of the non-Hellenic Cabiri, whose worship was centered on the island of Samothrace. On the west coast traces exist of another town Myrina (Mirina, Kastron), which stood on a rocky promontory flanked by two good anchorages, and possessed a shrine of Artemis.