The town is situated on a ridge, which falls gently to the east but steeply on its other three sides, so that it was always potentially of strategic importance.
By the third century BC the town was of some cultural importance. It was the birthplace of the satirist Menippos, a slave who became a Cynic philosopher and satirised the follies of mankind in a mixture of prose and verse. His works have not survived, but were imitated by Varro and by Lucian.
The Greek historian Polybius describes Gadara as being in 218 BC the 'strongest of all places in the region'. Nevertheless it capitulated shortly afterwards when besieged by the Seleucid king Antiochus III of Syria. The region passed in and out of the control of the Seleucid kings of Syria and the Ptolemies of Egypt.
In 167 BC the Jews of Jerusalem rebelled against the Seleucids, and in the ensuing conflict in the region Gadara and other cities suffered severe damage.
In the early first century BC Gadara gave birth to its most famous son, Meleager. He was one of the most admired Hellenistic Greek poets, not only for his own works but also for his anthology of other poets, which formed the basis of the large collection known as the Greek Anthology.
In 63 BC, when the Roman general Pompey placed the region under Roman control, he rebuilt Gadara and made it one of the semi-autonomous cities of the Roman Decapolis, and a bulwark against Nabataean expansion. But in 30 BC the Roman emperor Augustus placed it under the control of the Jewish king Herod. The historian Josephus relates that after King Herod's death in 4 BC Gadara was made part of the Roman province of Syria.
In the first century AD Jesus drove demons out of a man into swine 'in the country of the Gadarenes' (Gospel According to Matthew; the Gospels According to Mark and Luke read 'country of the Gerasenes').
Josephus relates that in AD 66 at the beginning of the Jewish revolt against the Romans the country around
