the Week of Proper 28 / Ordinary 33
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Bible Dictionaries
Mitylene
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or (Μιτυλήνη)
Mitylene, or-according to the usual spelling in classical writings and on coins-Mytilene, was the chief town in the island of Lesbos, lying on the S.E. coast, about 12 miles from the mainland of Asia Minor. Built on a peninsula which had once been an island, it had two excellent harbours, the northern for merchantmen, the southern for triremes.
Horace calls it ‘Mitylene pulchra’ (Ep. i. xi. 17), and Cicero praises it as ‘urbs et natura de situ et descriptione aediflciorum et pulchritudine, in primis nobilis’ (Leg. Agr. ii. 41). Mitylene was the home of Alcaeus and of Sappho, ‘an extraordinary person (θαυμαστόν τι χρῆμα), for at no period within memory has any woman been known at all to be compared to her in poetry’ (Strabo, xiii. ii. 3). For its old renown the Romans left the city free-‘libera Mitylene’ (Pliny, v. 39).
Mitylene is mentioned only incidentally in Acts (20:14). The ship in which St. Paul sailed from Assos to Patara in the month of April lay over-night either in the northern harbour of Mitylene (which Strabo mentions as μέγας καὶ βαθύς [XIII. ii. 2]), or else in the roadstead outside. Mitylene was about 30 miles S. from Assos-an easy day’s sail. It was contrary to the general practice to sail at night in the aegean, where, throughout the summer season, the N. wind commonly blows fresh in the morning and dies away towards evening. In later Christian times the whole island of Lesbos came to be called Mitylene. The Turks, who captured it in a.d. 1462, have corrupted its name into Midüllü.
Literature.-Conybeare-Howson, Life and Epistles of St. Paul, new ed., London, 1877, ii. 261; H. F. Tozer, The Islands of the aegean, Oxford, 1890, p. 134 f.; W. M. Ramsay, St. Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen, London, 1895, p. 291 ff.
James Strahan.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Mitylene'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/m/mitylene.html. 1906-1918.
