Hello, χαίρετε, and welcome to Epic Greek History Episode 30, Fighting the Power: The Ionian Revolt. I’m Scott Emmons. 

As the title suggests, this episode is about a revolution. I hope you’ll pardon the spoiler — it’s a revolution that failed. But it’s more than just a historical footnote, because the Ionian revolt marked the first serious involvement of mainland Greeks in a conflict with the Persian Empire. And that had major repercussions over the next couple of decades. 

I feel like this episode needs more exposition than most, because in the last decade of the 6th century BCE, there were various factors escalating tensions between Greeks and Persians. For one thing, Darius’ so-called Scythian expedition had left the Persians in control of European territories, including Thrace. They were moving west. At this point, there was probably no definite plan to invade mainland Greece, but there was at least a trend that would naturally make cities like Athens nervous. A more immediate concern was the fact that the Persians now controlled the Bosphorus, that narrow strait between the Black Sea and the waterway leading to the Aegean. That was critical for trade with the Black Sea region — which was vital to Athens, because Attica didn’t have enough grain-producing land to feed its growing population. It had become more and more dependent on grain imports. The two best sources for grain were the Black Sea regions and Egypt, which was also now under Persian control.  

As for the Asiatic Greek cities, they were governed by tyrants who served at the pleasure of the Great King. Darius had his headquarters far to the east at Susa, and he’d left the local administration in the hands of his brother Artaphernes, who ruled from his capital at Sardis. To put it in modern corporate terms, the Greek tyrants reported directly to Artaphernes, who in turn reported to Darius. But a recent development had at least raised questions about that system. Athens had just thrown out her tyrants and set up a new democracy. Athens had always been seen as a kind of mother figure to the Greek cities of Ionia. So a lot of people in those cities must have been thinking, “Since it happened in Athens, could it happen here?” 

The plot gets even thicker. Hippias, the exiled tyrant of Athens, had his base at Sigeion at the mouth of the Hellespont, and he’d never stopped scheming to return to Athens and seize power again. He’d cultivated friendly relations with the Persians, and he had Artaphernes in his corner. It’s easy to forget, but Hippias still had his supporters in Athens. The democracy was very young, and it was yet to be seen whether it had staying power. With an effective combination of support in Athens and Persian backing, it’s not unthinkable that Hippias could have returned to power. 

So now that we’ve set the scene, we can backtrack a little and pick up where we left off last time. In 512 BCE, after returning from Scythia, Darius stayed for a while in Sardis before making the long trip back to Susa. Histiaeus, the tyrant of Miletus, had done him a solid by convincing the other Greek leaders not to destroy the Danube bridge and strand the Persians on the other side. Darius had repaid him for his loyalty by giving him the valuable territory of Myrcinus in Thrace on the north shore of the Aegean.

But of course, Histiaeus wasn’t just going to retire and live off the income from his silver mines and timberland. He had ambitions to build a whole new Greek city there and presumably rule it as a monarch. Which doesn’t seem to have bothered Darius much at first. But after Histiaeus started building fortifications and it looked like this new city could be a significant presence in what was now Persian territory, the king’s advisers in Thrace started getting concerned. According to Herodotus, it was Megabazos, the general in charge of Thracian operations, who warned Darius, “This guy could be dangerous.” The king was convinced, but it wouldn’t be a good look to grant a generous reward and then just take it away. The easy solution was to promote him. He summoned Histiaeus to Sardis and said, “You know, you’ve been such a valuable ally to me, and such a good friend, you deserve a greater reward than I’ve given you. So I’d like you to come back to Susa with me and be my honored adviser and table companion.” Histiaeus didn’t have much of a choice. All he could do was accept the king’s gracious offer. So Darius took him along when he left Sardis, leaving his brother Artaphernes in charge. 

So where did that leave Miletus? In Histiaeus’ absence, the acting monarch was his cousin and son-in-law, Aristagoras. Like Histiaeus, he was one of those highly ambitious and adventurous types we’ve seen so often in archaic Greece. But he was either not super talented or not super lucky. Either way, he was about to stir up a lot of trouble. 

