Herodotus Book V
Herodotus, in Book V, begins to weave together the main strands of his narrative: the expansion of the Persian Empire, the curious ways of barbarian peoples, and the petty and feuding Greek states that will, mirabile dictu, defeat the greatest empire the world had known.
Before getting down to business—the story of the Ionian Revolt—Herodotus adds a few notes on the barbarian Thracians, an Indo-European people living to the NE of Greece. He tells a peculiar story of the Paeonians, probably a mixed Thracian-Illyrian people. Two brothers, eager to become chiefs of their people, make a show of their sister’s great diligence. The Persian king Darius (pronounced DarEYEus) is so impressed that he decides to move the Paeonians to his own dominions. Some were conquered but the lake-dwellers held out. Now, the origin of the tale—the hardworking sister—may well be pure fancy, and Herodotus does not moralize. But the wholesale transfer of populations was a technique used by ancient empires to separate people from their roots and divide them, planting troublesome Jews, for example, in Babylon. Cyrus the Great had reversed this policy and sent the subject Jews and other peoples back home, but here we see Darius acting like the typical imperial tyrant. Note that Aristotle lists the transfer of peoples—such as Stalin would later compel—as one of the characteristics of tyranny. Athens, as soon as she got an empire, would do the same thing, and the US has done more than its share. The Cherokee are a familiar case, but the ethnic cleansing the US has performed in Krajina and Kosovo is something that would have pleased Nebuchadnezzar.
Herodotus sharpens his point when he comes to the Macedonians. The ethnicity of the Macedonians is subject to dispute. Some of my Greek friends become quite agitated over this question. They were certainly Indo-European and in dialect and customs closer to the Greeks than to any other people. Their ruling class claimed descent from Herakles, which gained Alexander (not the Great) admission to the Olympic Games. They were, at least at this point in their history, hardly any more civilized than the Thracians. But if they are barbarian in some respects, they are also Greek. Herodotus, it is claimed by some historians, has distorted the evidence in suggesting that Alexander who always anti-Persian, but I am not so sure. He did medize, but his lands lay athwart the Persian march and he was in no position to resist Darius or Xerxes.
In Book V, Herodotus treats us to the charming tale of the banquet at which the Persians asked for the Macedonian ladies to sit down at dinner and began paying rather too much attention—one tried to steal a kiss. King Amyntas was annoyed but did not want an incident. Nonetheless, he went to bed and his son Alexander dressed himself and his companions up as women, with daggers concealed under their dresses. When the Persians got fresh, the Macedonians stabbed them to death.
Once again, this episode is written to illustrate the Easterners’ lack of respect for respectable women, and the Greek sense of honor. Read the whole story, though, if only in one of the online translations because it is both charming and illustrative.
Herodotus is our primary source for the revolt of the Ionian (and Aeolian) Greek cities that had been subjugated by the Persian Empire. Rather than go chapter by chapter, I intend to summarize the history and make a few comments on what seem to be Herodotus’ views. But first, a little background.
The unity of Hellas (Greece) was a long time in the making. When Greeks came into the southern end of the Balkan peninsula in the Second Millennium, they found a people living on a higher level than they did, since they had to borrow their words for brick, bathtub, mint (menthe), wormwood (apsinthion)--along with other words for useful words for plants and animals--and even such an all-important word as thalassa (sea).
Whoever these pre-Greek peoples were, they were active and creative, and when the Greeks arrived in the middle of the Second Millennium, they did not, for the most part, try to exterminate them, but freely intermarried. If the Pelasgoi (as they were later called) were Indo-Europeans from the Middle East--as some scholars have supposed--they would have shared many customs and folkways, which might have made assimilation all the easier. We can only speculate. Civilization developed rather more slowly on the mainland than on the islands, especially Crete, which had trade relations with the Middle East. Minoan Crete still astonishes visitors who are amazed at is technological and artistic accomplishments.
To cut a long story short, the Greek invaders took to the sea and to the high culture of the people they conquered. They built fortified palaces on hilltops (Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos) and they conquered Crete. Because of the prominence of Mycenae, this first Greek civilization is called Mycenaean. Mycenaean Greece began to unravel after about 1100. Greeks related the downfall of the palaces to the period after the Trojan War, when a rougher breed of Greeks pushed south. These were the people later known as Dorians and Boeotians (among others). The Mycenaean peoples—Achaeans, Aeolians, and Ionians—were either expelled or subjugated or, in the case of Arcadians—went up into the mountains. Modern historians have taken a skeptical view of these traditions but offered nothing even halfway so convincing to replace them.
Dorian Greek cities on Crete and in the Peloponnese (Argos, Sicyon, Corinth, Sparta) were vigorous, enterprising, and warlike, and some—Sparta and cities on Crete—developed distinctive social and political institutions. Greek itself was not a unified language, and while there were many dialects, only three of them became important literary dialects: Doric, which became the primary language of choral lyric poetry, Aeolic, the language in which Sappho and Alcaeus wrote, and Ionic, which (with its offshoot Attic) became the primary literary dialect of the Greek world down to today.
The Greeks believed that the Ionians, who had inhabited Messenia (including Pylos and presumably the islands of the Ionian Sea), had taken refuge in Attica, where the Athenians welcomed their cousins, and from Athens they staged their successful recolonization of Asia Minor and the Islands. Aeolian Greeks also fled the same region.
The peninsula of Euboea opposite Attica was also Ionia, and its two major cities, Chalcis and Eretria became wealthy and powerful. They established a trading post in Syria and were active in colonization. Chalcis controlled many Cycladic islands like Andros and planted colonies in Sicily and the Chalcidice peninsula. Euboea might have emerged as a great power, had Chalcis and Eretria not wasted their resources in fighting each other. The first great war among the Greeks we hear of was their war over control of the Lelantine plain which went on for years—perhaps in the early seventh century--and is said to have involved many states in the Greek world. In the end, both cities were weakened, and Athens began her rise to become mistress of the Aegean.
