Ionian Revolt

The point is rather obscured by the persistence of downright medieval conditions at Sparta, which had yet to be described, and, although recent, seemed to be on par with the remoter days of the tyranny at Athens.

but everything is shaping up for the dramatic act which the book closes, the Ionian Revolt, which brought the Great War to Greece, henceforth the one dominant theme of the history.

The new keynote is struck by the comment with which Herodotus closes the account of the Athenian Revolution.

And it is plain enough, not from this instance only, but from many everywhere, that freedom is an excellent thing, since even the Athenians, who, while they continued under the rule of tyrants, were not a whit more valiant than any of their neighbors, no sooner shook off the yoke than they became decidedly the first of all.

Okay.

So they're all sort of, there's this thing called the Ionian revolt and that ends up sort of Athens decides they're in.

Athens like, yeah, we're going to defend you.

You're a Greek city state.

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For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Histories, Volume 2 by Herodotus of Halicarnassus Translated by E.D. Godley Volume 2, Part 14 This was the end of Aristagoras, after he had brought about the Ionian revolt.

Histiaeus, the tyrant of Miletus, arrived in Sardis after he was let go by Darius.

When he came there from Susa, Artaphrenes, the governor of Sardis, asked him for what reason he supposed the Ionians had rebelled.

The combined Greek population of coastal Asia Minor in 500 BC is now generally estimated at somewhere over a million.

Within five years of our snapshot date, almost all of these cities would rise against Persian rule in what historians call the Ionian Revolt.

The numbers they fielded, tens of thousands of hoplites and oarsmen drawn from a relatively narrow coastal strip, back up the higher estimates.

Sicily and southern Italy, the region the Romans would later call Magna Graecia, had been receiving waves of Greek colonists for two and a half centuries by this point.