That trouble started in the year 499 BCE, when a group of aristocratic exiles from the island of Naxos arrived in Miletus. There’d been a democratic revolution on Naxos, and these oligarchs had been driven out. So they approached Aristagoras and asked him for his support to put down the new democracy and get them back into power. Naxos was a very wealthy island, and when Aristagoras heard their request, the dollar signs flashed in his eyes. Well, maybe drachma signs. For him, this was an opportunity to increase his own wealth and power, maybe even bring Naxos under his rule. He was all in. But he didn’t have enough military muscle to pull it off, so he was going to need help from the Persians. 

Now, Miletus had always had a privileged position in the Persian system. Its rulers had been careful to maintain good relations with the authorities. So Aristagoras’ prospects were good when he went to Sardis and made his pitch to Artaphernes. He talked about how wealthy Naxos was and what a great opportunity it would be to expand Persian power. If he could restore these exiled nobles to power and make them vassals of the Great King, it would be easy to go on and conquer neighboring islands — even Euboea, just off the coast of the Greek mainland. All he’d need from the Persians would be a fleet of 100 ships. Artaphernes loved the idea. He said, “I’ll have to run it by the king first, but I’m prepared to give you 200!” Darius gave his approval, so Aristagoras got a fleet of 200 ships commanded by a Persian named Megabates — not to be confused with Megabazos, the general up in Thrace. Persian names weren’t designed to make things easy for us. 

Well, this naval force was strong enough that it probably could have won an easy victory. The plan was to make a feint by sailing north toward the Hellespont and then turn around to make a surprise attack on Naxos. But before long, a power struggle erupted between Aristagoras and the Persian admiral Megabates. At one point, Megabates was inspecting the fleet, which included Greek ships from the cities under Persian control, and he found that one of the Greek ships didn’t have a guard on duty. He wasn’t going to stand for that, so he punished the captain of that ship by having him tied up with his head sticking out of one of the oar-holes. This captain happened to be a friend of Aristagoras, who was appalled at the insult. When Megabates refused to untie him, Aristagoras did it himself. A heated argument broke out over who was in charge of the expedition. Insults flew back and forth. Megabates came away so angry that he sabotaged the operation by sending messengers ahead to Naxos warning about the coming attack. 

That warning gave the Naxians time to reinforce their walls and bring in enough supplies to withstand a long siege. Aristagoras and his Persian forces besieged the city for four months, after which their own supplies were starting to run out. Not only that, Aristagoras was running into financial trouble because he was paying a lot of money out of his own pocket to keep the siege going. At last, he had to face the fact that the operation had failed. The fleet broke up and sailed home.

That put Aristagoras in a tough spot. He’d sold Artaphernes on this Naxian adventure, and he had nothing to show for it. He was heavily in debt after financing so much of the siege himself. And knowing that Megabates was going to bad-mouth him to Artaphernes, he was well aware that he could lose his position as tyrant of Miletus. In this predicament, he decided, “They can’t fire me, I quit!” So this Greek aristocrat, long a member of the ruling family, stepped down from the tyranny and became a democratic revolutionary, fomenting rebellion not only in Miletus but in the other Ionian cities as well. And overthrowing the tyrants in those cities meant defying Persian authority. 

Herodotus tells a classic story about the start of this Ionian revolt. Histiaeus, the man Darius had quote-unquote “promoted” and taken back to Susa, was frustrated. It was a comfortable position, he could have just about anything he asked for, but it just wasn’t the life for an ambitious Greek nobleman. So he decided to send a message to Aristagoras telling him to start a rebellion. His plan was supposedly to get Darius to send him back to Ionia so that he could stamp out the uprising and get back into power. But how was he going to send a message like that when there were Persian guards and watchers all along the Royal Road? He called for his most trustworthy slave, shaved his head, tattooed the message on his scalp, waited for his hair to grow back, and sent him off to Miletus with instructions to tell Aristagoras to shave his head. As Herodotus tells it, the slave arrived just at the moment when Aristagoras was thinking about starting a revolt. 

