TROAS trō’ ăs (Τρῳάς, G5590). A port on the Aegean coast of western Asia Minor, opposite the island of Tenedos, at the mouth of the Dardanelles. It is not to be confused with Homeric Troy, whose fortress ruins stand on an escarpment dominating the coastal plain ten m. away. Troas was founded in 300 b.c. in the spate of Gr. city building that followed the division of Alexander’s short-lived empire. It belonged to the Seleucid dynasty of Syria, but western Asia Minor was seldom strongly held from distant Antioch. Troas early asserted her independence and maintained it in some form even when the kingdom of Pergamum was dominant in the W of the peninsula, and even when Rome came to Asia. The port was important as the nearest point to Europe, and both Pergamum and Rome may have found it sound policy to keep this important haven satisfied and conscious of its importance. There is a persistent hint in Augustan lit., supported by a statement of Suetonius, that Julius Caesar considered the idea of transferring the center of government to Troas (Suet. Div Iul. 79; Hor. Odes, 3.3).

Troas figured largely in the story of Paul (Acts 16:8-11). Luke recorded in terse narrative how Paul and Silas had arrived on the Aegean coast under a strange sense of compulsion. Alexandria Troas, to give the port its ancient name, had long since been a Rom. colony, but Paul could not accept the city as the goal of his journey. Here he appears to have met Luke, who may indeed have been “a certain man from Macedonia,” whom he saw in the dream that compelled him to take the gospel into Europe. The party traveled by sea, from Troas past Imbros and Samothrace, N of Thasos to Neapolis in Thrace, and thence by road to Philippi.

Ten years later, after the riot in Ephesus, Paul returned and established a Christian church (2 Cor 2:12). After a briefly recorded ministry in Greece (Acts 20:1-3), Paul came again, but Luke confined his narrative to a matter that interested his physician’s mind (Acts 20:4-12). Perhaps he was there again at the time of his arrest in a.d. 66 or 67, for he left essential possessions in Troas (2 Tim 4:13).

Bibliography W. Leaf, Strabo on the Troad (1912); R. Macaulay, The Pleasure of Ruins (1933), 42, 46, 47.