DOI: 10.33469/oannes.1962574 ISSN: 2667-7059

Civic Identity and Sacred Memory at the Margins of Epic Geography: Paris/Alexandros, the Adrasteia Legacy and the Representational Repertoire at Parion

Sadık Tuğrul, Vedat Keleş
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This article examines Parion’s place within the epic and sacred geography of the Troad through the relationship among civic identity, sacred memory and public representation. It begins from the premise that the city’s identity cannot be reduced to a single origin narrative, fixed etymology or uninterrupted cultic continuity. Its central argument is that a distinctive Parian repertoire of civic memory and representation can be reconstructed from bodies of evidence belonging to different periods and carrying unequal evidentiary weight. Colonisation and eponymic traditions, local sacred genealogy, sacred topography, public commemoration and numismatic imagery served different functions within this repertoire. Although Parion was an Archaic foundation outside the Homeric narrative, its location between the Propontis, Hellespont and Troad enabled later associations with the region’s epic past. Strabo provides the principal textual basis for discussing Adrasteia, Apollo Aktaios, Artemis, the reported transfer of sanctuary material and the Altar of Hermokreon. Athenagoras’ contested Alexandros passage offers a specific textual record of a taphos, bronze eikōn, sacrifice and festival in the agora, while the Paris/Alexandros identification remains a defensible but non-exclusive modern reading. The Gorgoneion, Apollo Aktaios, Eros/Cupid and Pario Conditori types document the circulation of selected images and sacred or founding references without establishing collective belief, ritual continuity or a single political programme. In the Roman period, local, sacred and epic memories were rearticulated through colonial status and imperial visual codes.

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