My first response is always to dismiss stories like that, but I have to remind myself that weird things do happen in espionage. It’s well documented that during the Cold War, the CIA hid messages inside dead rats for agents to pick up. I don’t know if tattooing a slave’s scalp is much more outlandish. But this is likely to be a story Histiaeus cooked up later to give himself more cred when he allied with Greek democrats. Aristagoras didn’t need orders from his father-in-law to start a revolution. There was already plenty of resentment against the Persian-backed tyrants in the Greek cities. Once Aristagoras had set off the spark, the revolution spread quickly through Ionia. In open defiance of the Persian authorities, the people overthrew their tyrants and set up democracies. In most cases, they seem to have accomplished it without a great deal of bloodshed. An exception was Mytilene, the chief city on the island of Lesbos, where the tyrant was so hated that an angry mob stoned him to death.

 So the cities were now in revolt, but they’d soon have to face the Persian backlash. For that, they would need military assistance. Which meant Aristagoras would have to look overseas to the powerful cities of mainland Greece.

 Let’s leave him looking overseas while we take our first break. Epic Greek History is free to anyone who wants to listen. I don’t want to waste anyone’s time with ads or promos, but I’m always grateful when someone helps with the cost of production by registering a paid subscription. If you’d like to make a small contribution to support the show, the one way to do it is by visiting the website at www.epicgreekhistory.com, hitting that “Support” button, and choosing a contribution level starting at just three dollars a month. With that out of the way, let’s break for… 

[SFX: A Moment of Greek!]

Since I’ve just been talking about a naval expedition, I thought it would be fun to look at a few English words that come from Greek seafaring terms. The ancient Greek word for a ship is “naus” — spelled “n-a-u-s” in our alphabet. The combining root is “naut-”, as in the adjective “nautikos,” which comes directly into English as “nautical.” “Nautes” is Greek for a sailor, and from that we get words like “astronaut” — literally a “star-sailor.” And anytime you need to describe the feeling of motion sickness, you can thank the seafaring Greeks for the word “nausea.” And that’s today’s moment of Greek. 

[SFX] 

If I were starting a revolution of small city-states against a massive empire, I like to think I’d spend a good deal of time preparing. I’d want to secure some solid alliances and make sure I had the military backing I’d need. But Aristagoras seems to have started the Ionian revolt in a hurry, to avoid the consequences of his failed adventure in Naxos. So after getting the Ionians to overthrow their Persian-backed tyrants, he sailed off to the mainland in the hope of getting support from one or more powerful states.

 Naturally, the first place he went was Sparta, the city with the most distinguished military reputation. This was during the reign of King Cleomenes, who dominated his city’s politics in a way that few Spartan kings could. I covered his life and his inglorious end back in episode 27. But when Aristagoras visited, Cleomenes was still at the height of his power. For the details of this visit, we have to depend mainly on Herodotus, and as usual, that means we have an entertaining story that reinforces certain perceptions of Spartan culture and Aristagoras’ character. It’s doubtful how much of it is historically accurate. So, as I go through the story, just be sure to keep a few grains of salt handy.

 Aristagoras made his case to Cleomenes, appealing first to the ideal of panhellenism. It was a disgrace for fellow Greeks to be enslaved by foreigners. He added that the Persians were not good fighters. They fought with bows and arrows, not in close ranks with hoplite spears and shields. They even wore leather trousers, not skirts like real men wore! In addition to all that, Persia was incredibly rich, so after defeating its armies, the Spartans would get their hands on enormous wealth. 

