Lato: the city on two hills and the political heart of eastern Crete

Ancient Lato (Λατώ) lies in a mountain saddle between two hills, some three to four kilometres beyond the present-day village of Kritsa and a dozen or so from Agios Nikolaos. From the approach road the city is at first hard to make out: its walls, houses and public buildings melt into a grey-green slope of olive trees and low scrub, at a height of between 300 and 400 metres above the sea. Yet it is precisely this position that explains Lato’s fortunes. The city was not built at the water’s edge but on a naturally defended pass, a double acropolis from which the routes between central and eastern Crete could be watched and from which the eye travels down to Mirabello Bay.

Lato is now regarded as one of the finest monuments of Classical and Hellenistic Crete: the best-preserved city of that period on the island and one of the best preserved anywhere in Greece. What survives here is not a solitary temple in an empty field but a fragment of a real town: streets, squares, houses, sanctuaries, a theatral area, water tanks and the buildings in which political decisions were taken. Only part of it has been excavated, and the fenced area open to visitors is the civic core rather than the whole settlement. Lato presents ancient Greece not as a gallery of marble statues but as a many-layered fabric of daily life, administration, trade, religion and agreements between communities.

Lato Etera and Lato pros Kamara

Two names occur in the ancient sources and in modern scholarship: Lato Etera and Lato pros Kamara. They are not two spellings of one and the same place. Lato Etera is the mountain city whose ruins are seen near Kritsa. Lato pros Kamara – ‘Lato by Kamara’ – or simply Kamara was its harbour district on the coast, on the site of today’s Agios Nikolaos. The geographer Ptolemy lists the coastal town, and an ancient sailing guide places it a short distance east of Olous.

The word ‘Etera’ means ‘the other’. It helped to tell apart two centres that belonged together, once coastal Kamara had begun to play an ever larger part. Such a double arrangement was practical: in the hills lay the protected political centre, by the sea the harbour through which ships, goods and contacts with other cities passed. The harbour town was to outlive its parent by centuries, remaining in use well into Roman times.

The city of the Dorians

Lato took shape as a Dorian polis in the Archaic period, probably in the 7th century BC; an organised settlement already existed at that time. The wider area had been inhabited in Minoan times, as Late Minoan chamber tombs near Kritsa show, and sherds of the 12th century BC found on the site itself suggest that the saddle was already occupied at the very end of the Bronze Age. The Dorians were one of the great Greek-speaking peoples of the ancient world. Their presence in Crete showed itself not only in language but in political institutions, in a culture of war, in cults and in the system of citizen communities.

The city occupied the saddle between two heights, a northern and a southern acropolis. The slopes formed a natural defence, and walls strengthened the most vulnerable stretches; a circuit wall closed the rest. The entrance was a small fortress in itself: anyone coming in had to pass three successive openings with two small courts between them, so that an attacker who forced the first gateway found himself penned in before the next. The streets climb with the terrain, so Lato should not be pictured as a level grid of house blocks. Its builders fitted houses, stairways and retaining walls to the mountain and turned the awkward relief into part of the city’s defences.

The city controlled a considerable territory, the chora. The word denoted not merely the fields around the polis but the whole rural district that fed the city, supplied its raw materials and was subject to its political decisions. Lato’s territory took in the country around modern Agios Nikolaos, Kritsa and Kroustas with their surroundings, and on Mount Thilakas, about a kilometre and a half south-east of the town, it maintained a sanctuary out in the countryside; the borders were fixed by treaties with the neighbouring cities. Without the chora Lato could not have existed: the squares and sanctuaries of the town depended on the farmers, shepherds, craftsmen and harbour workers who lived outside the walls.

Streets, squares and houses

The real value of Lato is that one can see how public and private space interlocked. Through the well-preserved city gate the visitor enters the main street, which climbs by some eighty steps to the agora; it was lined with shops and workshops, a dye-works among them. Paths run along the slopes, and stairways link the different levels. The houses were built in terraces: one wall might at the same time support the neighbouring plot, and the roof of a lower house could serve as the yard of the one above. That saved space and protected the town against landslips.

