[6] In writers of the 1st and 2nd century AD such as Statius and Lucian Zeus is said to have abducted the Trojan prince Ganymede from Mount Gargaron while he was hunting in the nearby forests.

[12] This is partly confirmed by the fact that the earliest archaeological remains found at the site (fortification walls around the acropolis and the foundations of a temple) date no later than the 6th century BCE.

[17] In the 5th century BCE Gargara was a member of the Delian League and paid a tribute to Athens of between 4,500 and 4,600 drachmas as part of the Hellespontine district.

306 Gargara was a member of the koinon of Athena Ilias, a regional association of cities in the Troad which held an annual festival at Ilion.

The inscription records a series of honorific decrees passed by the koinon which praise a prominent and wealthy citizen, Malousios of Gargara, for providing interest free loans to finance the annual festival.

[23] While Gargara continued to exist in the Roman period, we hear about it primarily in the context of Latin literature, since it became a by-word for agricultural prosperity in Latin poetry following Virgil's reference to it in the Georgics: Gargara is likewise used as an expression of proverbial fertility in Ovid's Ars Amatoria, Seneca's tragedy The Phoenician Women, and as late as the 5th century CE in the odes of Sidonius Apollinaris.

[25] Macrobius in his Saturnalia (early 5th century CE) devoted a chapter to the question of what had given Virgil the idea of using Gargara this way in the first place, concluding that it was an inference firstly from Mount Ida's reputation for being well-watered in Homer, secondly from Mysia's general reputation for fertility, and thirdly from the use of γάργαρα (gargara) in Old Comedy to express an immense quantity of anything.

[29] The latest period of occupation at the site may be represented by the nearby castles of Menteşe and Şahin Kale which Cook thought could be either Byzantine or Genoese.