Ionian Revolt

Between 499 and 493 BC, the Greek cities along the western coast of Asia Minor, joined by Carians, Cypriots and others, rose against the Achaemenid Empire. The rising failed, but because Athens and Eretria had sent ships to help, it set Persia on the road to invading mainland Greece, and it is usually counted as the opening phase of the Greco-Persian Wars. Almost everything known about it comes from Herodotus, whose figures and dates modern scholars treat with some caution.

The twelve Ionian cities, among them Miletus, Ephesus, Samos and Chios, had fallen first to Lydia and then, around 540 BC, to Cyrus the Great. Persia governed them through local tyrants backed by the satrap at Sardis. These rulers depended on Persian support rather than on their fellow citizens, and resentment of them ran deep.

At Miletus, power was held by Aristagoras, deputising for his uncle Histiaeus, whom Darius the Great kept at his court in Susa. In 499 BC Aristagoras persuaded the satrap Artaphernes to back an attack on the island of Naxos. The expedition quarrelled internally, besieged Naxos for four months and went home empty-handed. Facing ruin and likely dismissal, Aristagoras gave up his tyranny, proclaimed a democracy in Miletus and called on Ionia to revolt. Tyrants were expelled across the region.

Sparta refused to help, but Athens sent twenty triremes and Eretria five. In 498 BC the Greeks marched inland and took the lower town of Sardis, which caught fire and burned, although the Persian garrison held the citadel. On the way back the Greeks were overtaken and badly beaten near Ephesus, and the Athenians went home. Herodotus tells the story that Darius ordered a servant to remind him of the Athenians three times a day.

The revolt nonetheless spread to Byzantium and the Hellespont, to Caria and to most of Cyprus.

From 497 BC Persian armies moved to retake the outlying areas. In Cyprus the rebels were crushed in a land battle near Salamis, even though the Ionian fleet won at sea. Persian commanders recovered cities on the Hellespont, then turned south against the Carians, defeating them on the Marsyas river and at Labraunda, before an ambush at Pedasus destroyed a Persian army and its generals. A stalemate followed for about two years. Aristagoras left for Thrace, where he was killed; Histiaeus, released by Darius, failed to regain Miletus and turned to raiding from Byzantium.

In 494 BC the Persians gathered their army and a fleet drawn from Phoenicia, Cyprus, Egypt and Cilicia and went straight for Miletus. The Greeks assembled 353 triremes, according to Herodotus, off the island of Lade. When battle began, most of the Samian ships sailed away under a secret deal with Persia, the Lesbians followed, and the line collapsed despite hard fighting by the Chians. Miletus was then taken by siege. Herodotus says most of its men were killed and its women and children enslaved; archaeology shows widespread destruction. Surviving captives were resettled near the mouth of the Tigris.

In 493 BC Persian forces swept the islands of Chios, Lesbos and Tenedos and the remaining coastal cities. Histiaeus was captured and executed by Artaphernes. Artaphernes then imposed a settlement that required disputes between cities to go to arbitration and reassessed tribute according to each city's land, and it was remembered as fair. In 492 BC Mardonius replaced the Ionian tyrannies with democracies.

Darius was now determined to punish Athens and Eretria. Mardonius's expedition of 492 BC reached Thrace and Macedon but was halted by a naval disaster; in 490 BC a second force destroyed Eretria before being defeated by the Athenians at the Battle of Marathon.

Our 500 BCE map shows the Achaemenid Empire at about the time of the revolt, stretching to the Aegean coast and beyond, with the cities of Greece lying across the sea to the west.