The Greek scholar Alexander Polyhistor listed Araxa in the second book of his Lyciaca. Ptolemy placed it near Sidyma. That is close to the whole of the ancient literary record — two mentions, both of them essentially catalogue entries. Lycia was the mountainous country of Anatolia's south-western coast, a place with its own language, its own extraordinary rock-cut tomb architecture, and eventually a federal constitution that historians describe as the first democratic union of its kind. The famous Lycian cities were on the water. Araxa was not. It sat inland, up the Xanthus valley, in the sort of position that is defensible against a fleet and wide open to whatever comes down out of the hills.

The inscription — catalogued as SEG 18.570 — is the city thanking one of its own. It opens by saying that Orthagoras "inherited the nature of a noble man from his ancestors," and then, campaign by campaign, sets out what he actually did. Moagetes and the people of Bubon raided Araxa's territory and carried citizens off; Orthagoras commanded in the field and then went as the city's envoy to negotiate their return. When Kibyra laid waste to Araxa's farmland, he served as a cavalry officer and went again and again to the Lycian League to plead for troops. He led a contingent of Araxa's young men alongside Lycian forces to stop Lysanias and Eudemos from making themselves tyrants at Xanthos, and campaigned a second time to free Tlos from Eudemos. Against Termessos he rode as a cavalry officer at his own expense. Scholars place the decree somewhere between 180 and 120 BC; some argue for a date several decades later.

Read as a document about institutions rather than about one man, the decree is remarkable. The Lycian League — the koinon — was a federation of roughly twenty-three cities, first attested in two inscriptions of the early second century BC, with votes weighted by size: three for the largest, two for the middling, one for the rest. Xanthos, Patara, Pinara, Olympos, Myra and Tlos were the big six; a Lyciarch stood at the head. Orthagoras' decree shows all of that machinery in motion. The league arbitrated disputes between members, supplied soldiers, and admitted new ones — he secured the entry of Orloanda into its sympoliteia. He also dealt with Roman commissioners named in the text as Appius and Publius, and came away, the stone says, with everything advantageous to his city. Rome had made Lycia a protectorate in 168 BC, and a small inland town evidently understood that lobbying was now part of survival.

Under Roman administration Lycia was a province and Araxa's bishop answered to the metropolitan at Myra. Four names survive, scattered across four centuries of church councils: Theotimus at the First Council of Constantinople in 381, Leontius at Chalcedon in 451, Theodorus at the Trullan Council in 692, Stephanus at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787. Each name carries an unstated fact with it — that somebody was still living at Araxa, and that the community was organised enough to send a man across the empire and back. After 787 the record falls silent. The Catholic Church still lists Araxa as a titular see: a diocese that exists as a name assigned to bishops who have no territory to go with it.

The modern village of Ören sits in the Seydikemer district, inland from Fethiye, in country that is farmland and pine ridge rather than ruin field. Araxa is not a site people queue for. Its fame rests on a stone rather than on standing architecture, which is an unusual and rather honest way for an ancient city to be remembered. The valley itself is unchanged in the way that matters: a corridor running down toward the coast, with high ground on either side and neighbours at both ends. It is easy, standing in it, to see why the citizens of Araxa spent so much of the second century BC writing to the league for help.