Homer called it "furthermost" — the last town of Boeotia, perched at the northern edge of the Euboean Gulf where the land ran out and the sea began. Anthedon earned the epithet honestly. This was a place that faced the water and lived by it, and its people told a story about that water stranger than most: that a local fisherman named Glaucus once ate a certain herb and felt himself transformed, plunging into the gulf to become a sea-god. The Anthedonians claimed him as their own. A coin from the town, kept now in the museum at Chalkida, still carries his face.
The Anthedonians did not feel quite like the rest of Boeotia, and ancient writers noticed. One described them as a different stock altogether, mariners rather than farmers, shipwrights and fishermen who made their living from the sea. The geographer Dicaearchus recorded what they traded: fish hauled from the gulf, purple dye wrung from sea-snails, and sponges gathered from the seabed. It was a maritime economy in a region better known for its plains and cattle. Their town served as the port of mighty Thebes inland, and Anthedon held a seat in the Amphictyonic League, the sacred council that bound the Greek states around their shared sanctuaries.
Walk into Anthedon as the travelers of antiquity did, and the heart of it was the agora, ringed by a double colonnade — a stoa on stoa — and shaded with planted trees. Pausanias, the tireless guidebook-writer of the second century AD, mapped its sacred geography for us. A grove of the mysterious Cabeiri stood at the town's center, wrapped around their temple, with a shrine to Demeter and Persephone close by. Outside the walls rose a temple of Dionysus, fitting for a town whose wine was famous across the Greek world. And somewhere near the shore was a spot they simply called "the leap of Glaucus," where the fisherman was said to have made his plunge into immortality.
The real wonder of Anthedon lay at the water's edge. Its harbor was generous for its day, and excavators have found that it had two jetties whose mouth could be drawn shut with a chain — sealing the basin against raiders and against the hard winds that funnel down the gulf. Archaeologists from Greece, Germany, and the United States have worked this ancient port, turning up the very temples Pausanias described, along with an Early Christian basilica from late Roman times. The herb-eating fisherman may be myth, but the engineering that protected his town's ships was real, and remarkably ambitious.
The sea that made Anthedon eventually unmade it. In the Byzantine centuries, pirate raids harried the coast until the townspeople gave up the shoreline and withdrew inland, climbing into the northern foothills of Mount Messapius — now called Ktypas — to found a farming village. That settlement became the nucleus of today's community of Loukisia, about a mile and a half from the old ruins. The settlers carried stone with them: building material from Anthedon's earlier structures went into the little church of St. George that stands outside the village, whose architecture preserves valuable clues to the Byzantine age and was restored by Greece's Ministry of Culture in 2010. The town that faced the sea ended its life with its back to it.
The ruins of Anthedon lie on the Boeotian coast of the North Euboean Gulf at 38.50°N, 23.45°E, about 15 km west of Chalcis (Chalkida) and at the foot of Mount Messapius, near the village of Loukisia. Best viewed at 2,000-4,000 ft, with the gulf and Euboea's coastline to the east as landmarks. Athens International (LGAV) is roughly 40 nm to the south; Nea Anchialos (LGBL) lies to the north. The narrow Euripus strait at Chalkida is a useful nearby reference point.