REVOLT OF THE IONIANS

IONIAN REVOLT

On a spring night in 498 BCE, spiky tongues of orange and yellow flames darted high into the Anatolian sky. By morning, the ancient city of Sardis would be a smoking pile of ash and corpses. Even the Temple of Cybele, the revered mother goddess of Asia Minor, had been destroyed. The raging inferno was the work of the Ionians—the Greeks on the western shores of Asia Minor and its nearby islands. They had revolted against Darius I, the Great King of Persia, and had come to Sardis to strike a blow for their freedom. Instead, they set in motion a horrific disaster.

For more than four decades, Persian kings had lorded over the troublesome Ionians. Insular and argumentative, the Ionians even kept apart from other Greeks, zealously seeking to preserve the 12 cities of their “cultural league.” Chief among these was Miletus, at the mouth of the Maeander River on the southwestern coast of Asia Minor. The Milesians were renowned for their love of philosophy, science, and the arts, unlike their more warlike neighbors. Milesian traders, who were among the first Greeks to use writing and coinage, established dozens of colonies on the Black Sea and as far away as Egypt and Italy.

Of the major cities on the Ionian mainland, only Miletus had avoided being annexed by Croesus, the king of Lydia. But then Persian king Cyrus I defeated Croesus in the Battle of Thymbra in 547 BCE and captured Sardis, the Lydian capital, after a 14-day siege. During the campaign, Cyrus appealed to the Ionians for aid, but they remained loyal to Croesus. After Croesus’s defeat, the Ionians offered to transfer their allegiance to Cyrus on the condition that they could maintain the same relative autonomy they had enjoyed under Croesus. But Cyrus understandably declined, conquering the Ionian cities and installing subsidiary rulers, called tyrants, to control them. The new arrangement rankled the proud Ionians, though they remained reasonably docile for the next half century.

For more than four decades, Persian kings had lorded over the Ionians.

In 513 BCE, Darius, who had overthrown Cyrus’s successor nine years earlier, launched an ill-fated punitive campaign against the nomadic Scythians—Persia’s first incursion onto European soil. His target was land they controlled adjacent to the Black Sea. The Scythians, renowned for their horsemanship and skill with the bow and arrow, stymied the Persians by refusing to stand and fight. Instead, they adopted a scorched-earth strategy that denied the Persians much-needed supplies and remounts.

Frustrated by his inability to force the Scythians to stand and fight, Darius had halted his pursuit and begun retracing his path home to Persia. Waiting nervously at the