Ionians

The one he loved was Favorit.

Oh, Favorit, thou hast Ionian lips.

There was a Greek painter named Euphorion who was surnamed the painter of the lips.

That Greek alone would have been worthy to paint thy mouth.

and flaming barbarians we do not know whether the old hellenes had any general word to denote the surrounding peoples palatians and divers other barbarous tribes whom they conquered or accepted as allies in any case by the time of the persian wars say five hundred b c all these tribes together considered themselves hellenized bore the name of hellenes and formed a kind of unity against hordes of barbaroi surrounding them on every side and threatening them especially from the east let us consider for a moment the dates in political history this self-realization of the greek tribes as hellenes against barbarians seems to have been first felt in the ionian settlements on the coast of asia minor where the sons of javan yawan i clashed as invaders against the native hittite and semite it was emphasized by a similar clash in the further colonies in pontus and in the west if we wish for a central moment as representing this self-realization of greece

I should be inclined to find it in the reign of Pisistratus, 560-527 BC, when that monarch made, as it were, the first sketch of an Athenian

empire based on alliances and took over to Athens the leadership of the Ionian race.

In literature, the decisive moment is clear.

It came when, in Mr. McHale's phrase, quote, Homer came to Hellas, unquote.

the ionians are defined by herodotus as those tribes and cities who were sprung from athens and kept the apaturia they recognized delos as their holy place and worshipped apollo patros as their ancestor the ionian homer has naturally brought us the ionian god and significantly enough though the tradition makes him an enemy of the greeks and the poets have to accept the tradition there is no tendency to crab or belittle him he is the most splendid and

awful of homer's olympians the case of pallas athene is even simpler though it leads to a somewhat surprising result What Apollo is to Ionia, that, and more, Athena is to Athens.

There are doubtless foreign elements in Athena, some Cretan and Ionian, some northern.

Although they called themselves Partu or Pythia, we sometimes called them different names.

The Greeks called them Medes because they'd conquered Croesus of the Ionian coast, and he was a Medean to the Greeks.

Everybody has different names, but you know Athens and you know Sparta.

Sparta doesn't have anything to look at today.

She was from Miletus.

It's one of the city-states that the Spartans...

It's on the Ionian coast, yeah.

That the Spartans picked on.

Can you explain what that is, what it means and what it means for Athenian history?

So as you said, the Persians invade and the Greeks manage to defeat them over the course of two invasions.

And when the Persians withdraw, and that is a year of 478 BCE, which is an important year because that's the beginning of our story, there is no guarantee that they're not going to come back for a third invasion.

So the coalition of Greeks who fought the Persians decide to continue the war and take it over to the Persian side over the other side of the Aegean Sea.

So they've defeated the Persians on the Greek mainland side.

But of course, the Greeks living in Asia Minor, that is the modern coast of Turkey, are still under Persian rule.

So the Greeks... decide to take the war to the Persians, liberate the Greeks of Ionian, and they need a military leadership to do that.

Now, for traditional military terms, Sparta was the leader during the present wars because it was the biggest military power, especially for land warfare.

But there were two very large conflicts during the 5th century BCE that put the Dorian and Ionian alliances to the test.

At the beginning of that century, the Greek cities of Ionia rebelled against the Persian Empire, which had subjected them to its authority, and the Athenians, who were themselves Ionians, sent soldiers to help them do it.

The result was that a large Persian army invaded Greece in 490 BCE, which was repelled almost solely by Athens, who were famous for their navy.

But the decisive Greek victory in this war was the land battle that the Athenians fought at Marathon.