The residential quarters had small courtyards, storerooms and rooms given over to crafts, and many houses had a cistern of their own cut into the rock. In the ancient polis the private house was not shut off from public life: the family took part in cults, festivals, military duties and assemblies. The way from house to agora led through the lanes of the town, where people met, exchanged news and struck bargains.

The agora was more than a market. The open square, set in the saddle between the two hills, served trade, gatherings, proclamations and political life. Decisions on war, alliances, levies and relations with neighbouring cities could be debated here. Along its west side ran a Doric stoa, a colonnaded hall with steps on three sides; on the north a broad flight of steps rises towards the prytaneion. Most of the buildings now visible around the square date from the 4th and 3rd centuries BC, the city’s heyday.

Theatre and public speech

The theatre of Lato lay beside the civic centre, on the slope of the southern height below a temple; it is a theatral area with tiers partly built and partly cut into the rock rather than a theatre on the pattern of the great mainland buildings. Its rows are straight, not curved – ten or eleven on the eastern side, seven or eight on the western, each about thirty centimetres high and sixty deep – and they are reckoned to have held some 350 people. Beside them is a rectangular exedra, and the long, narrow open space in front, about thirty-one metres by fifteen, is held up by a retaining wall. The whole was laid out at the end of the 4th or in the first half of the 3rd century BC. In the Greek polis the theatre was not only a place for performances. Assemblies, festivals and ceremonies could be held here, and dramatic productions allowed the citizens to work through questions of power, justice, war and the relations between generations.

The open form of the theatre joined the performing space to the landscape. The spectator saw no enclosed building but, all at once, the performers, the slopes of the valley and the line of the horizon. The arrangement heightened the communal character of the performance: the city itself became, as it were, part of the play. Something of that use has returned in recent years, for since 2006 a cultural event has been staged once a year in the agora next door.

Prytaneion and symposium

One of the most important public buildings of Lato, set on the north side of the agora above a broad flight of steps, is generally interpreted as the prytaneion. The steps themselves were part of the arrangement: seven tiers, divided by narrow stairways into three blocks, on which some eighty people could sit. The prytaneion, built in the second half of the 4th century BC, was where the city’s representatives met and official receptions were held. The sacred fire of the community was kept burning in it, and certain office-holders could be fed at public expense as a mark of their service.

In the architecture of the building a courtyard stands out, together with rooms associated with meetings and shared meals – one hall for deliberation, a second for the banquets at which food and drink were served to the magistrates and to the envoys of other cities. The principal room had the eschara, the hearth, at its centre, with a double step of benches round it, each seating eight; two rooms on the north side are thought to have housed the city’s archives. For the ancient polis these were no domestic trifles but part of the political machinery: at table envoys were received, alliances confirmed and the standing of the city displayed.

Water supply and the cistern

For a mountain city water was a matter of security. Lato relied on large tanks, among them the public cistern, the dexameni, in the middle of the agora – a roughly square basin sunk some six metres into the ground, originally roofed and entered by a flight of steps – in which rainwater was collected; to these were added the numerous smaller cisterns hewn out of the rock for the private houses. In the dry climate of Crete such a system made it possible to get through the summer and through sieges, and to supply houses, workshops and sanctuaries.

The cistern was more than a piece of engineering. Its position influenced the course of the streets, and access to the water called for rules and supervision. The public tank bound the inhabitants together in a common dependence: the destruction of the water supply would have put the whole polis at risk. That it was placed in the very centre of the civic square, beside a temple and below the steps of the prytaneion, says a good deal about how the citizens ranked it.

