The Ionian Revolt (499–494 BCE)

Between 499 and 494 BCE the Greek cities of the empire's north-western seaboard rose against Darius I and were, in the end, beaten back into the empire. The revolt began with a botched joint expedition against the island of Naxos, spread from Byzantium in the north to Cyprus in the south, produced one spectacular act, the burning of the satrapal capital at Sardis, and was decided at sea off the little island of Lade, after which Miletus, the wealthiest and most prominent of the Ionian cities and the revolt's origin, was stormed, its men killed, its people deported to the mouth of the Tigris. From the imperial centre this was a serious but containable disturbance on one frontier of a realm that reached from the Indus to the Danube; it cost Darius one son-in-law and an army in a Carian ambush, and five campaigning seasons, but never threatened the empire's existence. The trouble is that we see it almost entirely through Herodotus, a Greek of Halicarnassus writing around the 440s, two generations after the events, who made the revolt the hinge of his whole history: the provincial rising that dragged Athens into the quarrel and so set in motion the great wars between Greeks and Persians. To read the revolt from the Persian side is first of all to read Herodotus against his own design.

The sources: a Greek near-monopoly

There is no Persian narrative of the Ionian Revolt, and there was never likely to be one. The royal inscriptions are not narrative texts; they proclaim the order the king upholds, not the campaigns of a given year, and Darius's monument at Behistun falls silent well before 499. What survives is Herodotus, and after him only fragments and echoes: a few lines of Diodorus (drawing on the fourth-century Ephorus), Plutarch's hostile essay On the Malice of Herodotus, a single administrative tablet from Persepolis, and a late and dubious temple chronicle from Lindos. Briant states the position flatly: to answer the historical questions "historians ceaselessly analyze Herodotus, because, except for a few brief allusions elsewhere ... and despite Plutarch's attacks on him ... he represents our only source of information."^[1] Kuhrt's assessment is the same: "the picture of events remains one-sided given our heavy reliance on Herodotus, who focusses strongly on the parts played by Histiaeus and Aristagoras of Miletus."^[2]

That one source has a purpose, and it is not neutral. For Herodotus the revolt is the overture to the Persian Wars, the moment the westward pressure of the empire and the liberty of the Greeks first collided head-on. He did not admire the rebels. As Briant puts it, "in his mind it is clear that the Ionians, for whom he did not harbor the least sympathy, played a despicable role: their revolt brought on devastation."^[1] Aristagoras of Miletus, who lit the fire, is drawn as a reckless schemer who fled when things went wrong, a "poor-spirited creature"; his father-in-law Histiaeus as a self-serving intriguer whose role may be, in part, a novelistic invention of an anti-Histiaeus tradition. Whatever else the entry does, it cannot forget that its narrator is telling a Greek story about the origins of a Greek war.

The empire on the Aegean edge before 499

The Greek cities of western Asia Minor had been imperial subjects since Cyrus took Lydia and Harpagus reduced the coast a generation earlier; the Companion's survey notes that Herodotus already reckoned Ionia "enslaved" twice over before Darius, once by the Lydians and once by the Persians.^[3] Persia governed them as it governed most conquered lands, lightly and through local men. It did not garrison every town or dictate every constitution. Instead it backed individual aristocrats, the "tyrants" of the Greek sources, whose personal loyalty guaranteed the tribute and the muster, and who in return leaned on Persian power to hold their cities. The relationship was reciprocal and unstable: a tyrant kept his place by Persian favour, and the Persians kept the coast quiet through him. Herodotus makes the link the pivot of the whole affair, and here Briant judges him right: "From the time that the Achaemenids took power, the expulsion of the tyrants was a prerequisite for rebellion ... it is difficult not to agree with Herodotus."^[4]

Darius had lately extended imperial power across the straits. His campaign beyond the Danube against the Scythians around 513, though inconclusive, was followed by the reduction of Thrace and the submission of Macedon; the Aegean was becoming a Persian lake. Older scholarship liked to trace the revolt to that Scythian setback, arguing that a dented Persian prestige emboldened the cities. Kuhrt rejects the causal chain: "the time-lag between the two events was over ten years and some regional city-tyrants reaped substantial rewards for their support in the immediate aftermath of the expedition. So there can certainly be no direct causal link."^[5]