The leaders of the immigrants claimed descent from the royal family of Pylos, the family of Nestor, son of Neleus. Some of these Neleids, like the legendary Codrus became kings of Athens itself, though Codrus’ son, another Neleus led the Ionian migration from Attica to the coast of Asia Minor and the island of Chios. This Ionian migration was not a single invading force, but a series of waves of immigrants who made their way east in the tenth and ninth centuries. Ionia would have been stabilized then, well before 800, at about the time we can imagine the Homeric poems to have begun taking shape and the Greeks were learning to write.
Although in later centuries, Ionia was proverbial for its wealth and sophistication, these earlier colonists lived lives much like Homeric heroes. They were occupied in wars against Carians as well as against other Greeks, and they engaged in piracy and trading expeditions. Ionians were organized (whether originally or later) into four tribes, which were divided into phratries, that is clans descended from a common ancestor. When they merged with other peoples, as they often did, new tribes might be assigned to the aliens, though in time there came to be no distinction, much less discrimination against the newly invented tribes.
While Dorian cities established disciplined states that ruled over large territories, the Ionian cities were all independent and tended to compete rather than cooperate. By about 600, however, the growing Lydian threat led them to form the Panionium, a consortium of 12 Ionian cities. They met annually to discuss matters of general interest and to plan the common defense. It was an early and interesting attempt at federalism, but each Ionian city was more interested in its own welfare, and, even when the Persians posed a greater threat than the Lydians ever had, the cities-- Miletus--especially were inclined to cheat on the alliance.
Even earlier, however, Ionians had found a sense of religious unity on the sacred island of Delos, where Leto had given birth to Apollo and Artemis. The festival of Apollo on Delos was an annual meeting place. Beginning in 750, the Messenians (in the Peloponnese) began sending choruses. It is no accident that these Ionians, with their memories stretching back to Nestor, took the final step of shaping the poems and legends of Troy into the Iliad. Although we only possess the Iliad and Odyssey, many other poems were written on different parts of the story--the Sack of Troy, the Cypria (on the origin of the war), and the great Homeric hymns.
There were 12 great Ionian cities. Among the most famous were Miletus, Ephesus, Clazomenae, Colophon and Phocaea on the mainland, and the islands of Naxos, Samos, Paros, Chios and Andros. They all retained some residual attachment to Athens but never the formal ties that later existed between mother cities and colonies. Despite the mixing of races and tribes--Mycenaean, Minoan, Aeolian Greeks, Ionian refugees from Pylos, non-Greek Carian--these Ionians fused into a people who acknowledged Athens as motherland and celebrated (as did Athens) the festival of phratries known as the Apaturia.
Ionian cities took an early lead in colonizing the Black Sea region and Magna Graecia (southern Italy). By the time they came into conflict with Lydia and then Persia they were by far the richest and most sophisticated Greeks. Their poetry included the Homeric epics, great lyric and satiric poets, as well as the first philosophers. While Ionians were later regarded as decadent, the peoples of Smyrna, Colophon, Samos, Naxos, Paros, and Phocaea were tough fighters against each other and against non-Greeks.
The Ionians of Asia Minor came under pressure from the expanding Lydian kingdom in the seventh and sixth centuries. The Near East was disturbed at this time by the raids of a nomadic people known as the Cimmerians, who had dwelt, according to Herodotus, north of the Black Sea until they were expelled by the Scythians. The Cimmerians were a great obstacle to Lydian expansion, but in the early sixth century the Lydian king Alyattes drove out the Cimmerian invaders and conquered the Ionian city of Smyrna, though he failed in his attacks on Miletus and Clazomenae. His successor Croesus, the last Lydian king, before he was conquered by Cyrus the Persian, completed the subjugation of the free Ionian cities, which were left to manage their own internal affairs but were forced to pay tribute to Lydia. Cyrus the Persian had requested Ionian help against the Croesus, but the Ionians refused, and after the Persian conquest of Lydia, the Ionian cities asked Cyrus for the same deal they had enjoyed under Croesus. His answer was succinct: You had your chance. Miletus was allowed to make a deal, the others were one by one conquered. Miletus’ arrangement was to maintain a virtual autonomy and pay taxes to Persia; at home her affairs were administered by rulers approved of by the Persian King. To give a flavor of Ionian culture, let me tell the stories of two or three of their cities.
Miletus was the southernmost Greek settlements on Asia Minor. Legend says it was founded first by Cretans and later by Mycenaeans. This legend has received support from archaeological excavations. Hittite records refer to Milawanda as a city of Ahiyawa in Hittite records, and this may well be Miletus of the Achaeans. By Homer’s time, the Greeks had been driven out, and Miletus is held by Carians, who fight on the Trojan side. In the tradition, Neleus (note again the name of Nestor’s father), who was a descendant of the Athenian king Codrus , led a group of all-male settlers who took Carian wives.
By the mid eighth century Miletus was founding colonies in the Propontis region: Cyzicus, founded in 756, was destroyed in the Cimmerian raid of the early seventh century but refounded a century later. Before the end of the seventh century (c . 609), Milesians also founded colonies in the Black Sea region, either independently or with other cities like Phocaea and Teos. Miletus had close, not always friendly, relations with the Lydians, who were the first to put an official stamp on a weight of precious metal, certifying its value. The Milesians quickly adopted the invention and began turning out a beautiful series of coins. Like other Greek states, Miletus began as a monarchy, lapsed into rule by aristocratic clans, until falling into the hands of a tyrant. The first tyrant to seize power in Miletus was Thrasybulus about 630.
