Evans, J. a. S._herodotus and the Ionian Revolt_Historia, 25, 1_1976!31!37

Herodotus and the Ionian RevoltAuthor(s): J. A. S. EvansSource: Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, Bd. 25, H. 1 (1st Qtr., 1976), pp. 31-37Published by: Franz Steiner VerlagStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4435483 .

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HERODOTUS AND THE IONIAN REVOLT

It has been remarked many times that Herodotus gives his readers a jaundiced view of the Ionian Revolt. One could quote a good number of verdicts against him, from Plutarch onwards. "Herodotus, after the event," wrote How and Wells,1 "endorsed the shallow view that the revolt was a blunder, if not a crime." "The imperfect character," wrote Grundy,2 "of the information which Hero- dotus furnishes with regard to the story of the great Revolt is so evident that the historian himself must have been conscious of it," and a little later in his text, Grundy3 lists the three main defects of the Herodotean account as omissions, lack of chronological data and anti-Ionian bias. This antipathy towards the Ionians, he notes, is less apparent in other parts of the Histories which do not deal with the Revolt, but in his account of the Revolt itself, he has "hardly a good word to say of them in any department of life."4 A. R. Burn's judgment is a pithy "grudging and less than f air,"5 and Russell Meiggs speaks of a "strong prejudice against the lonians, which is elsewhere made explicit" that pervades Herodotus' account.6 In the several articles which have appeared on the Revolt in the last decade or so,' it is assumed that Herodotus has misunderstood or deliberately twisted the information he found; one of these, by Mabel Lang, attempts to document the historian's prejudices against Histiaeus and Aristagoras in parti- cular, and against the Revolt in general.

However, the reasons given for Herodotus' bias differ widely. A great number of scholars have centred their suspicions on Herodotus' sources. Grundy8 suspected traditions current in the historian's city of origin, Halikar- nassos, and other Dorian cities in Asia Minor, which played no great part, if any, in the Revolt. "Those who have failed to fight the fight of liberty are not apt to be well-disposed to those who have fought and failed. . ." Burn9 notes not merely the neutrality of Halikarnassos, but also the dubious role of Samos, which

IW. W. How and J. Wells, A Commentary on Herodotus (Oxford, 1912) II, 66 ad 6.3. 2 G. B. Grundy, The Great Persian War and its Preliminaries (London, 1901) 79. 3op. cit. 80. 4 op. cit. 560-61. SA. R. Burn, Persia and the Greeks, The Defence of the West 546-478 B. C. (London, 1962) 197. 6 Russell Meiggs, The Athenian Empire (Oxford, 1972) 24. 'Cf. A. Blamire, "Herodotus and Histiaeus", CQ 9, n.s. (1959) 142-54; J. A. S. Evans,

"Histiaeus and Aristagoras: Notes on the Ionian Revolt", AJP, 84 (1963) 113-128; Mabel Lang, "Herodotus and the Ionian Revolt", Historia, 17 (1968) 24-36; A. French, "Topical Influences on Herodotus' Narrative", Mnemosyne 25 (ser. 4) 1972, 9-27; G. A. R. Chapman, "Herodotus and Histiaeus' R6le in the Ionian Revolt", Historia, 22 (1972) 546-68.

8 op. cit. 561. op. cit. 197.

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32 J. A.S. EVANS

betrayed the revolt in the end. Herodotus knew Samos well, for he lived there a short period, and modern scholars are generally suspicious that Samian sources vilified the Revolt. Herodotus' "primary motive," wrote How and Wells, "for insisting on the insubordination and effeminacy of the Ionians is to whitewash the Samians."-I The historian's treatment seems too kind, for it does appear that, if the Samian contingent had remained loyal at the battle of Lade, the Ionians could have won, and even if they had merely held their own and denied the Persians command of the sea, the fall of Miletus was not a foregone conclusion. But in fact, Herodotus does treat the failure of the Revolt as a foregone conclusion. When king Darius heard that the lonians had risen, he paid no attention to them, but concentrated his wrath on the Athenians instead."' The Revolt was not worthy of the king's attention. The Samian admirals were converted to the view that the Revolt was hopeless just before the battle of Lade, and the argument goes that Samos passed this view on to Herodotus.