Naxos, and the spark

The rising grew out of an imperial venture that failed. Around 500 certain wealthy men, expelled from Naxos by a popular faction, came as exiles to Miletus and to its acting tyrant Aristagoras, deputy for his father-in-law Histiaeus, whom Darius kept at Susa as an honoured, watched adviser. Aristagoras saw an opening: restore the exiles, and Naxos and the Cyclades might fall to him, and to the king. He put it to Artaphernes, Darius's brother and satrap at Sardis, in frankly imperial terms:

"Moreover, you will win for the king Naxos itself and those islands that depend on it: Paros, Andros and the rest of the so-called Cyclades. If you start out from there, you will be able to attack Euboea, which is a big, rich island ... A hundred ships will be enough to achieve all this." (Herodotus 5.31, trans. Kuhrt 2007)^[6]

Darius consented; Artaphernes offered two hundred ships and set a Persian, Megabates, over the fleet. The expedition was, as Briant stresses, "a Persian expedition, ordered by the king, with a real Achaemenid objective."^[1] It miscarried. Megabates and Aristagoras quarrelled, the Naxians were warned in time, and after a four-month siege the money ran out and the force withdrew, "having acquitted themselves very poorly." Aristagoras, his promise to Artaphernes unkept, his position at Miletus now precarious and his purse empty, chose revolt over ruin. He seized the tyrants of the returning fleet at their base, renounced his own tyranny, proclaimed isonomia, equal law, and set the coast alight. Herodotus adds the celebrated stratagem of a secret message from Histiaeus at Susa, tattooed on a slave's shaved scalp; the historicity of Histiaeus's whole role is much doubted, and Briant calls the personal-motive explanation "highly suspect."^[1]

Why the cities rose

The deeper causes are contested, and the Persian-side reading has to clear away two older theories. The first is economic: that Persian rule, or a Persian tilt toward the Phoenicians in trade, had strangled the Ionian cities into revolt. The evidence does not bear it. Herodotus's much-quoted line that Miletus was then "at the peak of her prosperity and the glory of Ionia" cuts against a crisis, and Briant shows the supposed Phoenician-favouring rests on a passage Herodotus himself disbelieves: "this interpretation is not based on any independent sources ... The king never chose one or the other as a privileged commercial partner."^[7] Archaeology, the Companion notes, has "not verified an economic decline in Ionia, but rather the opposite."^[3]

The second is national: that the Greeks rose in a war of liberty against an alien despotism. This too is a retrojection. The slogan of "freeing Ionia" appears, but the mobilising language of a "hereditary enemy" belongs to the fourth century, to polemicists like Isocrates, not to 499. Briant is emphatic: "it is not possible to explain the genesis of the Ionian revolt in terms of a (nonexistent) 'national consciousness' or in terms of a 'hereditary enemy' ... two concepts that were forged later in Greece."^[8] The Companion agrees that the freedom-struggle frame "first developed in the course of the fifth century BCE and w[as] then applied to earlier events."^[3]

What is left is politics, and it is local. The Naxos affair shows a Greek world in which popular factions were turning out the aristocratic families the Persians had backed; the tyrants, caught between dependence on Persia and pressure from their own citizens, were the weak point of the whole arrangement. Aristagoras understood that to make a rebellion he had to widen its base, and so gave the cities their "equal law" and their own generals, the more surely to lead them. There is a fiscal edge as well. Briant, reading the settlement backward, suspects that the levying of tribute "had posed or, more precisely, revealed or even exacerbated internal social tensions," so that supporting the revolt "promoted a hope for an end to this external pressure and the consequent internal sociopolitical pressure."^[9] The revolt, in short, was less a nation rising against a conqueror than a cluster of divided cities in which one faction's bid for power happened to require breaking with the king. The timing confirms it: had the aim simply been to be rid of Persia, the great crisis of Darius's own accession in 522–520 would have been the moment, and the cities stayed quiet.^[3]