Miletus and the other Ionian cities pioneered the development of philosophy, science, and geography. Aristotle, looking backwards, saw the Milesians as engaged in a search for the arche, a word that means “beginning” and comes also to signify something like our word element. The arche or archai--there might be many--are the fundamental building blocks of the universe. Because an arche must be eternal and, essentially, changeless, it had the attributes of a god. In the traditional account, Thales thought the arche was water, while for Anaximander it was something called “the unlimited,” for Anaximenes it was air or mist, while Heraclitus chose fire. These early philosophers were not so simple-minded as it might seem. Each was seeking for some element or quality into which all others could be resolved. Mist or Air, so Anaximenes discovered, can be compressed and expanded, and it is the additional virtue of being indispensable for life, while fire, which can consume even iron, could be regarded as a basic principle that could be converted into other forms of matter.
Samos had already been occupied during the Bronze Age, though it was probably abandoned by the Greeks until the Ionian migration. Ionians on Samos went on to settle Amorgos and Perinthus, and they established colonies in Thrace. They were famous as sailors and merchants. Herodotus (4.32) tells us that Colaeus of Samos made a voyage to Tartessus in Spain and sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules into the Atlantic Ocean, and we know from Thucydides that a Corinthian shipwright was making warships for Samians before 700. Samos is also said to have sent a fleet to help Spartans in the Second Messenian War.
Samos’ fleet was the most powerful in the Aegean during the seventh and sixth centuries--though they had very important rivals, like Chios, Phocaea and Mytilene on Lesbos. Like most of Ionia in the sixth century, Samos was controlled by a merchant aristocracy that owned the fleet and grew rich on trade. Naturally they had rivals who resented their power, and, just as naturally, ambitious men were willing to exploit them.
About 540 Polycrates and his brothers Pantagnotus and Syloson seized power, but Polycrates, after killing one brother and exiling the other, quickly established himself as sole tyrannos. Polycrates may have been quite popular, as tyrants, who come to power with support from non-elites, typically are. He was certainly an able ruler, who made Samos the greatest naval power in the region. He was also quite aggressive, and when he took over neighboring islands, he would say it was better to restore what you had taken from a friend than never to have taken anything. He made alliances with the Greek colony of Cyrene (in North Africa) and King Amasis in Egypt, though he later betrayed the Egyptians by supporting the Persian invasion led by Cambyses. Typically, he killed two birds with one stone since the fleet he sent was made up of disaffected Samians. When they returned, they tried, allegedly with Spartan assistance, to overthrow Polycrates.
Polycrates appears to have overreached himself. Oroetes, the Persian governor of Lydia, realizing Polycrates’ ambition to make himself master of Aegean, lured him to a meeting at which he was captured and crucified. Samos fell into Persian hands and was used a base in the invasion of Greece. The Persians installed the tyrant’s exiled brother Syloson as dictator to put down civil strife, and he killed so many Samians that it gave rise to a proverb: plenty of room, thanks to Syloson.
Samos was famous both for sculpture and for gem carving and coins. The philosopher Pythagoras worked as a gem-cutter before emigrating to Italy, perhaps wanting to escape from Polycrates. There he founded a philosophical school that revived and systematized the mystical ideas found in some Greek religious sects. He taught a public doctrine of reincarnation and the purification of souls, though his deeper secret wisdom was that the true reality was number. His followers founded philosophical brotherhoods whose teachings were to be very influential on later writers like Plato.
Phocaea was the most northerly Ionian city on Asia Minor. It is said to have been founded not by Ionians but by Achaean exiles from Phocis, the mountainous region of central Greece that included Delphi. The colonists did not have to conquer their territory, which was given to them by Cumae, the Aeolian city on Asia Minor. The expedition was led by two Athenians, but the mixed colony of Phocaea was not regarded as truly Ionian or allowed into the Panionium until it accepted two descendants of Codrus as rulers.
Herodotus says the Phocaeans were the first Greeks to undertake long voyages, and the city was certainly a pioneer in colonization, planting trading stations and settlements along the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian (western Italy) coasts and establishing close ties with Tartessus in Spain. Her most famous colony was Massalia on the coast of France. Phocaea was never conquered by Lydia, and the legendary king of Tartessus, Arganthonius, gave them enough gold and silver to pay for massive walls to defend their city against the Persians, after he failed to persuade them to settle down in Spain.
They might have been wiser to have accepted his offer, since even strong walls could not withstand the Persian siege conducted by Cyrus’s top commander Harpagus, who in 540 demanded them to tear down one defense tower as a token of their submission. Hating the idea of slavery, the Phocaeans asked for a 24 hours truce to decide. While some stayed to surrender, most packed up everything they could and sailed away (Herodotus. I. 163 ff.). First, they asked Chios permission to settle some of their islands, but Phocaeans were proverbial for piracy and were told to keep moving.
After dropping lump of iron into sea and pledging not to return until the iron rose, the exiles proceeded to Corsica, where they raided shipping of barbarian Carthaginians and Etruscans who joined forces to attack the newcomers. The Phocaeans won the battle but at so great a cost they decided to leave. Some went to the great colony they had established at Massalia; others went to Southern Italy and founded city of Elea. Both Massalia and Elea prospered, and the latter town became home to one of the greatest philosophers of all time: Parmenides.
