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Greek city Kibyra (Cibyra) in Phrygia Pseudo-autonomous issue
Bronze 19mm (5.29 grams) Time of the Antonines. Struck circa 138-192 A.D.
Reference: RPC Online 1954 (temporary); BMC 26; SNG Copenhagen 279.
Radiate and draped bust of Helios right.
ΚΙΒΥΡΑΤΩΝ, wicker basket.
An important city in the far south of the country, near the Lycian border, Kibyra retainer its independence until 84 B.C. when it wa added to the Roman province of Asia. It was celebrated for its iron products.
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.jpg/200px-Colosse_de_Rhodes_(Barclay).jpg) In Greek mythology, the sun was personified as Helios. Homer often calls him simply Titan or Hyperion, while Hesiod (Theogony 371) and the Homeric Hymn separate him as a son of the Titans Hyperion and Theia (Hesiod) or Euryphaessa (Homeric Hymn) and brother of the goddesses Selene, the moon, and Eos, the dawn. The names of these three were also the common Greek words for sun, moon and dawn.
Helios was imagined as a handsome god crowned with the shining aureole of the sun, who drove the chariot of the sun across the sky each day to earth-circling Oceanus and through the world-ocean returned to the East at night. Homer described Helios’s chariot as drawn by solar steeds (Iliad xvi.779); later Pindar described it as drawn by “fire-darting steeds” (Olympian Ode 7.71). Still later, the horses were given fiery names: Pyrois, Aeos, Aethon, and Phlegon.
As time passed, Helios was increasingly identified with the god of light, Apollo. However, in spite of their syncretism, they were also often viewed as two distinct gods (Helios was a Titan, whereas Apollo was an Olympian). The equivalent of Helios in Roman mythology was Sol, specifically Sol Invictus.
Kibyra (sometimes also spelled as Cibyra) is an ancient city and an archaeological site in south-west Turkey, near the modern town of Gölhisar, in Burdur Province.
Possibly originally settled by Lydians, it is also the place where, according to Strabo, the Lydian language was still being spoken among a multicultural population around his time (1st century BC), thus making Kibyra the last locality where the culture, by then extinct in Lydia proper according to extant accounts, is attested.
A tetrapolis (grouping of four cities) was formed under the leadership of Kibyra during the 2nd century BC. The Kibyran Tetrapolis included the neighboring cities of Bubon, Balbura and Oenoanda. The tetrapolis was dissolved by the Roman general Lucius Licinius Murena in 83 BC, at the time of the First Mithridatic War.
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