Long before there was a Greece to speak of, there was Carystus. Scratched into a clay tablet in the spidery script of Linear B, more than three thousand years old, sits the word ka-ru-to, the name of this town at the foot of Mount Oche on the southern tip of Euboea. Homer named it too, listing it in the Iliad's Catalogue of Ships among the towns of the Abantes who sailed for Troy. Legend traced its name to Carystus, a son of the centaur Cheiron. Few places can claim to have been remembered for so long, in so many voices, and Carystus was old already when the great wars of the classical age came to its shore.
In 490 BC, with the Greco-Persian Wars opening, the Persian admiral Datis brought his fleet to Carystus and began the way conquerors did, by burning the crops in the fields around the town. The threat of his force was overwhelming, and Carystus surrendered. That surrender would haunt it. After the Greeks broke the Persians at Salamis, the Athenian fleet under Themistocles stopped by to extort money from the city, and worse was coming. When Athens formed the Delian League against Persia, Carystus, tainted by its earlier submission, refused to join. Athens would not take no for an answer. It attacked, plundered the city, and forced it into the alliance. The logic was cold but consistent: no Greek town would be allowed to sit out the struggle, neither offering itself as a Persian base nor enjoying a Persia-free Greece without paying its share.
What truly made Carystus famous, though, was buried in its mountain. The quarries on Mount Oche yielded a marble unlike any other: a green stone laced with white, wavy bands, so like the layers of an onion that the Romans would come to call it cipollino. To them it was marmor carystium, marble from Karystos, and they could not get enough of it. From the 1st century BC onward, great columns of the green-veined stone were cut from the slopes above the sea and shipped across the empire, from Rome to North Africa to the eastern Mediterranean. On Mount Oche, seven entire columns were found lying where they had been quarried, three miles from the water, abandoned mid-journey. The same hills gave up another curiosity, a fibrous mineral the ancients called Carystian stone, which we know as asbestos.
For all its troubles, Carystus produced people of consequence. The boxer Glaucus fought his way to fame in the 6th century BC. The physician Diocles, working in the 4th century BC, was esteemed enough that some later writers called him a second Hippocrates. The comic playwright Apollodorus and the writer Antigonus both carried the city's name into the Hellenistic age. The Carystians proved loyal too, fighting alongside Athens in the Lamian War and later siding with Rome against Philip V of Macedon. Today the ancient polis survives mostly as a memory and a name: no longer a living bishopric, Carystus endures in the Catholic Church's roll of titular sees, a title attached to a city that the sea, the marble, and the long centuries have largely reclaimed.
Ancient Carystus stood near modern Karystos on the south coast of Euboea, at roughly 38.017 degrees N, 24.420 degrees E, at the foot of Mount Oche (Ochi), whose summit rises to about 1,400 meters just inland. From altitude, the cipollino quarry scars on the mountain slopes and the broad south-facing bay are the navigational landmarks, with the Aegean opening to the south. Nearest major airport is Athens International (LGAV), roughly 90 km to the west across the Petalioi Gulf. Strong northerly winds funnel around Mount Oche and can produce turbulence on the lee side.