LEBEDOS Turkey.
City in Ionia, on the Kisik (formerly Xingi) peninsula 36 km NW of Ephesos. Founded according to tradition by a son of Kodros named variously as Andraimon or Andropompos. The city was among the poorest of those in the Ionian League; in the Delian Confederacy it was assessed at first at three talents, but this was soon reduced to one. Antigonos, ca. 303 B.C., planned to transfer the inhabitants of Lebedos to Teos and to merge the two cities into one, but the plan was never carried out; instead, Lysimachos used the populations to man his new city at Ephesos. About 266 B.C. Ptolemy II refounded Lebedos under the name of Ptolemais, but the old name soon revived. The Ionian branch of the Artists of Dionysos, originally settled at Teos, moved finally to Lebedos in the 2d c. B.C. Horace's reference to Lebedos as a deserted village is plainly an error; the coinage continues down to the time of M. Aurelius, and a bishop of Lebedos is recorded in the Byzantine lists.The little peninsula, low and flat, is surrounded by a wall of regular ashlar 2 m thick, with four towers and three gates; a rock-cut ramp leads up from the water to the SE gate, but little else survives. Some foundations of buildings may be discerned on the peninsula, but the acropolis hill is on the mainland opposite. Here sherds are abundant, and there are numerous fragments of unidentifiable walls and foundations.
There are thermal springs on the shore W of the city and at a spot called Karakoç to the N, where substantial ruins of ancient baths are still standing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
G. Weber, AthMitt 29 (1904) 228; SIG 344; G. E. Bean, Aegean Turkey (1966) 149-53.G. E. BEAN