Rhithymna or Rithymna () or Rhithymnia (Ῥιθυμνία), was a town of

ancient Crete The history of Crete goes back to the 7th millennium BC, preceding the ancient Minoan civilization by more than four millennia. The Minoan civilization was the first civilization in Europe. During the Iron Age, Crete developed an Ancient Greece-i ...

Greece Greece, officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. Located on the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula, it shares land borders with Albania to the northwest, North Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, and Turkey to th ...

, which is mentioned by

Ptolemy Claudius Ptolemy (; , ; ; – 160s/170s AD) was a Greco-Roman mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were important to later Byzantine science, Byzant ...

and

Pliny the Elder Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23/24 79), known in English as Pliny the Elder ( ), was a Roman Empire, Roman author, Natural history, naturalist, and naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and a friend of the Roman emperor, emperor Vesp ...

as the first town on the north coast to the east of

Amphimalla Amphimalla (Greek language, Greek: , Strabo p. 475; Pliny the Elder, Plin. iv. 20) or Amphimalion (Greek: , Stephanus of Byzantium, Steph. B. ''s. v.''), was an ancient town on the north coast of Crete, Greece, situated on the bay named after i ...

, and is spoken of as a Cretan city by

Stephanus of Byzantium Stephanus or Stephen of Byzantium (; , ''Stéphanos Byzántios''; centuryAD) was a Byzantine grammarian and the author of an important geographical dictionary entitled ''Ethnica'' (). Only meagre fragments of the dictionary survive, but the epit ...

, in whose text its name is written Rhithymnia; Stephanus gives the city's

ethnonym An ethnonym () is a name applied to a given ethnic group. Ethnonyms can be divided into two categories: exonyms (whose name of the ethnic group has been created by another group of people) and autonyms, or endonyms (whose name is created and used ...

s as and . It is also alluded to by

Lycophron Lycophron ( ; ; born about 330–325 BC) was a Hellenistic Greek tragic poet, grammarian, and commentator on comedy, to whom the poem ''Alexandra'' is attributed (perhaps falsely). Life and miscellaneous works He was born at Chalcis in Euboea, a ...

(76). Modern

Rethymno Rethymno (also Rethymnon; ) is a city in Greece on the island of Crete. It is the capital of Rethymno regional unit, and has a population of more than 35,000 inhabitants (nearly 40,000 for the municipal unit). It is believed to have been built ...

retains the name of the ancient city, upon whose site it stands. Rhithymna minted coins in antiquity; maritime emblems are found on them. It is believed that

Arsinoe Arsinoe (), meaning "elevated mind", may refer to: People * Arsinoe of Macedon, mother of Ptolemy I Soter * Apama II or Arsinoe (c. 292 BC–after 249 BC), wife of Magas of Cyrene and mother of Berenice II * Arsinoe, probable mother of Lysimachu ...

is the same town as Rhithymna.

References

Populated places in ancient Crete Former populated places in Greece Cretan city-states Rethymno {{AncientCrete-geo-stub

See also

References