The Ionians

The Ionians of Asia were descendants of the archaic Greek migrations who held the middle stretch of the Anatolian coast, between the Aeolians to their north and the Dorians to their south. Herodotus, himself a Greek of Asia, counts twelve cities, Miletus, Myus and Priene in the south, then Ephesus, Colophon, Lebedos, Teos, Clazomenae and Phocaea up the coast, with Samos and Chios on their islands and Erythrae facing them, and reports that they "had set their cities in places more favoured by skies and seasons than any country known to us".^[1] The twelve guarded the name jealously, but they were a league only in religion. "They use not all the same speech but four different dialects," Herodotus writes; what they held in common was a sanctuary: "The Panionion is a sacred ground in Mycale, facing the north; it was set apart for Poseidon of Helicon by the joint will of the Ionians", where the cities gathered each year for the festival of the Panionia.^[1] The shrine stood on the very headland where, in 479, a Greek fleet would break Persian rule on the coast (see the battle of Mycale); in the sixth century it produced festivals rather than armies. Balcer's judgement on the eve of the Persian conquest is that the shrine "had not generated a concerted Ionian military effort, nor would it for some time".^[2]

Subjection did not begin with Persia. The Mermnad kings of Lydia had already forced the mainland cities into tribute, a process finished under Croesus, while the islanders stayed beyond Lydian reach; the Ionians paid, made their dedications, and governed themselves, an arrangement Nudell finds "striking for its similarity to the relationship between Ionia and the imperial actors of the Classical period".^[3] When Cyrus overthrew Croesus in the mid-540s, the Greek cities came to him as part of the Lydian inheritance: wealthy, walled, disunited, and long accustomed to paying a master at Sardis.

The terms of the new subjection were set in a single scene. When Sardis fell, "the Ionians and Aeolians sent messengers to Cyrus, offering to be his subjects on the same terms as those which they had under Croesus".^[4] Cyrus had invited these same cities to rise against Croesus when his war began, and they had refused; now, Herodotus says, he "answered them in his anger" with a fable:

Once, he said, there was a flute-player who saw fishes in the sea and played upon his flute, thinking that so they would come out on to the land. Being disappointed of his hope, he took a net and gathered in and drew out a great multitude of the fishes; and seeing them leaping, "You had best," said he, "cease from your dancing now; you would not come out and dance then, when I played to you."

Herodotus 1.141, trans. Godley^[4]

The fishes had missed their chance to dance to the flute; caught in the net, their leaping earned no terms at all. Submission, in the empire's understanding, was accepted from the willing and imposed on the rest, and it was not renegotiated after the fact. The exception proved the rule: Miletus, which had come over early, kept its standing as the one city "with whom alone Cyrus had made a treaty on the same terms as that which they had with the Lydians".^[4] The others "fortified themselves severally with walls", assembled at the Panionion, and voted to ask Sparta for help.^[4]

Sparta declined the war but sent a fifty-oared ship to watch, and its envoy Lacrines delivered a warning at Sardis: Cyrus was to harm no Greek city. The king, Herodotus reports, first asked who the Lacedaemonians were and how many, then answered: "I never yet feared men who have a place set apart in the midst of their city where they perjure themselves and deceive each other."^[5] The threat that followed was for Sparta itself: "These, if I keep my health, shall have their own mishaps to talk of, not those of the Ionians." The jibe, Herodotus explains, was at the agora, "because they have market-places and buy and sell there; for the Persians themselves use no market-places, nor have they such at all".^[5] Filtered though it is through a Greek narrator, the scene preserves a rare Persian-voiced characterisation of the polis: a community organised around a square for bargaining and oath-taking, seen from the Iranian plateau as a school of perjury.

Cyrus went east to his greater wars and left Lydia to be digested. The arrangement misfired at once: the Lydian Pactyes, entrusted with the treasure at Sardis, raised the coast in rebellion and hired Greek mercenaries with the king's own gold (see Sardis). The Mede Mazares crushed the rising and enslaved towns that had joined it; on his death the command passed to Harpagus, who reduced the coast city by city, piling siege-mounds against the walls. Two peoples chose exile over submission, the Phocaeans sailing for the western Mediterranean and the Teians for Abdera in Thrace: "These were the only Ionians who, being unable to endure slavery, left their native lands."^[6] Even that gesture was partial, for many of the emigrants gradually drifted back, returning, as Balcer puts it, "to live under Persian sovereignty".^[2] For the rest, Herodotus's summary became the classic statement of the Ionian condition:

The rest of the Ionians, except the Milesians, though they faced Harpagus in battle as did the exiles, and bore themselves gallantly, each fighting for his own country, yet, when they were worsted and their cities taken, remained each where he was and did as they were commanded. The Milesians, as I have already said, made a treaty with Cyrus himself and struck no blow. Thus was Ionia for the second time enslaved.