At this point, Aristagoras showed the king a bronze plaque he’d brought with him, which was inscribed with a map of the entire known world. This is a fascinating detail of the story, because Aristagoras’ home city of Miletus was known for being the first to produce world maps, at least among the Greeks. The early philosopher Anaximander was supposed to have developed the first one, and then in Aristagoras’ own time, the geographer and ethnographer Hecataeus had improved it and added a lot more detail. Well, Aristagoras showed his map to Cleomenes and pointed out the locations of the people the Spartans would encounter on the march to Susa. Here are the Lydians, then the Phrygians, who have enormous flocks of sheep, by the way, very valuable. Then the Cappadocians, the Cilicians, and so on.  

Cleomenes was intrigued, and he said, “Give me a couple of days to think it over. Come back again day after tomorrow and we’ll talk.” So Aristagoras hung around Sparta for the next two days. I don’t know what he would have to pass the time in Sparta. Maybe he sampled some of that famous black soup. But when he went back, Cleomenes said, “I’ve given this some thought, and I have just one question. How long does it take to march from the coast to Susa?” Aristagoras said, “About three months.” Cleomenes said, “I want you out of Sparta by nightfall.” There was no way a Spartan army was going to commit to a journey three months inland. 

But Aristagoras wasn’t quite out of ideas. He went to Cleomenes’s private residence, holding an olive branch, which was a symbol of supplication. And when someone came to you as a suppliant, you had an obligation to hear them out. The story goes that Cleomenes had his eight-year-old daughter Gorgo in the room with him. Aristagoras asked, “Can we talk in private?” The king said, “Whatever you have to say to me you can say in front of my daughter.” So Aristagoras said, point blank, “I’ll give you ten talents if you’ll lead an expedition against Persia.” Cleomenes turned him down. Aristagoras said, “Oh, did I say ten talents? I meant twenty!” Again, no deal. Aristagoras kept upping the ante until he was offering fifty talents. And at that point, little Gorgo spoke up and said, “Daddy, you need to get away from this man, or he’ll corrupt you!” That made Cleomenes swell with pride, and he left the room so Aristagoras could show himself out.

It’s easy to see how a story like that became part of the lore that Herodotus drew on. Everybody knew that indifference to wealth was supposed to be a Spartan virtue. But at the same time, Spartans in power were thought to be highly corruptible. There’s a hint that Cleomenes might have caved if little Gorgo hadn’t been there to keep him on the straight and narrow. As for Gorgo, she grew up to be not only the wife of the war hero Leonidas, but one of those famously sharp and quick-witted Spartan women. So it’s natural that stories about her precociousness in childhood would spring up.  

The historical kernel in all of this is that Aristagoras appealed to Sparta for help and was turned down. One practical reason for the refusal was that Sparta was gearing up for the campaign against Argos that I described in an earlier episode. The Spartans had their hands full with that and couldn’t afford to send a major operation overseas. 

Well, Aristagoras went to Athens next, and there he was in friendlier territory. He was an Ionian, and the Athenians always felt a special kinship with the Ionian cities of Anatolia. Also, Athens was a very young democracy, not even a decade old yet, and many of the citizens must have been sympathetic to the fledgling democracies in Ionia. I would imagine a lot of Athenians felt a great deal of pride that those cities were following in Athens’ footsteps. 

Aristagoras didn’t hesitate to play on those sentiments, and he made the same exaggerated claim he’d made at Sparta — that the Persians were a bunch of wimps who would practically faint at the sight of a Greek hoplite. The pitch may have been largely the same, but the audience was different. At Sparta, he was trying to persuade the king. In Athens, he addressed the citizen assembly. And after the speeches and deliberations, the Athenians voted to send a force of 20 ships. Which may not sound like a lot, but this was before Athens became a major naval power. 20 ships at this time would have been a substantial part of its fleet. When Herodotus relates this decision of the Athenians, he marks it as a turning point in history. Quote: “These ships were the beginning of evils for both the Greeks and the barbarians.” Unquote.  

