This chapter presents a new, annotated translation of the prose Anaplous Bosporou (Upstream Voyage on the Bosporos) by one Dionysios of Byzantion, written around the middle of the 2nd century AD. As the chapter introduction shows, this striking prose work is ‘perhaps the most detailed description of a landscape to have survived from the ancient world’, and expresses Dionysios’ admiration for his homeland. It also preserves a host of invaluable topographical details along both shores of the Thracian Bosporos and in the Golden Horn (especially the locations of sacred places), as well as information about fisheries. A new, detailed map shows many of the localities mentioned, with an inset showing the area immediately around Byzantion in more detail.

Chapter 2, “Urban Development and Decline, Fourth–Fifteenth Centuries,” tracks the development of the city’s infrastructure and monumental public architecture from the period of its fourth-century foundation to its fifteenth-century collapse, noting periods of prosperity and decline together with the transformation from an ancient to a medieval urban center.

Chapter 1, “Before Constantinople,” discusses ancient Byzantion, the town selected as the location for Constantine’s new capital. It explores the site’s strategic value from its earliest settlement in the eighth century BC until the fourth century AD, paying particular attention to the political, military, and economic implications of its relationship to the Bosporos.