Gortyn spread across the Messara plain and the hills above it for well over a thousand years, from a Minoan and then Dorian town into the capital of the Roman province of Crete and Cyrenaica. Its most celebrated monument is the Law Code, twelve columns of archaic Greek inscribed on stone in the 5th century BC and reused in a later building, the longest and most complete legal text to survive from the Greek world, setting out rules on marriage, inheritance, property and the treatment of the enslaved. The letters run in alternating directions, right to left then left to right, in the manner called boustrophedon, as an ox ploughs. The Roman city that grew around it left an odeon, a praetorium, temples and baths, and by tradition the first church in Crete, for the apostle Paul is said to have left Titus here as bishop. Earthquake and Arab raids ended it in the 9th century.
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