Ionian Revolt: When the Phocaeans abandoned their city in 540, Miletus came to terms with the Persians and installed a pro-Persian regime that was headed, some 25 years later, by Histiaeus. When Darius the Great was retreating in disarray from Scythia, the Greeks were protecting the bridge, which made the retreat possible. As Herodotus tells the story, the Scythians approached the Greeks and advised them to burn the bridge. Miltiades the Athenian, who had become a wealthy potentate in Thrace, was all in favor, but Histiaeus of Miletus dissuaded the other Ionians from following this advice. (This Miltiades was the uncle of the future hero of Marathon.) Histiaeus would live to regret the decision. Darius viewed him with suspicion, and he was summoned to the Persian court as an “adviser.” Histiaeus viewed his situation more as exile. The Greeks, then and now, are a clannish people, and to be separated from their people is painful. Knowing that he would only be sent back to Ionia if there were trouble, he advised his son-in-law, Aristagoras, to foment unrest. That, at least, is Herodotus’ skeptical interpretation of his motives.
Aristagoras was already angry with the Persians. It was Aristagoras, who had plotted to take over Naxos, but on the expedition, when the Persian commander summarily inflicted a humiliating punishment on a Greek captain, Aristagoras had his friend released but made an enemy of the Persian commander. The Persian king had untold wealth and vast armies at his disposal. To counter this threat, Aristagoras solicited aid from the greatest military power in Greece—Sparta. The Spartan King Cleomenes, who was eager for fame and power, was on the point of promising aid, when Aristagoras made the mistake of telling him how far the Persian capital was from the coast.
Aristagoras fared better at Eretria in Euboea, which agreed to send five triremes in gratitude for Milesian assistance in their war with Chalcis, and Athens, symbolic motherland of the Ionians, sent 20 ships. Athens had originally agreed to submit, symbolically, to Darius in 507, but she later revoked the submission and was now headed on a collision course with the Persians. All of Ionia, including the non-Greek Carians, was on fire, and the revolt against the Persians was widespread. The Athenians were successful at first. They seized and burned Sardis, the former Lydian capital, but they failed to take the garrison. The Persians sent an invasion force to Cyprus. In the ensuing struggle, Ionian ships defeated the Phoenician navy, but on land some Cypriot Greeks deserted to the Persians and Cyprus was lost.
As the Persians advanced against Miletus in 495, the Ionian cities, met at the Panionium, not to raise an army to defend Miletus--the locals would have to look out for themselves--but to assemble a fleet near the island of Lade off the coast of Miletus. The fleet had 353 triremes, the largest contingents being supplied by Chios, Miletus, Lesbos, and Samos. Although most Phocaeans had abandoned their city 40 years earlier, a Phocaean named Dionysius was put in charge of the fleet. Dionysius drilled his seamen mercilessly in the heat of the day, knowing that the liberties of all the Ionians would be staked on one battle. The Ionians by then had lost their warlike edge, living in subjection to the Persians. The sailors mutinied, and when the Persian fleet came in to attack, the Samians led the retreat and the Lesbians followed. The fleet from Chios and the rest fought bravely but they were vastly outnumbered. Dionysius himself captured three Phoenician ships, and after the battle he raided Phoenician merchant shipping in enemy waters before sailing off to Sicily. The next year Miletus fell and by 493 all the Greek cities of Asia Minor, south of the Hellespont, were in Persian hands. Histiaeus, who had meanwhile joined the revolt, was caught raiding Persian territory. He was impaled, and decapitated, and his head was sent to the Great King as a trophy.
The Ionians had failed, especially at Lade, where they were divided. Only the Phocaean admiral was a hero on that occasion. On the other hand, they had shown more grit than the Persians had anticipated. The alliance stood firm, even when the Persians tried to bribe individual cities to break away, and the Ionian fleet was clearly superior to the Phoenicians’ ships. The cooperation of Ionian cities in the Panionium paved the way for the much wider cooperation that would be needed to resist future Persian aggression.
The Persians were ruthless in their triumph. They sacked cities, burned temples, and rounded up boys and girls to make eunuchs and prostitutes of them. Darius was not satisfied and he instructed his servants to tell him every day, “Remember Athens.” He set his sights on the Greek mainland--on Athens and Eretria, whom he wished to punish, and on the Spartans, who, he was told, were the toughest and most effective soldiers in the Greek world. In three years, he was to find out what the Greeks were made of.
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If true, the Persians behavior was sheer insolence and would not have been tolerated in Persia either. Alexander was Greek on his mother's side (specifically, from Epirus)and his father Phillip had spent some of his youth in Thebes as a hostage and was an ardent Hellenizer (thus his choice of Aristotle as turor to Alexander and friends). Macedonia was far from the only state to Medize. Several Greek city states did likewise, calculating that the enormous force of Darius was invincible and failing to reckon on the tactical superiority of the numerically inferior Greek forces.
I fear you have the wrong Alexander and the wrong century. The point of this discussion is to explore Herodotus' perspective and not to engage in a critical analysis of Archaic history.
Herodotus has long been one of my favorite authors. He has a very readable, entertaining stlye that is a pleasure to read. His stories and observations are interesting and gives an idea of what the 5th Century BC world was really like. By comparison, Thucydides I found a chore and a bore. I'm not sure my bias adds anything to this interesting discussion.
Sorry, I blended two points: the Persians insolence during the time of an earlier Alexander and the later Hellenization of the Macedonians under Phillip and Alexander III (perhaps more of a process of civilization than Hellenization since the Macedonians considered themselves Hellenes already).
It's the internet--we all read too quickly. Another point to look for, if you are reading H. and thinking about his ethnic characterizations, is the distinctions he makes among Greeks, particularly Ionians and Dorians, but also between mainland Ionians, namely, the Athenians, and Asiatic Ionians. I'll talk more about this later in the main body of my comments, but it is a topic of some interest and consideration of it helps to sort out some puzzles, as, for example, why the Athenians seem to distance themselves from their cousins in Asia and why they are willing to oppress them.
