Constructing and re-constructing Asia Minor's history and identity during the imperial age: the Amazons in Ionia and Aeolis

In the ancient Greek world, the myth of the Amazons, who, in the Greek collective imagination, were the "otherness", is often attested in connection with the foundation and eponimy traditions related to cities, especially in Ionia and Aeolis in Asia Minor. It is possible to find these traditions in local accounts, which were preserved until the Roman imperial age, when there was a revival of archaic and classical Greek traditions during the second Sophistic. The age of the Emperor Hadrian would have been particularly important for the revival of these foundation myths, as many Ionian and Aeolian cities (such as Ephesus, Smyrna, Kyme and Myrina) linked their past and their origin to the figure of the Amazon, as represented by the local coinage, in order to affirm their antiquity and priority: these traditions are also documented in literary sources. Thanks to its remote antiquity and adaptability, the foundation myth based on the Amazons passed through several processes of re-elaboration and re-functionalisation and was reused as a "paradigm" in Asia Minor, especially during the Roman imperial age to underline the archaiologia of the ancient poleis. These elaborations, based on ancient local mythical traditions, were instrumental in reaffirming the cultural and ethnic identity of the Greeks under the Roman Empire in a specific time. The aim of this paper is to investigate the processes of re-construction of city identity through the analysis of the sources about the foundation and eponimy accounts attested in Ionia and Aeolis, in relation to the particular background linked to the revival of local traditions during the Roman imperial age.