Herodotus 1.169, trans. Godley^[6]

The first enslavement had been Lydian; the second was Persian; each city had fought alone and fallen alone. The islands, in Herodotus’s account, drew the lesson without a battle: "the Ionians of the islands, fearing the same fate, surrendered themselves to Cyrus."^[6] The date of effective island subjection is contested, for Herodotus elsewhere has the islanders with "nothing to fear" from a Persia without ships, and Samos’s real submission is commonly placed under Darius; Balcer’s early reading is one position among several. And the new subjection announced itself immediately as service: "Harpagus, after subduing Ionia, made an expedition against the Carians, Caunians, and Lycians, taking with him Ionians and Aeolians."^[7] Within a season of losing their own liberty the Ionians were marching to take their neighbours', a pattern of conscripted service that would hold for two centuries.

Herodotus closes the conquest with the two counsels the Ionians refused. Even in defeat the cities kept assembling at the Panionion, and there Bias of Priene urged the radical escape: that they "put out to sea and sail all together to Sardo and then found one city for all Ionians", where they "would be rid of slavery and win prosperity".^[8] Before the conquest, Thales of Miletus had proposed the political version of the same cure: that the Ionians "make one common place of counsel, which should be in Teos, for that was the centre of Ionia", the remaining cities standing to it as if "they were but townships".^[8] Neither counsel was taken. In Herodotus's design the refusals explain the servitude: twelve sovereignties sharing a festival could resist a siege singly and never together. The moral is a Greek moralist's, but the structural observation survives modern scrutiny, for the empire never had to fight "Ionia"; it fought Miletus, Phocaea and Teos one at a time.

In the empire's own languages the Greeks were Yauna, the name of the nearest Greeks, the Ionians, generalised to the whole people. Cognate forms of the same ethnicon run through the languages of the Near East and outlived the empire by millennia: Hebrew Yawan, the Akkadian Iamannaia, and in time the Yunanistan of modern Turkish and al-Yūnān of Arabic all descend from the same ethnicon.^[9] What the label never carried was the Greeks' own self-division. Where Greek usage separated Ionians, Aeolians and Dorians by dialect and descent, the Persian term folded them together; Balcer renders the Greek complaint as the charge that the conquerors "had subdued the Greeks of Yauna, the Ionians, Aiolians, and Dorians in Asia, and demanded of them tributary gifts".^[9]

The royal scribes divided their Yauna on another axis altogether: by where they lived and what they wore. The tribute lists distinguish Yauna of the mainland, Yauna dwelling by the sea, and Yauna dwelling beyond it, and after the Balkan campaigns a further group appears, the Yauna takabara, whom Brosius identifies as "the Ionians with the shield-like hat, that is, the Macedonians".^[10] Geography and headgear, the categories of an administrator surveying a frontier from Susa, replaced the dialect and kinship categories the Greeks used of themselves (see the peoples of the empire). The elastic term also carried an ambition, for Balcer reads the campaigns of Darius and Xerxes as the drive to gather all Greeks "within a western province, the satrapy called Yauna or Ionia".^[9] The Ionians of Asia were the first bearers of a name the empire proved willing to stretch to the whole Greek world.

Persia held the coast with remarkably few Persians. There was no colonisation, and outside the satrapal seats no standing garrison network; the working instrument of rule was the client city-ruler, the tyrannos of the Greek tradition, one leading man in each city whose position rested on the King's favour and who answered to the satrap at Sardis for his city's tribute and troops. The clearest statement of the mechanism is Herodotus's scene at the Danube bridge in about 513, when the Ionian rulers, serving in Darius's Scythian campaign, were urged by Miltiades of the Chersonese to break the bridge, strand the King, and free Ionia. Histiaeus of Miletus talked them out of it:

"Now," said he, "it is by help of Darius that each of us is sovereign of his city; if Darius' power be overthrown, we shall no longer be able to rule, neither I in Miletus nor any of you elsewhere; for all the cities will choose democracy rather than despotism." When Histiaeus declared this opinion, all of them straightway inclined to it, albeit they had first sided with Miltiades.