I've just gotten into Book V, conveniently enough. There are so many of these striking anecdotes (throughout the whole work) that it's difficult to keep track of them all.
When going through the story of Amyntas, Alexander, and the Persians I was struck by the fact that the Persians' bad behavior seems partly due to their being unable to handle their drink.
Also, when the Persians tell King Amyntas that it is their custom to have the women with them while they feast, and Amyntas notes that his people do not have such practive in their customs, it occurred to me that perhaps the Macedonian customs are being shown as better or at least safer.
The depiction of Amyntas going along with the Persians' whims is painful -- not that I pass judgment on him for letting them have their way, given his responsibilities, but it's always unpleasant envisaging dignity & age bowing to shamelessness and arrogance.
I expected the story to end with the Macedonians being on the receiving end of a ghastly massacre, especially when Alexander is described in my translation as "a young man and unacquainted with suffering". I assumed that was foreshadowing that he was going to do something rash and get everybody in big trouble.
So it was a pleasant surprise when he smoothly and adeptly covered up the matter. Apparently being hotblooded does not always prevent one from being prudent.
"Easterners’ lack of respect for respectable women"
My first inclination would've been to attribute this episode to haughty rulers' typical lack of respect for their subject's respectable women, rather than a lack of respect for respectable women as such.
But then I guess the early episode with Candaules & Gyges suggests a pattern from the beginning, and maybe this should be contrasted to the Spartan Anaxandridas in the same book, whom you mentioned in an earlier post... for some reason I had the vague impression that Spartans were somewhat, ah, misogynistic, which is one reason why Anaxandridas stands out so much.
Oh.
Come to think of it, not having respectable women with them while they drink might be one of the ways by which the Macedonians make the distinction between respectable vs. not-respectable women?
At this point I am still playing catch up in my reading. Herodotus is so good that I'd rather read it straight through than skip ahead.
Before getting down to business—the story of the Ionian Revolt—Herodotus adds a few notes on the barbarian Thracians, an Indo-European people living to the NE of Greece. He tells a peculiar story of the Paeonians, probably a mixed Thracian-Illyrian people. Two brothers, eager to become chiefs of their people, make a show of their sister’s great diligence. The Persian king Darius (pronounced DarEYEus) is so impressed that he decides to move the Paeonians to his own dominions. Some were conquered but the lake-dwellers held out. Now, the origin of the tale—the hardworking sister—may well be pure fancy, and Herodotus does not moralize. But the wholesale transfer of populations was a technique used by ancient empires to separate people from their roots and divide them, planting troublesome Jews, for example, in Babylon. Cyrus the Great had reversed this policy and sent the subject Jews and other peoples back home, but here we see Darius acting like the typical imperial tyrant. Note that Aristotle lists the transfer of peoples—such as Stalin would later compel—as one of the characteristics of tyranny. Athens, as soon as she got an empire, would do the same thing, and the US has done more than its share. The Cherokee are a familiar case, but the ethnic cleansing the US has performed in Krajina and Kosovo is something that would have pleased Nebuchadnezzar.
Herodotus sharpens his point when he comes to the Macedonians. The ethnicity of the Macedonians is subject to dispute. Some of my Greek friends become quite agitated over this question. They were certainly Indo-European and in dialect and customs closer to the Greeks than to any other people. Their ruling class claimed descent from Herakles, which gained Alexander (not the Great) admission to the Olympic Games. They were, at least at this point in their history, hardly any more civilized than the Thracians. But if they are barbarian in some respects, they are also Greek. Herodotus, it is claimed by some historians, has distorted the evidence in suggesting that Alexander who always anti-Persian, but I am not so sure. He did medize, but his lands lay athwart the Persian march and he was in no position to resist Darius or Xerxes.
In Book V, Herodotus treats us to the charming tale of the banquet at which the Persians asked for the Macedonian ladies to sit down at dinner and began paying rather too much attention—one tried to steal a kiss. King Amyntas was annoyed but did not want an incident. Nonetheless, he went to bed and his son Alexander dressed himself and his companions up as women, with daggers concealed under their dresses. When the Persians got fresh, the Macedonians stabbed them to death.
Once again, this episode is written to illustrate the Easterners’ lack of respect for respectable women, and the Greek sense of honor. Read the whole story, though, if only in one of the online translations because it is both charming and illustrative.
Herodotus is our primary source for the revolt of the Ionian (and Aeolian) Greek cities that had been subjugated by the Persian Empire. Rather than go chapter by chapter, I intend to summarize the history and make a few comments on what seem to be Herodotus’ views. But first, a little background.
The unity of Hellas (Greece) was a long time in the making. When Greeks came into the southern end of the Balkan peninsula in the Second Millennium, they found a people living on a higher level than they did, since they had to borrow their words for brick, bathtub, mint (menthe), wormwood (apsinthion)--along with other words for useful words for plants and animals--and even such an all-important word as thalassa (sea).
Whoever these pre-Greek peoples were, they were active and creative, and when the Greeks arrived in the middle of the Second Millennium, they did not, for the most part, try to exterminate them, but freely intermarried. If the Pelasgoi (as they were later called) were Indo-Europeans from the Middle East--as some scholars have supposed--they would have shared many customs and folkways, which might have made assimilation all the easier. We can only speculate. Civilization developed rather more slowly on the mainland than on the islands, especially Crete, which had trade relations with the Middle East. Minoan Crete still astonishes visitors who are amazed at is technological and artistic accomplishments.