Sanctuaries and religious life

Lato was a city of gods, festivals and sacrifices. In the middle of the agora, just south of the cistern, stood a small rectangular temple without columns; on the southern height a larger one, measuring about ten metres by sixteen, with an oblong porch leading into a square cella and, in front of it, an altar raised on two steps. To which deity either was dedicated is not known. Archaeologists found sanctuaries and a great number of terracotta figurines – small clay gifts offered to the gods; many of those from the little temple in the agora go back to the 6th century BC. Their small size does not mean small importance: such objects were often more affordable than costly marble statues and allowed a wide circle of people to take part in the cult.

The name Leto links the city with the cult of the mother of Apollo and Artemis. Yet the religious life of the polis was not confined to a single deity. There were various cults concerned with protection in war, fertility, family life, the sea and the welfare of the community. The coins that Lato struck for itself show Eileithyia, the helper in childbirth, and Hermes. Elsewhere in Crete Eileithyia was worshipped at Eleutherna and in sacred caves at Amnisos and Inatos, and the clay figures of pregnant and nursing women left at her shrines show plainly what was asked of her.

Treaties and relations with the neighbours

Lato did not exist in isolation. The Cretan city-states concluded alliances, competed for land and harbours, took part in wars and turned to outside powers. The surviving inscriptions allow concrete diplomatic relations to be made out behind the ruins. Border disputes with the neighbours are attested for the late 3rd century BC – with Hierapytna, with Lyttos and with Olous on the bay of present-day Elounda. The quarrel with Olous dragged on longest. Between 118 and 113 BC Knossos was called in to arbitrate, and its ruling, confirmed by a Roman embassy under Quintus Fabius that came to Crete in 113 BC, gave Lato the island of Pyrrha with the neighbouring headland and the temple at Dera, while Olous kept a disputed ship and its contents. Copies of the award were to be set up in the temples of all three cities, at Dera and in the sanctuary of Apollo on Delos.

An important piece of evidence is Lato’s treaty with Hierapytna, the city in the area of modern Ierapetra. Agreements of this kind laid down who was to be counted a friend and who an enemy, how military aid was to be given and in what manner the territory was to be protected. Documents are also known that connect Lato with cities outside Crete.

Nearchus and the memory of great men

The name of Nearchus, admiral and companion of Alexander the Great, is associated with Lato. Nearchus, the son of Androtimus, had been made governor of Lycia and Pamphylia in 334/333 BC; in 326 BC he took command of Alexander’s fleet on the river Hydaspes and led the celebrated voyage from Patala on the Indus through the Persian Gulf to the mouth of the Tigris, in the lands of the Macedonian empire. He wrote his own account of the undertaking, now lost; ancient authors, above all Arrian in his Indica and Strabo in his Geography, preserved its substance, and it ranks among the first detailed descriptions of the shores of the Indian Ocean produced for the Greek world.

How closely Nearchus was really connected with Lato is debated: the sources call him a Cretan and link him with eastern Crete, though his family settled at Amphipolis in Macedonia in the reign of Philip II; later local tradition – followed by the Greek archaeological service – makes him a son or native citizen of Lato. It is safer, then, to say that Lato regarded Nearchus as its outstanding countryman than to treat a later tradition as documented biography.

The decline of the mountain city and the rise of Kamara

Between the end of the 3rd and the beginning of the 2nd century BC the importance of the harbour settlement of Kamara began to grow. Seaborne trade, the development of shipping and the changed political situation gradually shifted the weight towards the coast. Lato Etera did not vanish in a day, but some of its functions passed to the coastal town, and as sea traffic increased the inhabitants too moved down; the hill town is thought to have been largely given up by about 200 BC.

This process explains why modern Agios Nikolaos and the mountain ruins of Lato share a history but present different archaeological faces. On the hills the civic centre of the Dorian polis was preserved; by the sea Kamara developed, later to become the basis of the future town, and its remains lie beneath the modern one. The transfer of economic life from the height to the harbour was not the fall of a civilisation but a change in its routes.