Immerwahr"2 has pointed out an additional reason which may help account for Herodotus' kind treatment of Samos. The Samians usually acted with independence. Before the battle of Mycale, they were the first to come over to the Hellenic cause, and during the battle, they took the initiative in opposing the Persians. In the Ionian Revolt, they were the first to desert the Ionian ranks. Their independence may have caused Herodotus "to excuse their behaviour at Lade somewhat." Yet, if Herodotus excuses the Samians, it is more by what he does not say than by what he does. He does not minimize their role at Lade. He merely fails to condemn it, and if he himself, on other grounds, believed that the Ionian Revolt was a foolish, ill-starred venture, he might well find it difficult to blame the Samians for acting on a presumption he himself shared. We should note too that there was a patriot group in Samos which disapproved of the betrayal of the Samian commanders at Lade, and the Samian sources for the Revolt may have been mixed in their views.

It is true, however, that there is an implicit contrast between the Samian behaviour at Lade and at what Herodotus refers to in his last book as the second Ionian Revolt, when, on Samian initiative, the Ionians turned on the Persians at the battle of Mycale. 3 The two revolts frame the story of the Persian offensive against Greece. But we should be cautious before we place special emphasis on the contrasting roles of the Samians in both revolts. Herodotus had already remarked on the mutability of human fortune,14 and his cross-reference to the lonian Revolt at the conclusion of his account of Mycale may be intended only as a reflection along the same line.

Recently Cawkwell has suggested that the Herodotean bias betrays an Athenian, isolationist view, and pointed to Alkmnaeonid influence as the sour-

10 op. cit., ad 6.13. " Hdt. 5. 105. 12 Henry R. Immerwahr, "The Samian Stories of Herodotus", CJ 52 (1957) 312-22, esp. pp.

320-1. 13 Hdt. 9. 104. 4 Hdt. 1. 5. 4.



Herodotus and the Ionian Revolt 33

ce.'5 Everyone who has studied Greek history knows that the Alkmaeonids were great contaminators of historical tradition; indeed, one wonders how they did it all. In this case, the argument goes that the Alkmaeonids were pro-Persian in the first decade of the fifth century, and thus had an interest in vilifying the Revolt. Now it is true that in this period, the Alkmaeonids were sufficiently pro-Persian to be suspected of treason at the battle of Marathon. It is equally true that Herodotus attributed disdain for the lonians to Cleisthenes,'6 and thought this was his ruling motive for reforming the Athenian tribes: a remark which may be more understandable if he knew that the Alkmaeonids had taken an anti-Ionian line about this time. We can take it as very probable that the Alkmaeonids did support Athens' withdrawal of assistance to the Revolt, and there is a modern tendency, which I cannot share, to treat Herodotus as a "house historian" of the Alkmaeonids.'7 Yet, even if there were some truth to this, would the Alkmaeonids still have any interest in propagating their isolationist view a couple of generations after the Revolt was over, when Herodotus was putting together his account? Athens was then in her imperial heyday, and I cannot believe there was any political gain for the Alkmaeonids in the moral of Herodotus' story: that Athenian interference in the quarrel between Ionians and Persians was foolish and the beginning of calamity.'8

In this discussion of Herodotus' sources for the Ionian Revolt, little attention has been given to the old view of Grote and Busolt'9 that Herodotus used Hecataeus of Miletus and hence may have derived his bias partly from him. Herodotus brings Hecataeus twice on stage as a "wise counselor" figure. He advised against the uprising before it took place, and as Grote pointed out, his advice does not betray wisdom after the event, for Hecataeus seemed to assume erroneously that the revolt would not spread beyond Miletus. Add to this the information preserved in Diodorus20 that Hecataeus was sent as an envoy to Artaphrenes whom he persuaded to treat the vanquished lonians generously, and it would appear that, while Hecataeus was in the inner councils of the rebels, he was not compromised with the Persians. The fact that he disapproved of the Revolt may have been widely known. A final point: when the king of Sparta,

15 G. L. Cawkwell, Auckland Classical Essays Presented to E. M. Blaiklock, ed. B. F. Harris (Auckland, N. Z./Oxford, 1970) p. 55, note 12. 16 Hdt. 5. 69.