To cut a long story short, the Greek invaders took to the sea and to the high culture of the people they conquered. They built fortified palaces on hilltops (Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos) and they conquered Crete. Because of the prominence of Mycenae, this first Greek civilization is called Mycenaean. Mycenaean Greece began to unravel after about 1100. Greeks related the downfall of the palaces to the period after the Trojan War, when a rougher breed of Greeks pushed south. These were the people later known as Dorians and Boeotians (among others). The Mycenaean peoples—Achaeans, Aeolians, and Ionians—were either expelled or subjugated or, in the case of Arcadians—went up into the mountains. Modern historians have taken a skeptical view of these traditions but offered nothing even halfway so convincing to replace them.
Dorian Greek cities on Crete and in the Peloponnese (Argos, Sicyon, Corinth, Sparta) were vigorous, enterprising, and warlike, and some—Sparta and cities on Crete—developed distinctive social and political institutions. Greek itself was not a unified language, and while there were many dialects, only three of them became important literary dialects: Doric, which became the primary language of choral lyric poetry, Aeolic, the language in which Sappho and Alcaeus wrote, and Ionic, which (with its offshoot Attic) became the primary literary dialect of the Greek world down to today.
The Greeks believed that the Ionians, who had inhabited Messenia (including Pylos and presumably the islands of the Ionian Sea), had taken refuge in Attica, where the Athenians welcomed their cousins, and from Athens they staged their successful recolonization of Asia Minor and the Islands. Aeolian Greeks also fled the same region.
The peninsula of Euboea opposite Attica was also Ionia, and its two major cities, Chalcis and Eretria became wealthy and powerful. They established a trading post in Syria and were active in colonization. Chalcis controlled many Cycladic islands like Andros and planted colonies in Sicily and the Chalcidice peninsula. Euboea might have emerged as a great power, had Chalcis and Eretria not wasted their resources in fighting each other. The first great war among the Greeks we hear of was their war over control of the Lelantine plain which went on for years—perhaps in the early seventh century--and is said to have involved many states in the Greek world. In the end, both cities were weakened, and Athens began her rise to become mistress of the Aegean.
The leaders of the immigrants claimed descent from the royal family of Pylos, the family of Nestor, son of Neleus. Some of these Neleids, like the legendary Codrus became kings of Athens itself, though Codrus’ son, another Neleus led the Ionian migration from Attica to the coast of Asia Minor and the island of Chios. This Ionian migration was not a single invading force, but a series of waves of immigrants who made their way east in the tenth and ninth centuries. Ionia would have been stabilized then, well before 800, at about the time we can imagine the Homeric poems to have begun taking shape and the Greeks were learning to write.
Although in later centuries, Ionia was proverbial for its wealth and sophistication, these earlier colonists lived lives much like Homeric heroes. They were occupied in wars against Carians as well as against other Greeks, and they engaged in piracy and trading expeditions. Ionians were organized (whether originally or later) into four tribes, which were divided into phratries, that is clans descended from a common ancestor. When they merged with other peoples, as they often did, new tribes might be assigned to the aliens, though in time there came to be no distinction, much less discrimination against the newly invented tribes.
While Dorian cities established disciplined states that ruled over large territories, the Ionian cities were all independent and tended to compete rather than cooperate. By about 600, however, the growing Lydian threat led them to form the Panionium, a consortium of 12 Ionian cities. They met annually to discuss matters of general interest and to plan the common defense. It was an early and interesting attempt at federalism, but each Ionian city was more interested in its own welfare, and, even when the Persians posed a greater threat than the Lydians ever had, the cities-- Miletus--especially were inclined to cheat on the alliance.
Even earlier, however, Ionians had found a sense of religious unity on the sacred island of Delos, where Leto had given birth to Apollo and Artemis. The festival of Apollo on Delos was an annual meeting place. Beginning in 750, the Messenians (in the Peloponnese) began sending choruses. It is no accident that these Ionians, with their memories stretching back to Nestor, took the final step of shaping the poems and legends of Troy into the Iliad. Although we only possess the Iliad and Odyssey, many other poems were written on different parts of the story--the Sack of Troy, the Cypria (on the origin of the war), and the great Homeric hymns.
There were 12 great Ionian cities. Among the most famous were Miletus, Ephesus, Clazomenae, Colophon and Phocaea on the mainland, and the islands of Naxos, Samos, Paros, Chios and Andros. They all retained some residual attachment to Athens but never the formal ties that later existed between mother cities and colonies. Despite the mixing of races and tribes--Mycenaean, Minoan, Aeolian Greeks, Ionian refugees from Pylos, non-Greek Carian--these Ionians fused into a people who acknowledged Athens as motherland and celebrated (as did Athens) the festival of phratries known as the Apaturia.
Ionian cities took an early lead in colonizing the Black Sea region and Magna Graecia (southern Italy). By the time they came into conflict with Lydia and then Persia they were by far the richest and most sophisticated Greeks. Their poetry included the Homeric epics, great lyric and satiric poets, as well as the first philosophers. While Ionians were later regarded as decadent, the peoples of Smyrna, Colophon, Samos, Naxos, Paros, and Phocaea were tough fighters against each other and against non-Greeks.
The Ionians of Asia Minor came under pressure from the expanding Lydian kingdom in the seventh and sixth centuries. The Near East was disturbed at this time by the raids of a nomadic people known as the Cimmerians, who had dwelt, according to Herodotus, north of the Black Sea until they were expelled by the Scythians. The Cimmerians were a great obstacle to Lydian expansion, but in the early sixth century the Lydian king Alyattes drove out the Cimmerian invaders and conquered the Ionian city of Smyrna, though he failed in his attacks on Miletus and Clazomenae. His successor Croesus, the last Lydian king, before he was conquered by Cyrus the Persian, completed the subjugation of the free Ionian cities, which were left to manage their own internal affairs but were forced to pay tribute to Lydia. Cyrus the Persian had requested Ionian help against the Croesus, but the Ionians refused, and after the Persian conquest of Lydia, the Ionian cities asked Cyrus for the same deal they had enjoyed under Croesus. His answer was succinct: You had your chance. Miletus was allowed to make a deal, the others were one by one conquered. Miletus’ arrangement was to maintain a virtual autonomy and pay taxes to Persia; at home her affairs were administered by rulers approved of by the Persian King. To give a flavor of Ionian culture, let me tell the stories of two or three of their cities.
