In Cyzique, on the shores of the Propontide (Sea of Marmara), among the considerable gifts made to the people of this city by Philetairos, first dynast of Pergamon(OGIS 748), we find mention of a sum of 26 talents of silver offered "for the oil and synagôgè of the neoi " (a remarkable expression, which deserves to be the subject of a detailed commentary). This document is one of the first witnesses to the appearance of a neoi corps, and confirms their military role. In fact, it is these Cyzicene neoi of the Hellenistic period that Riet van Bremen has suggested should be recognized in the mythical heroes, such as Jason and his companions, mentioned in great detail in the Argonautics of Apollonius of Rhodes (i, 936 ff.): the Hellenistic poet would thus have given us a precise idea of the behavior expected of these young men and the values involved in joining a neoi corps.
The importance of the Cyzic inscription for the history of the neoi seems all the greater - and also in terms of its antiquity - given that an inscription from Trèzène, dated to the end of the 4th century and hitherto considered to be the earliest evidence of their existence in the Greek world(IG IV 749), appears to have been wrongly alleged, the word neoi being there only the result of a highly debatable conjecture. It wasn't until the first decades of the 3rd century B.C., therefore, that bodies of neoi appeared, not only at Cyzique, but also at Halicarnasse (Migeotte, Souscriptions, nos. 77 and 102), Samos(IG XII 6, 11), Ilion(Inschr. von Ilion, no. 31) and perhaps Milet, according to an inscription from Didymes (I. Didyma 259).
Based on a recently published decree of the neoi of Xanthos(SEG 46, 1721), Riet van Bremen has set out to demonstrate that the alleged opposition between a phase during which the gymnasium was a private institution, managed by its users (including the neoi), and a phase of "etatization" (to use Christof Schuler's formula), during which it gradually came under the control of the city, could not in any case be generalized from the sole case of Beroia in Macedonia (whose now famous gymnasiarchic law was published by M. Hatzopoulos and Ph. Gauthier in 1993).