On a side note, Herodotus makes a wry comment here about democratic politics. Just a few pages before, he praised democracy for improving the citizens’ morale and effectiveness in defending the city against its enemies. But here, he points out that Aristagoras’ clever speechmaking couldn’t deceive one man, but it could fool 30,000 Athenians. Like any political system, democracy had its pros and cons. 

So Aristagoras returned to Miletus with those 20 Athenian ships. The city of Eretria on the island of Euboea contributed five more, bringing the total to 25. Once they reached Miletus, Aristagoras organized an army of his Athenian and Eretrian allies plus all the men he could get from the Ionian cities and sent that force inland to attack the regional capital of Sardis. 

The army encountered very little resistance when it marched into the city. The Greeks easily took it, except for the fortified acropolis, where the satrap Artaphernes had retreated for safety. He’d brought in a good-sized force to defend the citadel, so it was virtually impregnable. Down in the lower town, the soldiers were all ready to grab as much plunder as they could. But somehow, in all the commotion, one of the houses was set on fire. And since most of the houses were made of reeds and were packed close together, the whole town was a tinder box. In no time at all, it was engulfed in flames. There was no time for looting and pillaging now. Both the invading army and the townspeople had to get out fast. 

The Greek troops retreated toward Miletus by way of Ephesus, another coastal city. But that’s where a force of Persians caught up with them. And the Athenians now discovered that the Persians weren’t quite the weaklings that Aristagoras had made them out to be. They inflicted a severe defeat on the Greeks. Those who survived scattered and made their way back to their own cities. 

After that experience, Athens was done with the Ionian revolt. Herodotus tells us that Aristagoras sent messengers repeatedly, begging the Athenians to send more help, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. There may even have been a backlash against anti-Persian sentiment in Athens. In 496, a man named Hipparchus, from the family of the Pisistratid tyrants, was elected to the chief archonship. And this was at a time when the ex-tyrant Hippias was still living over in Sigeion on the Hellespont, with the support of the Persian king.

But as much as the Athenians may have wanted to wash their hands of the whole matter, they were in it now. By sending ships and burning Sardis, they’d made Darius mad. And as the saying goes, you come at the king, you’d best not miss. The legend is that when Darius heard about the burning of Sardis and the involvement of Athens, he first asked, “Who are these Athenians?” When the messenger told him, he took up his bow and shot an arrow high into the sky, praying, “Zeus, let it be granted that I take vengeance on the Athenians!” He then appointed one of his slaves to come to him every time he sat down to dinner and remind him, “Remember the Athenians.” 

On that dramatic note, let’s take our second break. Which means it’s time for…

 [SFX: Random Facts!]

 That map that Aristagoras showed Cleomenes was most likely a version of the chart that his contemporary Hecataeus had developed. It was a significant advance for its time, but the Greeks didn’t have sophisticated techniques for drawing up an accurate world map. Without detailed information about the configurations of landmasses and bodies of water, their presumptions about the cosmos naturally influenced their mapmaking. Anaximander, the philosopher who took the first crack at it, saw balance and symmetry as fundamental principles of the cosmos. So there was a tendency with these Milesian maps to make the world as symmetrical as possible. We don’t actually have any of their maps, but from authors who drew on them we know that the Mediterranean was shown as a kind of equator, dividing the world between north and south. The Nile in the south and the Danube in the north were to some extent considered mirror images of each other. That sense of geographical symmetry may even have influenced the Greek perception of an eternal struggle between East and West. And that’s today’s random fact.

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 Aristagoras had lost the support of Athens, but the Ionian revolt went on. And even if we know the outcome, it’s impressive how far the rebellion spread and how long it lasted. It started in 499 BCE and wasn’t decisively put down until 494. To oversimplify a bit, the Greeks were hard pressed on land but had enough victories to keep going. The did better at sea, where their fleet got control of the Hellespont and most of the cities there. That included Byzantium, which was immensely important because it controlled the straits of the Bosphorus. Far to the south, most of Cyprus was brought into the revolt. But all those gains were eventually going to fall away as the Persians reasserted control.