Miletus was the southernmost Greek settlements on Asia Minor. Legend says it was founded first by Cretans and later by Mycenaeans. This legend has received support from archaeological excavations. Hittite records refer to Milawanda as a city of Ahiyawa in Hittite records, and this may well be Miletus of the Achaeans. By Homer’s time, the Greeks had been driven out, and Miletus is held by Carians, who fight on the Trojan side. In the tradition, Neleus (note again the name of Nestor’s father), who was a descendant of the Athenian king Codrus , led a group of all-male settlers who took Carian wives.
By the mid eighth century Miletus was founding colonies in the Propontis region: Cyzicus, founded in 756, was destroyed in the Cimmerian raid of the early seventh century but refounded a century later. Before the end of the seventh century (c . 609), Milesians also founded colonies in the Black Sea region, either independently or with other cities like Phocaea and Teos. Miletus had close, not always friendly, relations with the Lydians, who were the first to put an official stamp on a weight of precious metal, certifying its value. The Milesians quickly adopted the invention and began turning out a beautiful series of coins. Like other Greek states, Miletus began as a monarchy, lapsed into rule by aristocratic clans, until falling into the hands of a tyrant. The first tyrant to seize power in Miletus was Thrasybulus about 630.
Miletus and the other Ionian cities pioneered the development of philosophy, science, and geography. Aristotle, looking backwards, saw the Milesians as engaged in a search for the arche, a word that means “beginning” and comes also to signify something like our word element. The arche or archai--there might be many--are the fundamental building blocks of the universe. Because an arche must be eternal and, essentially, changeless, it had the attributes of a god. In the traditional account, Thales thought the arche was water, while for Anaximander it was something called “the unlimited,” for Anaximenes it was air or mist, while Heraclitus chose fire. These early philosophers were not so simple-minded as it might seem. Each was seeking for some element or quality into which all others could be resolved. Mist or Air, so Anaximenes discovered, can be compressed and expanded, and it is the additional virtue of being indispensable for life, while fire, which can consume even iron, could be regarded as a basic principle that could be converted into other forms of matter.
Samos had already been occupied during the Bronze Age, though it was probably abandoned by the Greeks until the Ionian migration. Ionians on Samos went on to settle Amorgos and Perinthus, and they established colonies in Thrace. They were famous as sailors and merchants. Herodotus (4.32) tells us that Colaeus of Samos made a voyage to Tartessus in Spain and sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules into the Atlantic Ocean, and we know from Thucydides that a Corinthian shipwright was making warships for Samians before 700. Samos is also said to have sent a fleet to help Spartans in the Second Messenian War.
Samos’ fleet was the most powerful in the Aegean during the seventh and sixth centuries--though they had very important rivals, like Chios, Phocaea and Mytilene on Lesbos. Like most of Ionia in the sixth century, Samos was controlled by a merchant aristocracy that owned the fleet and grew rich on trade. Naturally they had rivals who resented their power, and, just as naturally, ambitious men were willing to exploit them.
About 540 Polycrates and his brothers Pantagnotus and Syloson seized power, but Polycrates, after killing one brother and exiling the other, quickly established himself as sole tyrannos. Polycrates may have been quite popular, as tyrants, who come to power with support from non-elites, typically are. He was certainly an able ruler, who made Samos the greatest naval power in the region. He was also quite aggressive, and when he took over neighboring islands, he would say it was better to restore what you had taken from a friend than never to have taken anything. He made alliances with the Greek colony of Cyrene (in North Africa) and King Amasis in Egypt, though he later betrayed the Egyptians by supporting the Persian invasion led by Cambyses. Typically, he killed two birds with one stone since the fleet he sent was made up of disaffected Samians. When they returned, they tried, allegedly with Spartan assistance, to overthrow Polycrates.
Polycrates appears to have overreached himself. Oroetes, the Persian governor of Lydia, realizing Polycrates’ ambition to make himself master of Aegean, lured him to a meeting at which he was captured and crucified. Samos fell into Persian hands and was used a base in the invasion of Greece. The Persians installed the tyrant’s exiled brother Syloson as dictator to put down civil strife, and he killed so many Samians that it gave rise to a proverb: plenty of room, thanks to Syloson.
Samos was famous both for sculpture and for gem carving and coins. The philosopher Pythagoras worked as a gem-cutter before emigrating to Italy, perhaps wanting to escape from Polycrates. There he founded a philosophical school that revived and systematized the mystical ideas found in some Greek religious sects. He taught a public doctrine of reincarnation and the purification of souls, though his deeper secret wisdom was that the true reality was number. His followers founded philosophical brotherhoods whose teachings were to be very influential on later writers like Plato.
Phocaea was the most northerly Ionian city on Asia Minor. It is said to have been founded not by Ionians but by Achaean exiles from Phocis, the mountainous region of central Greece that included Delphi. The colonists did not have to conquer their territory, which was given to them by Cumae, the Aeolian city on Asia Minor. The expedition was led by two Athenians, but the mixed colony of Phocaea was not regarded as truly Ionian or allowed into the Panionium until it accepted two descendants of Codrus as rulers.
