Greek Troas Kolonai

Kolonai or Kolone was a ancient Greek city on the coast of Troas, south of Troy and opposite Tenedos. Kolonai was the home of the historian Daes the only historian known from that particular city. A writer of local history, he can date no earlier than the late 5th century BC, and as a citizen of Kolonai he must date before circa 310 BC when Kolonai became synoecized with Alexandreia Troas he is therefore likely to have been active in the 4th century BC. The Augustan geographer Strabo provides our only information on Daes in a brief quotation from his work on the history of Kolonai: 'Daes of Kolonai says that the temple of Apollo Killaios was first founded in Kolonai by the Aeolians who sailed from Greece'. The cult of Apollo Killaios was local to the southern Troas and Lesbos and is first mentioned in Homer's Iliad. The reference to the foundation of Kolonai by Aeolians indicates both that the inhabitants of Kolonai in the 4th century BC considered themselves to be ethnically Aeolian and that Daes' work dealt with the early history of his polis. The Aeolian identity of 4th century BC Kolonai is independently confirmed by the legends on their coins which were spelt in the Aeolic Greek dialect.

In Greek mythology, the king of Kolonai during the Trojan Wars was Kyknos. He was killed on the first day of the Trojan Wars by Achilles. This story does not appear in the Iliad, but does in the Kypria, which is thought to have been composed slightly later than the Iliad in the latter half of the 7th century BC. Kyknos appears on two separate occasions in Pindar, suggesting that by the early 5th century BC the myth had some currency. The mid 1st century BC historian Diodorus Siculus related a story about Kyknos which he attributed to the inhabitants of Tenedos, an island not far north of Kolonai, in which Kyknos' son Tennes founded Tenedos and gave it has name. A similar connection between the mythical king of Kolonai and the foundation of Tenedos was made two centuries later by the writer Pausanias.