The name Antikyra was said to derive from an 'Antikyreos' — a mythological figure who cured Hercules of madness with local hellebore. Whether or not anyone believed the myth, the underlying reality was botanical: the black and white hellebore that grew in these hills had made the town famous before history could record it. Ancient physicians used compounds extracted from both plants as purgatives, and Greek medicine regarded them as treatments for forms of insanity and melancholy. Pausanias, the 2nd-century travel writer who visited the city, distinguished between the two varieties by effect — black hellebore as a laxative, white as an emetic. Neither sound like comfortable cures. Antikyra's willingness to trade in these compounds gave rise not only to the Latin phrase 'naviget Anticyram' but to the Greek equivalent, 'Antikuras se dei' — you need to go to Antikyra. It appears in the writings of Horace, who used it with comic relish. The town itself seemed unbothered by its literary reputation.

Antikyra's strategic position on the Gulf of Corinth made it a prize worth fighting over — and destroying. Philip II of Macedon razed it in 346 BC during the Third Sacred War. The town recovered quickly enough to commission a new temple to Artemis, with a cult statue by Praxiteles, by 330 BC. Then the Roman Republican wars arrived. Titus Quinctius Flamininus sacked it in 198 BC, choosing the port as a winter base for his army. Through all this, the town did not die — unlike Medeon, the settlement across the gulf that failed to survive the Hellenistic period. Antikyra endured, stubbornly, rebuilding each time, a small community on a coastal shelf that history kept targeting and the inhabitants kept repairing. A major earthquake around AD 620 destroyed much of the Byzantine city; they rebuilt again. In the 14th century Catalan mercenaries held the fortress and renamed it Port de Arago. The Ottomans called it Aspra Spitia — white houses — for the whitewashed buildings along the shore. The name Antikyra was not restored until the early 20th century.

When the geographer Pausanias visited Antikyra in the second half of the 2nd century AD, the city was thriving. He catalogued it carefully: a temple to Poseidon with a bronze statue of the god standing with one foot on a dolphin, a trident in one hand; two gymnasia, including one with a statue of Xenodamos, who won the pankration at the Olympics in AD 67, partly because the emperor Nero was competing and had made a mess of other events that year; an agora filled with bronze statues; a sheltered well; and two temples of Artemis outside the town walls. One held Praxiteles's cult statue, dedicated (a newly discovered inscription revealed) to Artemis Eileithyia. In the 1980s, a large five-nave Byzantine basilica with a mosaic floor was unearthed. In the modern era, excavations recovered an archaic temple of Athena with a severe-style bronze idol, and substantial remains of 4th-century BC ashlar fortifications with two rectangular towers.

The link between ancient Antikyra and the modern village of Aspra Spitia was only established in 1806, when the British traveler William Martin Leake found an inscription bearing the old name. Today Antikyra is a small maritime community — a pleasant, prosperous-looking settlement on the beach, its harbor suited to fishing boats rather than deep-water vessels. The deep-water docks are across the gulf, near the site of ancient Medeon, where Greece's largest aluminum plant was built in the 1950s and '60s to exploit nearby bauxite deposits. The plant brought a wave of workers and a new town — Paralia Distomou, still sometimes called Aspra Spitia — and Greenpeace has raised concerns about red mud dumped into the bay from operations. The ancient port and its hellebore trade are long gone. But the village remains on the same coastal shelf it has occupied since the Geometric period, largely for the same reason: it works.

The ancient phrase 'naviget Anticyram' stopped circulating with the Roman Empire. Antikyra didn't stop existing. Its population stayed below two hundred people for most of the centuries before 1810, then grew slowly toward a peak around 2000, then declined again. It is now part of the unified municipality of Distomo-Arachova-Antikyra. The village of about 700 people is quiet by any modern standard — restaurants, fishing, a beach at Agios Isidoros popular with locals. Mount Cirphis separates it from Delphi; the Kephali Peninsula closes off the southern side of its gulf. The landscape is rugged and particular to this corner of Phocis, where the hellebore still grows in the hills above a town that spent two thousand years being told it was the destination for people who had lost their minds, and responded by surviving every army and earthquake sent against it.