17 cf. Daniel Gillis, "Marathon and the Alkmaeonids", GRBS 18 (1969) 133-145. Is R. W. Macan, Herodotus, the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Books, I (London, 1895) 247, remarks

that Athens blundered not in sending help to the lonians, but in later withdrawing it, and states that Herodotus' comment on the gullibility of the Athenians at 5.97 was "certainly not Athenian".

9 G. Grote, History of Greece (Everyman edition, London/New York) V, 21, 29; G. Busolt, Gniechische Geschichte II2 (Gotha, 1895) 452. G. Nenci, "Le fonti di Erodoto sull' insurrezione ionica" RAL (ser. 8) 5 (1950) 106-8, doubts Herodotus' use of Hecataeus on the grounds that there is no reference to the Revolt in the surviving fragments of Hecataeus. However, Nenci does argue that Herodotus' general condemnation of the Revolt as the beginning of evils betrays an Ionian, particularly a Milesian viewpoint, for the Revolt marked the end of Ionian, and especially Milesian, prosperity. 20 10. 25. 4.

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34 J. A. S. EVANS

Cleomenes, declined Aristagoras' invitation to support the rebels, what turned him against the venture was his realization of how vast the Persian Empire was. Herodotus approved of Cleomenes' shrewdness, which he contrasted with the gullibility of the Athenians.2' It was this same fact: the sheer might of Persia, which Hecataeus had tried to impress upon the lonians. If Hecataeus took the same pessimistic view of the revolt that Herodotus did, he may have been responsible, at least in part, for Herodotus' bias against the whole venture.

But sources cannot be the whole explanation, for Herodotus must have had access to a number of traditions and viewpoints about the Ionian Revolt, and yet he has chosen to give what Grundy22 called an "excessively fragmentary" account. The later fifth century had reasons of its own for denigrating the lonians. Macan remarked that the story of the Revolt looked like a justification of Athenian imperialism, and Gomme23 has observed that when Herodotus described the lonians as "by far the weakest of the Greek peoples and of little account" he was talking "the language of the fifth century," although observe that when Herodotus24 speaks of the lonians in the passage just quoted, he seems to include the Athenians among them. However the Athenians, he adds, did not like to be called lonians.

This dislike of the label "Ionian" is not apparent in something as early as Aeschylus' Persians, and as long as the Delian League was under the patronage of a pan-Ionian god, Apollo of Delos, it is hard to think that Athens made a great deal of her disdain for lonians. But as the fifth century wore on, there is a good deal of evidence that lonians were considered effete and unwarlike: fit for slavery and inferior to the free Dorians. This is a theme which Thucydides puts in the mouths of Athens' enemies, who count the Athenians as Ionians. Brasidas, Hermocrates and Gylippus25 all use it. The author of On Airs, Waters and Places argued that a fruitful, mild land could not breed courageous, vigorous men, and compared, for example, Europe with Asia where the lonians dwelt.26

Herodotus was aware of the theory that soft climates made soft men; indeed, he ends his Histories with a story of Cyrus which illustrates the theme.27 He also notes the splendid climate of Ionia.28 But he does not connect it directly with Ionian softness. To be sure, some moderns have supplied the connective for him, since not long after his remark on the Ionian climate, he notes the weakness of the Ionians.29 But Herodotus' very failure to seize this opportunity to connect the two is surely of some significance. Moreover, Herodotus does not deny the lonians'courage as warriors as the later fifth-century did: witness their brave resistance against Harpagus30 in the first book, their efforts both at Salamis

