It was located on the Baba Kale spur of Çakal Tepe north of Halileli and west of İntepe (previously known as Erenköy) in Çanakkale Province, Turkey.

In 335 BC, prior to Alexander the Great's victory at the nearby Granicus river, one of his commanders, Calas, was beaten back by the Persians and forced to take temporary refuge at Rhoiteion.

[21] The story does not appear again until it is picked up by the Roman poet Catullus (c. 84 – c. 54 BC), an avid reader of Hellenistic poetry,[22] who in Poem 65 speaks of the unmarked grave of his drowned brother, "[where] under the shore of Rhoeteum the soil of Troy lies heavy".

[24] By contrast, the Augustan poet Ovid in Book 11 of the Metamorphoses speaks of a place "on Trojan soil ... close to the sea, to the right of Sigeion, to the left of Rhoeteum" which is not Ajax's tomb or the Aeantion promontory (as the description might suggest), but instead "an old altar of Jupiter the oracular, god of the thunder".

[27] In Pliny the Elder (mid-1st century AD) we hear of the promontory near İn Tepe referred to as Aeantion meaning 'the place of Ajax' (from Ancient Greek Αἰάντειον).

[28] Prior to this, the only mention of this promontory was in an Athenian inscription from 375 BC referring to a military action by the general Chabrias and honouring "the soldiers who were allies at Aianteion on the Hellespont".

[31] It was also in this period (probably during the reign of the philhellenic emperor Hadrian) that the tumulus of Ajax was renovated and given its present vaulting, suggesting local investment in what had become Rhoiteion's great attraction.