The burning of Sardis

The one act everyone remembered came early. Aristagoras got little abroad: Sparta's king Cleomenes sent him away once he learned Susa lay three months' march inland. His pitch there is preserved, and it is worth hearing, because it shows the rebels themselves reaching for the language of Greek liberty even as they angled for Spartan spears and Persian gold:

"the fact that the children of the Ionians should be slave not free is a matter of reproach and source of grief to us ... Now, in the name of the Greek gods, rescue the Ionians ... It is easy for you to succeed in this, because the foreigners are not brave ... They wear trousers when they go into battle and peaked caps on their heads; so it is easy to beat them." (Herodotus 5.49, trans. Kuhrt 2007)^[10]

Athens, newly at odds with Persia over the exiled tyrant Hippias, sent twenty ships; Eretria added five. With these and the Ionians, a force marched inland from Ephesus and took Sardis, all but the citadel, which Artaphernes held. What followed was, in Herodotus's telling, an accident that changed the shape of the age:

"the houses in Sardis were mostly built of reeds, and even those of them which were of brick had their roofs thatched with reeds: of these houses one was set on fire by a soldier, and forthwith the fire going on from house to house began to spread over the whole town." (Herodotus 5.101, trans. Macaulay)^[11]

The temple of the local goddess Kybebe burned with the city, and the Persians, Herodotus notes, "used [this] as their excuse later when they in their turn burned the temples of the Greeks."^[12] The raiders, caught in the open and then overtaken, were beaten near Ephesus; the Athenians sailed home and, though Aristagoras kept appealing, would not return. The burning had achieved nothing strategically. Its consequences were symbolic, and they were reciprocal: a satrapal capital and a sanctuary reduced to ash gave the empire both a grievance and a template for the reprisals to come.

The reconquest, city by city

From the Persian side the years 498 to 493 are a methodical, unglamorous reconquest on several fronts at once, and it is here that the empire's real advantages, manpower, money, siegecraft, cavalry and command of the sea-lanes, told. Hyland's verdict is that the success was neither quick nor foreordained: "the reconquest had been long and difficult, and its success was hardly inevitable. In the end, the Persians won because they had mastered naval movement and logistics, and used these systemic strengths to support the decisive siege operations."^[13]

Cyprus, which had joined under Onesilus of Salamis, was retaken after a single land battle in 497, though the rebels won at sea; the Persians, expert in siegecraft since Assyrian times, dug their way into the last holdout, Soli, in the fifth month. On the mainland, three Persian generals, each married to a daughter of Darius, drove the offensive: Daurises rolled up the Hellespontine cities, "each in one day," before turning south. There the war bit back. The Carians fought hard, and in a night ambush on the road to Pedasus they destroyed a Persian army and killed three of its generals, Daurises among them. It was the empire's worst single reverse of the war, costing Darius, as Hyland notes, "a son-in-law and an entire army" and delaying the advance on Miletus.^[14] The setback was made good; superiority in numbers, and above all in cavalry, was decisive on land, and the coastal cities fell one by one. Aristagoras, seeing no way to beat the king, abandoned Ionia for a Thracian venture and died fighting the locals. Histiaeus, released from Susa on the pretext of ending the revolt, was refused re-entry to a Miletus that had "had a taste of liberty," turned pirate in the straits, was captured by Harpagus, and was executed at Sardis. That execution, and Darius's reaction to it, is the sharpest surviving glimpse of the Persian view of a rebel client (below).