21 Hdt. 5. 97. 22 op. cit. 559. 23 Macan, op. cit. I, lxvii; A. W. Gomme, A Historical Commenta?y on Thucydides I (Oxford,

1959) 127. 24 1. 143. 25 Thuc. 5.9.1; 6.7.7; 7.5.4. 26 Hippocrates, Airs, Waters, Places, 12. 27 Hdt. 9. 122. 28 Cf. 1. 142. 29 Cf. Carl Roebuck, Ionian Trade and Colonization, (New York, 1959) 1-4. 3C Hdt. 1. 169.




(admittedly on the wrong side) and at Mycale.32 The anti-Ionian slurs cited above from Thucydides are to be found in one instance in Herodotus: in the mouths of the Scythians, enraged because the lonians saved Darius at the Danube crossing.33 But this is an anachronism for effect; the Scythians had reason to be angry, and Herodotus has lent them some fifth-century Dorian insults so that they could make their point to a fifth-century reader.

There is one famous instance before the battle of Lade where Ionian dislike of hard work seems apparent indeed.34 The lonians rebel against the basic training administered by the Phocaean admiral, Dionysius. Yet, I doubt if the main point of this story is Ionian softness. Anyone who trains at rowing too hard and too suddenly will get inflamed hands and blistered buttocks. Every spring, as the sailing season started, the Peiraeus must have been full of sailors with stiff muscles. It is Ionian lack of resolution and unity, and the irresponsibility of her leaders that Herodotus scores. One does not want to split hairs, but it appears that the Ionians in Herodotus were quite capable of courage and hard work when they put their minds to it. They suffered from no inherent inferiority.

Herodotus' estimate of the Ionians is not quite that of the later fifth century. It does not coincide with the Athenian justification for imperialism which Thucy- dides has Euphemos voice at Syracuse: that the lonians did not have the hardihood to revolt from the Medes and see their homes and belongings destroyed, but chose slavery instead,35 nor does it agree with the pejorative estimate put forward by Brasidas, Hermocrates and Gylippus. But neither does it coincide with the earlier fifth-century view found in Aeschylus' Persians, where "Ionian" may refer equally to Athenian, or Ionian under Persian rule, and there is no pejorative connotation attached to the word.36 Herodotus acknowledged contemporary Athenian disdain for the Ionians, and he ana- chronistically projected backwards into the sixth century Ionia's weakness in his own day. But he does not deny the lonians'courage, or willingness to fight for their freedom. Consequently, I find it hard to believe that Herodotus was influenced unduly by any fifth-century propaganda line, Athenian or Dorian, much less taken in by it.

There remains the possibility that Herodotus' prejudice was based on his estimate of the Revolt's place in the historical chain of events: that is, that he judged it by its results and the manner they were achieved. In this connection, I want to direct attention to three passages which may shed some light on the question if reexamined. The first is 5.97.3, where the twenty ships, which Athens sent to help the lonians at Aristagoras' request, are called the beginning

31 Hdt. 5. 112. 32 Hdt. 8. 90; 9. 103. 33 Hdt. 4. 142. Cf. Macan, op. cit. I, lxvi - lxvii, who points out the "anachronistic spirit" with

which the lonians are treated here and throughout the Revolt generally. We should not overlook the possibility that Herodotus used anachronism in this instance simply for effect.