Herodotus 4.137, trans. Godley^[11]

The tyrant, in his own account, is a creature of the King: remove the King and the cities remove the tyrant. Briant accepts the picture, observing that in Ionian eyes "the dominion to which they were subject was exercised jointly by the Persians and their tyrant".^[12] The office ran in practice as an inheritance, since "transmission of the job of tyrant proceeded along family lines", Histiaeus's own position passing to his cousin and son-in-law Aristagoras, yet it remained revocable at the King's pleasure.^[12] The bargain served both sides. The city delivered tribute and contingents through a man who could not survive without Persian backing; Persia policed a fractious, walled coastline at the cost of underwriting him. The arrangement broke in the expelled tyrants and thwarted ambitions of 499 (see the Ionian Revolt); its normal working was quiet, which is precisely why so little of it is recorded.

The empire did not hold all its Greeks on the same terms. At the top of the scale stood Miletus: "With the Milesians, Cyrus contracted a treaty of vassalage yet one that placed them in privileged status in marked contrast to the unprivileged status later to be imposed by Harpagos upon the rebellious Ionians."^[13] The treaty confirmed what Balcer calls "Milesian internal self-determination" and made the city "a semi-autonomous polis within the greater Achaemenid imperial system".^[13] A different accommodation covered Samos, where the tyrant Polycrates kept his island fleet and his ambitions under Persian overlordship "providing he furnished tribute, armed forces, and ships", an arrangement that lasted until the satrap Oroetes lured him to the mainland and killed him.^[13]

Beneath the special cases lay the common baseline: "From his subjects, Cyrus demanded tribute and military forces, both armies and navies, and his subjects' compliance with his imperial laws and decrees, and those of his satraps."^[13] Most of the subject peoples, Balcer concludes, "served their king and their satrap as obedient vassals, a few with privileged status".^[13] The gradations were an instrument of rule. The early friend kept a treaty; the stormed rebel bore the harsher yoke; the useful strongman was tolerated while he paid and supplied. Persia calibrated the weight of subjection to the record of loyalty, and every Ionian city could read its own possible futures in its neighbours' terms.

What subjection cost is set down in Herodotus's account of Darius's tribute reform: "The Ionians, Magnesians of Asia, Aeolians, Carians, Lycians, Milyans, and Pamphylians, on whom Darius laid one joint tribute, paid a revenue of four hundred talents of silver. This was established as his first province."^[14] The Greeks head the ledger, as an Asian Greek author would have them do, but the figure deserves attention for its weight: the whole first district, pooling Ionia with most of its Anatolian neighbours, owed less than half of Babylonia's thousand talents (fuller treatment at tribute and taxation). By the standards of the empire's fiscal geography the Greek assessment was modest.

Nor was the obligation new. Herodotus, Balcer observes, records that the East Greeks "paid tribute (phoros) to the Lydians", and implies that after the conquest they paid it to Cyrus; his conclusion is that "the Ionians owed tribute and military service", the double obligation Xenophon later states plainly as troops and dasmos.^[15] The tribute obligation, in other words, predated Persia by a generation and passed to Persia with the rest of Croesus's estate. This continuity is the hinge of the modern reassessment. Herodotus counts the conquest a second enslavement, Nudell notes, "but it is worth asking what had actually changed"; early Persian rule in Ionia, on his reading, was no more intrusive than Lydian rule had been, the cities keeping their governments while the silver went east instead of to Sardis.^[3]

The one great rupture, the revolt of 499–494, ended with a reconstruction whose instruments proved more durable than the empire's own rule on the coast (see the Ionian Revolt). Institutionally, the settlement of the satrap Artaphernes in 493 had three parts. He "brought the Ionian leaders to Sardis to compel them to stop fighting among themselves", in Nudell's summary, "setting a precedent for Persian arbitration between conflicting parties"; he then surveyed the land and "regularized the tribute payments at a level no higher than it was before".^[16] Because the assessment was pegged to the agricultural output of each polis, it was, in Nudell’s own judgement and against Georges’s picture of a vindictive Artaphernes, "the contrary of vindictive".^[16] A tradition outside Herodotus adds an actual remission: Darius "empowered Mardonius to relieve half of the assessed tribute".^[16] And the constitutional sequel, if Herodotus's report is taken at face value (its reach is doubted, for tyrants demonstrably persisted in several cities; the staging of that doubt is at the Ionian Revolt), astonished even the Greek historian:

he did a thing which I here set down for the wonder of those Greeks who will not believe Otanes to have declared his opinion among the Seven that democracy was best for Persia: Mardonius deposed all the Ionian despots and set up democracies in their cities.

Herodotus 6.43, trans. Godley^[17]

The durability is the institutional point. Dusinberre observes that Artaphernes's measures "stayed in effect through the entire fifth century and may also have been the basis for the tribute exacted by the Athenians from those Ionian city-states that joined the Delian League".^[18] On that reading the Athenian empire taxed Ionia on a Persian land-survey: on Dusinberre’s reading a demonstration that Achaemenid provincial administration on the coast was durable statecraft rather than improvised extraction.

