In the middle of the 4th century BCE, on a large plateau at an altitude of 650m a new city-state appears. It is Cassope, the political, religious, and financial center of the Kassopaeans, one of the numerous tribes that inhabit ancient Epirus. The citizens of Cassope prosper. A century after the city was founded there are almost ten thousand people living there. They are farmers and shepherds, potters or smiths, traders or sailors in the Ambracian Gulf and the Ionian Sea. Life ends abruptly though. Cassope was abandoned in 31 BCE when the inhabitants resettled to Nikopolis on the orders of emperor Augustus.