34 Hdt. 6. 11. 35 Thuc. 6. 82. 36 Cf. Pers. 178; 563; 771; 899; 950; 1011; 1025.

3:-"



36 J.A.S. EVANS

of calamity for the Greeks and the barbarians. The passage recalls the ships of Paris in the Iliad3' which brought Helen of Troy, and it begs comparison with two other passages in Herodotus. In the first,38 he concludes the Scythian expedition with a remark that there was a respite of calamities, and then they began again, instigated by Miletus. In the second,39 Herodotus remarks that the earthquake at Delos in 490 B.C. foretold calamities to come, for in the reigns of Darius, Xerxes and Artaxerxes, more ills befell Greece than in the twenty previous generations. If I may connect these three passages, then Herodotus did not regard the Ionian revolt as the beginning of Strife between Greek and barbarian - that went back to Croesus - but he did think of it as the start of a new chapter in which all Greeks, and not merely those in Asia, would be involved. And I suspect that the portent of the Delos earthquake was that the chain of evils begun by the Revolt continued into Herodotus' own day.

The second passage comes from the famous scene before the battle of Lade, where Dionysius of Phocaea presents the lonians with a choice between liberty and subjection: "Our affairs are on the razor's edge, whether we are to be free men or slaves. . ."'4 On two other occasions, Greeks are presented with equally clear-cut choices, once before Marathon,4' where the choice is put tO Callima- chus, and once before Salamis,42 where Themistocles puts it to Eurybiades. As at Marathon and Salamis, there is the suggestion that, if the right choice is made, the lonians can be free. Failure was not inevitable after all. The lonians made the right choice, but then irresolution and disunity set in. The lonians saw their duty and performed it, but for a space of only seven days.

The final passage is 6.42.2. The revolt had been crushed, and Artaphrenes made a fresh assessment based on a new land-survey. Evidence from Babylon indicates that Darius reformed tax- and tribute-payments there, borrowing from the old Assyrian system and basing his assessments not merely on the amount of land, but also on its potential for producing profits.43 We may suspect that Artaphrenes took this opportunity to regularize and reform the assessments in Ionia along a similar model. Herodotus says nothing about that. His comments are two. First is the cryptic remark that Artaphrenes' results were valid down to his own time, and second is his statement that the tribute payments were much the same as before the Revolt. The latter remark seems to indicate that nothing significant had changed. The Revolt had achieved nothing, and achieved it expensively, for Herodotus does record its disastrous outcome with care. Herodotus' other remark about Artaphrenes' land survey: that it remained valid to his own time, is a special problem I have dealt with elsewhere ;44 here I submit only that whether Herodotus is referring to tribute due to Persia or to Athens in his own day, his comment would serve to remind his

3' Iliad, 5. 62-3. 3 Hdt. 5. 27. 39 Hdt. 6. 98. 40 Hdt. 6. 11. 2. 4' Hdt. 6. 109. 42 Hdt. 8.60. 43 cf. R. N. Frye, 7he Heritage of Persia (London, 1962) 113. 44 CP(forthcoming).




audience of the status of Ionia in the fifth century. To most Greeks, tribute symbolized the absence of freedom.

Taken together, these three passages suggest that the Revolt's place in history was this: First, it opened a new chapter in the chain of evils which led directly to Xerxes' offensive, and continued down to Herodotus' own day. Second, it presented the Ionians with an opportunity to choose freedom for themselves, which they recognized at the time. But, although Herodotus does not deny the lonians' courage, they failed to muster enough unity or purpose during the Revolt to make a decision and abide by it. They rallied behind Dionysius of Phocaea when he presented them with a clear choice between liberty and servitude before the battle of Lade, but they quickly grew dissatisfied with their leader. Finally, as far as Ionia was concerned, the Revolt was a futile enterprise, if it was to be judged by its results. After the Revolt, the Ionian cities had to pay about as much tribute as before, and they continued to be liable for tribute down to Herodotus' own day.

Solon had advised Croesus: "We must look to the end in everything, and see how it turns out".45 By that standard, the Revolt was a useless gesture, for it achieved nothing. Its importance lay in the calamities that it brought in its wake.

The University of British Columbia J. A. S. Evans

45 Hdt. 1. 32. 9.



Documents

Evans, J. a. S._herodotus and the Ionian Revolt_Historia, 25, 1_1976!31!37