Lade and the fall of Miletus

The war was decided at sea in 494, when the Persians concentrated everything on Miletus. They had rebuilt a fleet, Herodotus says six hundred ships, from Phoenician, Cypriot, Cilician and Egyptian contingents; the Ionians gathered 353 triremes at the islet of Lade off the city. Before the battle the Persian commanders tried the cheaper weapon first, sending the exiled tyrants in their train to work on their former subjects with a promise and a threat. The threat is one of the plainest statements of imperial terror in Herodotus, and it was carried out to the letter after Lade:

"If they don't accept this ... threaten them with what will certainly happen: when defeated, they will be sold into slavery, their boys we shall castrate, their girls will be taken to Bactria, and we shall hand their land over to others." (Herodotus 6.9, trans. Kuhrt 2007)^[15]

The Ionian coalition, never united, cracked under it. At Lade the Samians, whose old tyrant Aeaces the Persians had suborned, sailed off at the outset; others followed; only the Chians and a few more fought their stations. The battle lost, Miletus was besieged by land and sea, its walls undermined, and in the sixth year after Aristagoras began the revolt it fell. The reprisal matched the threat. Herodotus reports the men killed, the women and children enslaved, the sanctuary of Apollo at Didyma plundered and burned; the survivors deported to Susa and settled by Darius "on the so-called Red Sea," at the mouth of the Tigris; the Milesian plain given over, its hinterland handed to loyal Carians of Pedasa. Over the next season the offshore islands, Chios, Lesbos, Tenedos, were "netted," the soldiers linking hands across each island to hunt the people down; the best boys were castrated for the court, the fairest girls sent to the king, the cities burned. It was, Herodotus concludes, the third enslavement of Ionia. The severity was real and is not to be softened; it was also, in the terms of ancient empire, the standard price of a stormed rebel city, the fate Persia had already dealt Barca and would have recognised in the Assyrian record.^[16] The archaeology, it should be said, has not confirmed a destruction level at Didyma, a caution against taking every stroke of Herodotus's account as literal.^[17]

The settlement of Artaphernes

What the empire did next is, for the Persian-side historian, the most revealing part of the whole affair, and it is not vengeance but reconstruction. Once the fighting stopped, Artaphernes summoned envoys from the cities and imposed a settlement whose terms Herodotus records with visible surprise that they were, in his own word, "conducive to peace":

"Artaphrenes the governor of Sardis ... compelled the Ionians to make agreements among themselves, so that they might give satisfaction for wrongs and not plunder one another's land ... he measured their territories by parasangs ... and appointed a certain amount of tribute for each people, which continues still unaltered from that time." (Herodotus 6.42, trans. Macaulay)^[18]

Three measures, and each repays a Persian reading. The forced arbitration bound the cities to submit their quarrels to Persian adjudication rather than fight; Briant and Hyland both read it less as charity than as control dressed as benefaction, and, in Hyland's sharp formulation, as ideology: by making inter-city violence the problem, Artaphernes "could represent the revolt's worst excesses as inter-Ionian, rather than anti-Persian violence," and so undercut "any possible nostalgia for unified resistance to Persia."^[19] The re-survey of territory in parasangs served the same double end, a benefaction (confirmed boundaries, fewer disputes) that was also "a precursor to more efficient exploitation through tribute collection."^[19]

The decisive point, and the one that most corrects the popular picture of a crushed and gouged province, is the tribute. It was reassessed but, as Herodotus expressly says and modern scholars accept, not raised. Briant: "reorganization did not lead to an increase in the amount of tribute. Herodotus's remark ... seems perfectly credible, since it is impossible to see how Artaphernes could have dreamed of increasing the fiscal pressure on cities that had just been bled dry by their long rebellion."^[20] The Companion concurs: Artaphernes "came to the result that there was no need for raising the tributes following the Ionian Revolt."^[3] What changed was the distribution, made proportional to each city's surveyed land, with the confiscations and grants (Miletus's hinterland to loyal Pedasa) recorded in the satrapal archive at Sardis, so that loyalty was rewarded and rebellion charged in land, exactly as the Assyrians had done after their own revolts.^[16] Finally, and most puzzlingly, Herodotus says that in 492 Mardonius "threw down all the tyrants of the Ionians" and set up democracies. The report is doubted, since tyrants demonstrably persisted; the best reading is pragmatic, not ideological. The Persians had no principled preference for any constitution, and having just learned how brittle their tyrants were, they simply stopped propping up unpopular ones case by case, recognising whatever regime could keep a city quiet and paying. As Briant puts it, perhaps Herodotus meant "quite simply that, at the end of the revolt, the Persians had not systematically reimposed the tyrants ... but this was quite enough in the eyes of a fifth-century Greek."^[21]

