Trapezus (Arcadia)

Trapezus was an ancient Greek town in the district of Parrhasia in Arcadia, near the Alpheius river, at a site identified near modern Mavria in the municipal unit of Gortyna, Greece. Its name was said to derive either from its legendary founder Trapezeus, son of Lycaon, or from the Greek word for table, referencing a myth in which Zeus overturned a table on which Lycaon had served him cooked human flesh. According to tradition King Hippothous moved the seat of government there from Tegea, and when Megalopolis was founded in 371 BC the people of Trapezus refused to relocate and instead fled the Peloponnese, some settling in the city of Trapezus on the Black Sea, modern Trabzon in Turkey, where they were welcomed as kin. Some of the religious statues from the city were later moved to Megalopolis, where the geographer Pausanias recorded seeing them.