Herodotus says the Phocaeans were the first Greeks to undertake long voyages, and the city was certainly a pioneer in colonization, planting trading stations and settlements along the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian (western Italy) coasts and establishing close ties with Tartessus in Spain. Her most famous colony was Massalia on the coast of France. Phocaea was never conquered by Lydia, and the legendary king of Tartessus, Arganthonius, gave them enough gold and silver to pay for massive walls to defend their city against the Persians, after he failed to persuade them to settle down in Spain.
They might have been wiser to have accepted his offer, since even strong walls could not withstand the Persian siege conducted by Cyrus’s top commander Harpagus, who in 540 demanded them to tear down one defense tower as a token of their submission. Hating the idea of slavery, the Phocaeans asked for a 24 hours truce to decide. While some stayed to surrender, most packed up everything they could and sailed away (Herodotus. I. 163 ff.). First, they asked Chios permission to settle some of their islands, but Phocaeans were proverbial for piracy and were told to keep moving.
After dropping lump of iron into sea and pledging not to return until the iron rose, the exiles proceeded to Corsica, where they raided shipping of barbarian Carthaginians and Etruscans who joined forces to attack the newcomers. The Phocaeans won the battle but at so great a cost they decided to leave. Some went to the great colony they had established at Massalia; others went to Southern Italy and founded city of Elea. Both Massalia and Elea prospered, and the latter town became home to one of the greatest philosophers of all time: Parmenides.
Ionian Revolt: When the Phocaeans abandoned their city in 540, Miletus came to terms with the Persians and installed a pro-Persian regime that was headed, some 25 years later, by Histiaeus. When Darius the Great was retreating in disarray from Scythia, the Greeks were protecting the bridge, which made the retreat possible. As Herodotus tells the story, the Scythians approached the Greeks and advised them to burn the bridge. Miltiades the Athenian, who had become a wealthy potentate in Thrace, was all in favor, but Histiaeus of Miletus dissuaded the other Ionians from following this advice. (This Miltiades was the uncle of the future hero of Marathon.) Histiaeus would live to regret the decision. Darius viewed him with suspicion, and he was summoned to the Persian court as an “adviser.” Histiaeus viewed his situation more as exile. The Greeks, then and now, are a clannish people, and to be separated from their people is painful. Knowing that he would only be sent back to Ionia if there were trouble, he advised his son-in-law, Aristagoras, to foment unrest. That, at least, is Herodotus’ skeptical interpretation of his motives.
Aristagoras was already angry with the Persians. It was Aristagoras, who had plotted to take over Naxos, but on the expedition, when the Persian commander summarily inflicted a humiliating punishment on a Greek captain, Aristagoras had his friend released but made an enemy of the Persian commander. The Persian king had untold wealth and vast armies at his disposal. To counter this threat, Aristagoras solicited aid from the greatest military power in Greece—Sparta. The Spartan King Cleomenes, who was eager for fame and power, was on the point of promising aid, when Aristagoras made the mistake of telling him how far the Persian capital was from the coast.
Aristagoras fared better at Eretria in Euboea, which agreed to send five triremes in gratitude for Milesian assistance in their war with Chalcis, and Athens, symbolic motherland of the Ionians, sent 20 ships. Athens had originally agreed to submit, symbolically, to Darius in 507, but she later revoked the submission and was now headed on a collision course with the Persians. All of Ionia, including the non-Greek Carians, was on fire, and the revolt against the Persians was widespread. The Athenians were successful at first. They seized and burned Sardis, the former Lydian capital, but they failed to take the garrison. The Persians sent an invasion force to Cyprus. In the ensuing struggle, Ionian ships defeated the Phoenician navy, but on land some Cypriot Greeks deserted to the Persians and Cyprus was lost.
As the Persians advanced against Miletus in 495, the Ionian cities, met at the Panionium, not to raise an army to defend Miletus--the locals would have to look out for themselves--but to assemble a fleet near the island of Lade off the coast of Miletus. The fleet had 353 triremes, the largest contingents being supplied by Chios, Miletus, Lesbos, and Samos. Although most Phocaeans had abandoned their city 40 years earlier, a Phocaean named Dionysius was put in charge of the fleet. Dionysius drilled his seamen mercilessly in the heat of the day, knowing that the liberties of all the Ionians would be staked on one battle. The Ionians by then had lost their warlike edge, living in subjection to the Persians. The sailors mutinied, and when the Persian fleet came in to attack, the Samians led the retreat and the Lesbians followed. The fleet from Chios and the rest fought bravely but they were vastly outnumbered. Dionysius himself captured three Phoenician ships, and after the battle he raided Phoenician merchant shipping in enemy waters before sailing off to Sicily. The next year Miletus fell and by 493 all the Greek cities of Asia Minor, south of the Hellespont, were in Persian hands. Histiaeus, who had meanwhile joined the revolt, was caught raiding Persian territory. He was impaled, and decapitated, and his head was sent to the Great King as a trophy.
The Ionians had failed, especially at Lade, where they were divided. Only the Phocaean admiral was a hero on that occasion. On the other hand, they had shown more grit than the Persians had anticipated. The alliance stood firm, even when the Persians tried to bribe individual cities to break away, and the Ionian fleet was clearly superior to the Phoenicians’ ships. The cooperation of Ionian cities in the Panionium paved the way for the much wider cooperation that would be needed to resist future Persian aggression.
The Persians were ruthless in their triumph. They sacked cities, burned temples, and rounded up boys and girls to make eunuchs and prostitutes of them. Darius was not satisfied and he instructed his servants to tell him every day, “Remember Athens.” He set his sights on the Greek mainland--on Athens and Eretria, whom he wished to punish, and on the Spartans, who, he was told, were the toughest and most effective soldiers in the Greek world. In three years, he was to find out what the Greeks were made of.