SMYRNA smûr’ nə (Σμύρνα, myrrh). Smyrna is situated at the head of the gulf into which the Hermus flows, a well-protected harbor, and the natural outlet to the sea for the major trade route which runs inland along the Hermus valley. Aeolian Greeks may have been the first settlers here, a community overlaid and dominated by the later and more powerful Ionian Greeks, but facts are few from the shadowy years at the turn of the first millennium b.c., when these Aegean settlements were founded.
When history takes more certain shape at the end of the Dark Age, which fell on the Aegean world after the Dorian invasions, that last wave of infiltrating Hellenic tribes which ended the Mycenaean world, Smyrna emerges as a sturdy community, ready to assert itself against the powerful neighboring kingdom of Lydia. Mimnermus, poet of Smyrna in the 7th cent. b.c., some of whose poems have survived in single lines and fragments mentions the tension in the Hermus valley between Smyrna and Sardis. It seems to have brought catastrophe about 600 b.c., when Alyattes of Lydia destroyed Smyrna, and left its site devastated for three centuries. Lydian villages are traceable on the shore of the gulf, but the strong Ionian port lay dead.
It rose from the dead, hence a phrase in the imagery of John’s apocalyptic letter (Rev 2:8). Lysimachus, who ruled Thrace and the northwestern part of Asia Minor after the division of Alexander’s empire, refounded Smyrna in 290 b.c. It became a Gr. city again, with assembly and magistrates, and, thanks to the fine site, entered an era of vitality and prosperity which still continues. Izmir is one of the strongest urban communities in modern Turkey. Its progress was aided and promoted by a shrewd recognition of the coming dominance of Rome. Antiochus the Great of Syria (241-187 b.c.) was pushing W in a determined attempt to consolidate his borderlands. Rome, aware of his encroaching ambitions, was thrusting firmly E. Smyrna was a superb bridgehead in a great peninsula, which Rome now was more and more clearly regarding as her buffer region and coming challenge. And Smyrna, too, in Rome’s emerging eastern policy, was a useful counterpoise in the middle Mediterranean to the naval strength of Rhodes.
It was to these significant services that the Smyrneans referred in a.d. 26 when they appealed for permission to build a temple to Tiberius. Tacitus tells the story: “The Smyrnaeans,” he wrote, “having appealed to their ancient records to show whether Tantalus, the son of Jupiter, or Theseus, the son also of a god, or one of the Amazons was their founder, proceeded to the considerations in which they chiefly trusted, namely, their friendly services to the Roman people. They had aided Rome with a naval force, they said, not only in their wars abroad, but also in those they had fought in Italy. It was they, they said, who had first reared a temple in honor of Rome, when the power of the Roman people, though great, had not yet reached their highest glory, for the city of Carthage still stood, and powerful kings governed Asia. Sulla, too, they said, had experienced their generosity, when his army was in imminent peril from the bitter weather and scarcity of clothes. When the matter was made known in the citizens’ assembly at Smyrna, all present stripped off their garments and sent them to the legions.”
In consequence of the eleven applicants, Smyrna was preferred and became the site for the second Asian temple to the deity of Rome and the emperor, and the seat of the sinister Caesar-cult which was to cause so much suffering in the church. At Smyrna as elsewhere the imperial policy of suppression was carried out sporadically, and Domitian, no doubt, was the cause of this outburst with the help of a hostile synagogue, against whose machinations John has a scornful word to say (Rev 2:9). With legislation on the books against the church, as it had been since the middle sixties of the cent., such situations as those which Paul had found frustrating in an earlier decade, assumed a new possibility of danger. Smyrna had worshiped the spirit of Rome since 195 b.c. The temple to Tiberius increased the pride she held in this historic role.
Hence the exhortation to endure and win a “crown of life,” a piece of imagery caught from a diadem of porticoes surrounding her hilltop, and described by Apollonius of Tyana (a.d. 1?-96?). He wrote: “For though your city is the most beautiful of all cities under the sun, and makes the sea its own, and holds the fountains of Zephyrus, yet it is a greater charm to wear a crown of men than a crown of porticoes, for buildings are seen only in their one place, but men are seen everywhere, and spoken about everywhere, and make their city as vast as the range of countries which they visit.”
Aelius Aristides, who knew Smyrna well, spoke in similar terms. He compares the city to the crown of Ariadne, shining in the heavens, and to a statue with its feet in the sea, and rising to its crowned head at the hilltop. Apollonius wrote about the time the letter of Revelation 2 was written. He, like the writer, was in peril under Domitian. Aristides wrote half a cent. or more later. Both writers show that “the crown of Smyrna” was a recognized image of rhetoric.
It remains only to mention Polycarp the martyr bishop of Smyrna, who died in a.d. 155, and as one of the last pupils of John, made a link between the apostles and the middle 2nd cent.
The story of the actual coming of Christianity to Smyrna is not known. It was prob. a result of Paul’s activity in Ephesus, followed up and extended by John. On the evidence of the apocalyptic letter, Smyrna’s Christians stood well in the 1st cent. They continued to stand, and Smyrna was one of the Asian cities which withstood the Turk, and was among the last to fall to Islam. Such resistance played a part in history. The delaying action of surviving remnants of the Empire in the E, allowed Europe time to emerge from the Middle Ages, and receive with creative hands those gifts which brought the Renaissance and the modern world to birth.
Bibliography W. M. Ramsay, Letters to the Seven Churches chs. XIX, XX (1905); C. J. Cadoux, Ancient Smyrna (1938); E. M. Blaiklock, Cities of the New Testament, ch. 18 (1965).