The Greeks of Asia were also a resource the empire used far from the Aegean. Darius's foundation charter for his palace at Susa names the nations of his workforce, and the Ionians and their Lydian neighbours appear three times:

The cedarwood was brought from a mountain called Lebanon … from Babylon, the Carians and Ionians brought it as far as Susa … the decoration, with which the walls were ornamented, was brought from Ionia … the masons who crafted the stone were Ionians and Sardians.

Darius I, DSf §§9–12, trans. Kuhrt^[19]

The charter is ideology, the king glorified, in Briant's words, "for bringing raw materials and specialized craftsmen—Ionians, Sardians, Egyptians, Carians, Bactrians, Elamites, Babylonians—from everywhere", but the practice behind it was real and older than Darius: "to accomplish his construction projects at Pasargadae, Cyrus himself called on craftsmen from Lydia and Ionia."^[20] The Persepolis Fortification tablets turn the boast into book-keeping. Yauna appear among the kurtaš, the dependent workers of the crown economy, in mixed gangs alongside a dozen other peoples; Briant cautions that the tablets show no separate "Ionian trade", and rations went to Ionian women as well as men.^[20][21] One man in the archive bears the ethnicon as his personal name: "Yauna", the Ionian, "certainly a Greek, who apparently held jobs in the administration", handling grain and serving in 499–498 on the staff of the great administrator Parnaka.^[21] A ration order of March 498, issued by Parnaka for "Babylonian scribes on parchment", ends with the docket: "Takmaziya wrote. He received the dumme from Yauna."^[22] The dumme is the authorising copy. Kuhrt's comment draws out the implication, that the name "may indicate that a Greek occupied a high position in Parnaka's service".^[23] While the Ionian cities were in arms against the King, an Ionian was passing documents in the heartland's central accounting house.

Greek labour in the empire had a darker register. The Greeks whom Alexander's army later found at Persepolis "had been carried away from their homes by previous kings of Persia", according to Diodorus, and Curtius describes them mutilated and put to forced work; Briant sets the deported captives beside the honoured specialists, among them "the sculptor Telephanes of Phocis" known to Pliny, as the two faces of a single system.^[20] Requisition and reward ran together, and an individual Greek in Persian service could experience both in one lifetime.

The most vivid single career is that of Democedes of Croton, the best-paid physician of his generation, who was captured in the entourage of the satrap Oroetes and brought to Susa as a forgotten slave. When Darius I wrenched his ankle and his Egyptian doctors made it worse, someone remembered the Greek, who was produced "dragging his chains and clad in rags".^[24] The treatment succeeded: "Democedes applied Greek remedies and used gentleness instead of the Egyptians' violence", and he "made the king able to sleep and in a little while recovered him of his hurt, though Darius had had no hope of regaining the use of his foot".^[24] The reward scene distils the ambiguity of Greek service at court: "Darius rewarded him with a gift of two pairs of golden fetters. 'Is it then your purpose,' Democedes asked, 'to double my pains for my making you whole?'"^[24] The gift was gold and the joke was slavery, and both were accurate. Democedes went on to cure Atossa of a growth on the breast, and used her gratitude to obtain the one thing his position withheld, a passage west, slipping his Persian escort on a reconnaissance voyage to Italy.^[24]

The pattern outlived the man. Greek skill commanded a price at the Achaemenid court, paid in favour, gold and rank rather than in liberty; Briant's roll of the famous Greeks in Persian employ, artists, athletes, poets, dancers, carries the pointed reminder that "some of them (the physicians Democedes and Ctesias) were captives".^[20] Ctesias of Cnidus, physician to Artaxerxes II for many years, turned his court service into the Persica; exiled Greek politicians made the same journey in the other direction, seeking at Susa the backing their own cities denied them. The court, like the building sites, treated Greeks as a talent to be acquired, and the Greeks of Asia, nearest and first conquered, supplied the largest share.

