Colophon

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This article is about the ancient city of Colophon. For the publishing information found in a book, see colophon (publishing).

Colophon (Greek Κολοφών) was a city in Lydia. It was one of the twelve Ionian cities, between Lebedos and Ephesus.

The city's name comes from the word κολοφών, 'summit', which is the origin of the bibliographic term 'colophon', in the metaphorical sense of a 'crowning touch'. The term "colophony" for rosin comes from the term colophonia resina, that is, resin from the pine trees of Colophon, which was highly valued for the strings of musical instruments.

The ruins of the city are at the Castro of Ghiaour-Keui, an insignificant village in the vilayet of Smyrna, kaza of Kuşadası.

[edit] Antiquity

In Greek antiquity two sons of Codrus, king of Athens, established a colony there. It was the birthplace of the philosopher Xenophanes and the poet Mimnermus. It was destroyed by Lysimachus, one of the successors of Alexander the Great. Notium served as the port, and in the neighbourhood was the village of Clarus, with its famous temple and oracle of Apollo Clarius, where Calchas vied with Mopsus in divinatory science.

The cavalry of Colophon was renowned. In Roman times Colophon lost its importance; the name was transferred to the site of Notium, and the latter name disappeared between the Peloponnesian War and the time of Cicero.

Additionally, the city, as a major location on the Ionic mainland, was cited as a possible home or birthplace for Homer. In his True History, Lucian lists it as a possible birthplace along with the island of Khios and the city of Smyrna, though Lucian's Homer claims to be from Babylon.

[edit] Ecclesiastical history

The "Notitiae Episcopatuum" mentions Colophon or Colophone, as late as the twelfth or thirteenth century, as a suffragan of Ephesus. Lequien (I, 723) gives the names of only four Bishops: St. Sosthenes (I Cor., i, 1) and St. Tychicus (Tit., iii, 12) are merely legendary; Euthalius was present at the Council of Ephesus in 431, and Alexander was alive in 451.

It is a titular see of Asia Minor.