In Roman times the coastal zone continued to play an important part, while the mountain city little by little lost its population. Later Lato Etera was abandoned, and its buildings turned into an archive in stone: walls, stairways and public buildings preserved the ground plan of a vanished community.

Discovery by the archaeologists

The first investigations of Lato are bound up with the interest European travellers and archaeologists took in Crete. As early as 1865 the British naval officer Thomas Spratt described the ruins in his Travels in Crete, though he took them for the remains of Olous or Oleros; it was the archaeologists F. Halbherr, L. Mariani and A. Taramelli who identified the site correctly as Lato. Between 1894 and 1896 Arthur Evans made a small-scale investigation here, and systematic excavations were then carried out by the French School of Archaeology – first from 1899 to 1901 under Joseph Demargne, and again from 1968 into the 1970s under Pierre Ducrey, Olivier Picard and Vasso Chatzimichali. The research made it possible not only to uncover individual buildings but to recover the relationship between streets, civic centres and defences.

An archaeological monument should never be considered definitively ‘read’. New methods – the analysis of pottery, the study of inscriptions, digital survey of the terrain and comparison with other city-states – are constantly altering the picture of the town. Any new find may correct the dating of a building or show that a room had a different purpose. At Lato, moreover, the city has been only partially excavated, so a good deal remains to be learnt.

Visiting Lato

Lato is most conveniently reached from Agios Nikolaos by way of Kritsa, the nearest village, from which the last three or four kilometres can be covered by car, by taxi or on foot. Once the town’s seafront is left behind the road quickly changes character: the houses fall away and are followed by olive groves, hillsides and wide views over eastern Crete. The trip can be combined with a visit to the Panagia Kera near Kritsa, though the two places call for a different pace: at Lato one walks over uneven stone paths, in the church attention goes to the frescoes and the interior.

Once there, it is best to climb first to the upper levels and take in the overall layout of the town, then to come down to the agora, theatral area, prytaneion and cistern. This order helps one to see Lato as a coherent settlement and not as a collection of separate ruins. The main gate is the only way in, so every visit begins, as it did in antiquity, with the stepped street. The site is as a rule open only from the morning until early afternoon and closed on one day of the week; the exact times and the modest entrance charge are best checked beforehand. The finest season is spring, when the slopes are in flower.

Lato is one of those monuments where landscape cannot be separated from history. The climb up the hill explains the defences, the view of the bay the importance of Kamara, the cistern the value of water, the theatre the part played by public speech, and the inscriptions make the entanglements between the cities intelligible. What is to be seen here is not merely the ruins of a Dorian polis but the machinery that kept an ancient city alive: citizens, farmers, sailors, craftsmen, priests, envoys and warriors were part of one and the same political community.

Lato in brief

The valley, squeezed between two mountain tops, is strewn with ancient debris. Lato Etera was founded by the Dorians in the 7th century BC. The warlike Dorians ringed the city with walls and dominated the whole valley. They named their city after the goddess Leto, mother of Apollo and Artemis and patroness of women in childbirth. Today’s Agios Nikolaos was the Dorians’ trading harbour and was then called Lato pros Kamara. The city struck its own coins. From Lato Etera came Nearchus, the close companion of Alexander the Great and commander of his entire fleet. Open to view are the commercial centre, the agora; the sanctuary in which archaeologists found a great number of clay statuettes; the theatre, with room for about 350, where the citizens not only watched performances but also held debates; and the prytaneion – the seat of government, as we should say today. It has two large halls: one for the sessions, the other for the symposia, the libations and entertainments laid on for the ‘members of the government’ and the envoys of other cities. Then there is the dexameni, the great water tank – the city had a water supply of its own. The larger temple stands on the southern hill, ten metres by sixteen, with its altar before it. Anyone who has walked through Lato Etera comes away with an idea of the high level of urban organisation among the ancient Greeks and of the good sense of their building methods, which still hold good today.