The great wars with mainland Greece put the Ionians on the Persian side of the line, and the record shows them mostly staying there. Ionian contingents sailed in the King's fleets against Greece, and the searching modern reading of Herodotus finds their service solid: "if we trust Herodotus, Xerxes only began to suspect the loyalty of the Ionians after suffering defeat at Salamis", Nudell observes, and even then "not only is there no record of Xerxes punishing any Ionian for disloyalty, but he also appointed two Samians orosangai", royal benefactors.^[25] Through the winter after Salamis the region "was still firmly Persian".^[25] The familiar apologia, that the Ionians fought their kinsmen only under compulsion, Nudell argues, "likely emerged from a need to rehabilitate them for having been on the wrong side of a war branded as a defense of Greek liberty".^[25]

The rupture came on their own coast, at the foot of the Panionion's headland, when the Ionians in the beached Persian force turned during the fighting at Mycale in the late summer of 479 (see the battle of Mycale). Its consequence for the subject condition was epochal: "for Ionia, Mycale, not Salamis, led to the 'liberation' that framed the rest of the fifth century."^[25]

Liberation carried the cities into the Athenian alliance, then into the Athenian empire, where the tribute continued under new management. Persia never renounced the coast. The satraps at Sardis and Dascylium went on dealing in Greek politics throughout the century, and the Peloponnesian War brought the King back as paymaster of the winning side, with the cities of Asia as his price. Xenophon, who marched through it with the Ten Thousand and campaigned across it with Agesilaus, shows Persian western Anatolia from inside: a working world of satraps, tribute, paradises and Greek mercenaries two generations after the "liberation" (see the retreat of the Ten Thousand). The formal reckoning came in 387/6, when the King's terms were read to the assembled Greek envoys:

King Artaxerxes thinks it just that the cities in Asia should belong to him, as well as Clazomenae and Cyprus among the islands, and that the other Greek cities, both small and great, should be left independent, except Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyros; and these should belong, as of old, to the Athenians. But whichever of the two parties does not accept this peace, upon them I will make war, in company with those who desire this arrangement, both by land and by sea, with ships and with money.

Xenophon, Hellenica 5.1.31, trans. Brownson^[26]

The King's Peace, as Nudell notes, "formally recognized a distinction between the Ionian islands, which were to be autonomous, and the Anatolian littoral, which belonged to the Persian king".^[27] The Greeks of Asia, taken by Cyrus's general around 545, were the Great King's again by treaty in 386, and remained so for the empire's last half-century, until Alexander crossed the Hellespont. Seen across the whole span, the subjection Herodotus dated to Harpagus's siege-mounds was the durable condition of Ionian life; the fifth-century "freedom" was the interlude.

Whether the Persian yoke lay heavy or light on the Greeks of Asia is the oldest question in their history, and the answers now on the table are sharply distributed. The narrative the Greeks themselves transmitted is one of slavery: Herodotus counts the enslavements of Ionia one by one, and the fifth-century tradition made the coast the first battlefield of freedom against despotism. Balcer's objection is chronological, that the liberty-against-slavery frame was "a propagandistic theme of the mid-fifth century B.C. and not of the sixth", read backwards onto a conquest that contemporaries experienced as a change of overlord.^[28]

Against the slavery narrative stands the evidence of what Persian rule actually touched. Balcer's survey of the conquered satrapy finds the cultural fabric undisturbed:

From the scattered peasant's farms and the nobles' estates to the inhabitants of the urban centers, native Lydians, East Greeks, and other Anatolians throughout Sparda all retained their former cultures. Their native languages continued without the imposition upon them of a foreign eastern language. Religious practises, temples, cults, and even the Panionion shrine continued as before. Local customs remained intact.

Balcer, The Persian Conquest of the Greeks (1995)^[29]

The economic case has moved the same way. The older scholarship inferred decline, reading the end of Ionia's archaic brilliance as the price of conquest; Balcer's numismatic reassessment concluded instead that "Ionia under Persian political control flourished economically and significantly much more than has heretofore been noted", with Miletus the one real casualty — though Balcer himself did not extend the verdict to culture, maintaining that the political climate inhibited and then stifled Ionian innovation — and pressed the comparison to its uncomfortable conclusion, that "the subsequent Athenian imperial policies imposed were more debilitating".^[30] Nudell's synthesis draws the threads together: "The imperial regime had changed, but the way that the Ionians interacted with this world had not", and when the Hellenic League "liberated" the coast in 479 "it was not at all certain that freedom was anything more than a political slogan designed to win support for a new form of hegemony".^[16]

None of this cancels the violence in the record. Miletus was stormed and emptied in 494, the islands were swept, boys were castrated for the court and populations deported to the Persian Gulf (see the Ionian Revolt); Persian rule was light until it was defied, and terrible then. But the balance of current scholarship holds that for most cities, most of the time, the condition of the Ionian subject was tribute, troops and a sponsored ruler, under a light cultural hand, in a prospering economy: an ordinary Near Eastern subjection rather than a uniquely crushing one. What would sharpen the verdict further is more archaeology, for the archaic and classical levels of most of the subject cities remain thinly dug, and the fiscal history still rests on a Greek historian's ledger rather than a Persian one.