Nysa on the Maeander () was an ancient city and bishopric of Asia Minor, whose remains are in the Sultanhisar district of Aydın Province of Turkey, east of the Ionian city of Ephesus, and which remains a Latin Catholic titular see. At one time it was reckoned as belonging to Caria or Lydia, but under the Roman Empire it was within the province of Asia, which had Ephesus for capital, and the bishop of Nysa was thus a suffragan of the metropolitan see of Ephesus. Nysa was situated on the southern slope of mount Messogis, on the north of the Maeander, and about midway between Tralles and Antioch on the Maeander. The mountain torrent Eudon, a tributary of the Maeander, flowed through the middle of the town by a deep ravine spanned by a bridge, connecting the two parts of the town. Tradition assigned the foundation of the place to three brothers, Athymbrus, Athymbradus, and Hydrelus, who emigrated from Sparta, and founded three towns on the north of the Maeander; but in the course of time Nysa absorbed them all; the Nysaeans, however, recognise more especially Athymbrus as their founder. History In Greek mythology, Dionysus, the god of wine was born or raised in Nysa or Nyssa, a name that was consequently given to many towns in all parts of the world associated with cultivation of grapes. The name "Nysa" is mentioned in Homer's Iliad (Book 6.132-133), which refers to a hero named Lycurgus, "who once drove the nursing mothers of wine-crazed Dionysus over the sacred mountains of Nysa". The town derived its name of Nysa from Nysa, one of the wives of Antiochus I Soter, who reigned from 281 to 261 BC and founded the city on the site of an earlier town called Athymbra (Ἄθυμβρα), a name that continued in use until the second half of the 3rd century BC, but not in the earliest coinage of Nysa, which is of the next century. According to Stephanus of Byzantium, the town also bore the name Pythopolis (Πυθόπολις). Nysa appears to have been distinguished for its cultivation of literature, for Strabo mentions several eminent philosophers and rhetoricians; and the geographer himself, when a youth, attended the lectures of Aristodemus, a disciple of Panaetius and grandson of the famous Posidonius, whose influence is manifest in Strabo's Geography. Another Aristodemus of Nysa, a cousin of the former, had been the instructor