The Persian view: a frontier restored, not an empire shaken

Set in its own frame, the revolt looks very different from the way Herodotus casts it. From Susa it was a rebellion on one maritime edge of an empire that spanned a continent, and the imperial response, punish the ringleaders, deport and redistribute at the storm-centre, reward the loyal, rebuild the tribute base, resume the advance, is the classic repertoire of Near-Eastern empire. Hyland reads the whole aftermath through the Assyrian precedents and finds the Ionian settlement "all too familiar to Assyrian rulers."^[16] The ideology is the empire's own, not Herodotus's: the king as the guarantor of an order in which subjects who "smite one another" are set right and kept each in his place. Darius had carved the principle at Susa:

"the lands were in turmoil, one smiting the other. That which I have done ... that the one no longer smites the other, each one is in his place. My law, that they fear, so that the stronger does not smite nor harm the weak." (Darius I, Susa, DSe §4, trans. after Hyland 2025)^[22]

Within that framework the reprisals were not gratuitous but the enforcement of justified vengeance on those who had followed the Lie, a duty Darius proclaims from Behistun to his tomb, where he insists on its proportion: "He who does harm, him I punish according to the damage."^[23] The most humane glimpse of the Persian mind comes, unexpectedly, at the execution of the arch-rebel Histiaeus. Artaphernes and Harpagus, fearing he might yet talk his way back into royal favour, put him to death and sent only his embalmed head to Susa. Darius was not pleased:

"Dareios having been informed of this, found fault with those who had done so, because they had not brought him up to his presence alive; and he bade wash the head of Histiaios and bestow upon it proper care, and then bury it, as that of one who had been greatly a benefactor both of the king himself and of the Persians." (Herodotus 6.30, trans. Macaulay)^[24]

A rebel, once loyal, given a dignified burial by the king he had betrayed: the passage shows the empire's relationship to its clients as one of service and reward, injury and punishment, within which even a traitor's earlier benefaction still counted. It is a world away from Herodotus's melodrama of freedom and slavery.

"The beginning of evils": the revolt as prologue

All of this Herodotus subordinated to a larger design. He made the sending of the Athenian and Eretrian squadron the fatal act that entangled the mainland Greeks with the king, and he marked it with the most freighted phrase in his account:

"These ships proved to be the beginning of evils for the Hellenes and the Barbarians." (Herodotus 5.97, trans. Macaulay)^[25]

The line is a signpost, and it points forward, not back: to Darius's punitive expedition against Athens and Eretria that ended at Marathon in 490, and beyond that to Xerxes' invasion. Whether it is good history is another matter. That Athenian involvement at Sardis gave Darius a specific grievance is likely enough, and Hyland treats the campaign of 490 as in part the closing of the Ionian account, the punishment of the revolt's overseas accomplices.^[13] But the notion that the burning of Sardis set the empire on an inexorable march toward the conquest of Greece is Herodotus's architecture, not a Persian war-plan. Briant insists the revolt's true weight "is out of proportion to Darius's greater concerns in an Empire that thereafter extended from Macedonia to the Indus," and that between 500 and 493 the king was busy with much else on which Ionia had no bearing.^[26] The Companion similarly reads the westward campaigns of the 490s as the restoration of control over Thrace and Macedon rather than the opening of a bid to swallow Greece, a bid Herodotus took for granted as Darius's "master plan."^[3] The revolt made Athens a marked city and gave the empire a reason to reach across the sea; it did not, by itself, make the Persian Wars inevitable. That inevitability is a Greek retrospect, written after Salamis, read back into a Milesian tyrant's failed gamble on Naxos.