According to Pausanias, Teuthis was one of three Arcadian cities — along with Theisoa and Methydrium — that originally belonged to the territory of Orchomenus. Their citizens chose to relocate and join the founding of Megalopolis in 371 BCE, seeking safety in numbers against Spartan pressure. The dissolution of Teuthis into the larger city was part of a broader Arcadian project: the Great City, as Megalopolis translates, was one of antiquity's deliberate acts of urban planning.

Before that dissolution, Teuthis had its temples and its legend. Despite being labeled a "Homeric" city by some ancient commentators, the town is not explicitly named in Homer's Iliad or Odyssey. The legend of King Teuthis at Aulis comes from Pausanias alone, preserved in his Description of Greece, and it carries the kind of detail — the quarrel with Agamemnon, the wounding of Athena, the decision to turn back — that suggests a local tradition once kept the story alive.

When 19th-century European travelers began crisscrossing the Peloponnese with copies of Pausanias as their guide, Teuthis presented a puzzle. Pausanias placed the city bordering the district of Theisoa, north of the ancient city of Gortys, somewhere in the mountains of northern Arcadia. But his description was just ambiguous enough to allow two competing identifications.

Eight scholars — including archaeologists Ernst Curtius and Ludwig Ross, historian François Pouqueville, and cartographer Kiessling — placed Teuthis in the Akova/Galatas area in the north. Five others, including the meticulous British military surveyor William Martin Leake and geologist Alfred Philippson, argued for the modern town of Dimitsana to the south. Two more, including the anthropologist James George Frazer, found either location plausible and declined to choose. Most were careful with their language, writing "probably" and "perhaps" and sometimes simply adding a question mark after the name.

The key passage in Pausanias is brief. Traveling from Gortys northward, he writes that "bordering town to Theisoa is Teuthis, which was formerly a city." The word "formerly" tells us something: even by the 2nd century CE, Teuthis had declined to a village. What the passage does not tell us clearly is where exactly Theisoa was, or in which direction from it Teuthis lay.

Modern scholars tend to place Teuthis near Dimitsana, the southern candidate, which is built on older fortified ruins still visible in the hillside stone. Ancient walls in Dimitsana are among the more striking remnants of the pre-Megalopolis Arcadia. But the problem remains: no inscription naming Teuthis has ever been found in Dimitsana. Without one, the identification stays probable rather than proven. As the Wikipedia article on the site bluntly notes, only systematic excavation can settle the matter — and that excavation has not happened.

In 1834, when the newly independent Greek state was reorganizing its local administration after centuries of Ottoman rule, the village closest to the medieval castle of Akova was formally declared the "Municipality of Teuthis" — Dimos Teuthydos in Greek. The name was revived as an administrative convenience, a way of tethering modern governance to ancient geography. Whether the village actually stood on the ruins of ancient Teuthis, or simply inherited its name from local tradition, is as uncertain as everything else about the city.

What survives of Teuthis is mostly the legend: the king who quarreled with a god, the soldiers who turned back from Troy, the city that chose consolidation over independence, and the scholars who have argued about its location for two centuries without resolution. The ruins are somewhere in the mountains north of Gortys. They are waiting.