 So where was Aristagoras in all this? At a certain point, he could see that the revolt was a lost cause. He knew he’d almost certainly be executed if the Persians got their hands on him, and the execution wouldn’t be merciful. Clearly, he needed to get out of Dodge — or Miletus at least. He got his supporters together to brainstorm places he might escape to, and he ultimately decided his best bet was to head for Myrcinus, where Histiaeus had been building fortifications before all the chaos broke out. As soon as he got a foothold there, he thought it would be a great idea to try expanding his territory by laying siege to one of the neighboring Thracian towns. And in the course of the fighting, he was killed. That was the rather anticlimactic end of the man who had launched the Ionian revolt.

 And what about Histiaeus? Before the revolt, he’d spent years in the king’s court, bored and restless. But he got some excitement at last when Darius got the news about the revolt and the burning of Sardis. When the king was done shooting arrows into the air and vowing vengeance against the Athenians, he summoned Histiaeus and said, “Explain yourself.” As Herodotus tells it, Histiaeus did some fast talking and convinced the king he’d had nothing to do with the revolt. In fact, he got what he’d always wanted. Darius sent him back to Ionia to get things under control. It’s hard to believe he really bought what Histiaeus was selling, but he did send him back. If we can believe Herodotus, Darius never lost his trust in Histiaeus. 

 Well, the Royal Road took him to Sardis, where he found that Artaphernes was a lot more suspicious than Darius had been. Histiaeus gave him the same song and dance about how he’d had nothing to do with the revolt, it was all Aristagoras’ doing. To which Artaphernes replied, “You made the shoe. Aristagoras just put it on.” That scared Histiaeus enough that he slipped out of Sardis that night and made his way to the island of Chios. The rest of his career plays out like a swashbuckling adventure. After convincing the Chians that he was really on the rebels’ side and not just a Persian lackey, he got them to support him in an attempt to return to power in Miletus. The Milesians didn’t want their old tyrant back, and they fought him off when he tried to take the city by force. Later he raised a small fleet at Lesbos and set himself up as a pirate lord at the Bosphorus, raiding ships as they sailed out of the Black Sea. The last we hear of him is that he was leading a Greek army and raiding some territory on the coast opposite Lesbos, where a Persian force attacked and captured him. Artaphernes had had enough of him, and without consulting the king, had him impaled on a stake. But we’re told he had Histiaeus’ head embalmed and sent it to Darius, who gave it an honorable burial.

 Well, the real knockout blow against the Ionian revolt came in 494 BCE with the fall of Miletus. On the Persian side, the generals combined their land forces to prepare for an attack while the fleet blockaded the town by sea. That fleet would have been made up mostly of Phoenicians, but it included other subject peoples, including Greeks from Cyprus, where the Persians had regained control. As for the Ionians, they assembled a formidable fleet and stationed it at the small island of Lade, just off the coast of Miletus.

 Meanwhile, the Persians were doing everything they could to undermine Greek morale. They summoned the former tyrants who’d been their puppet rulers before the revolt and had them go out to the Greek camps with the message that if they surrendered, they’d be treated humanely, but if they continued to fight, they’d face severe punishment. It was the usual kind of psychological warfare that happens when armies are about to engage in close combat.

 Ionian morale started off high. A Phocaean commander by the name of Dionysius delivered a rousing motivational speech, saying the coming battle would decide whether the Ionians would be free or submit to slavery. And the only path to victory was through rigorous training and discipline. No pain, no gain. The Ionians were fired up, and they put themselves in his hands.

 So Dionysius became their drill sergeant and put them through a training regimen like they’d never seen. He had the rowers practice a special maneuver for breaking through a line of enemy ships. He put the hoplites who served as marines through drills to get them battle ready. But it didn’t take long for that discipline to break down. It sounded good in a speech, but the Ionians weren’t used to such intensive training. After seven days, they decided, “This is Spartan crap!” They pitched tents on the island and refused to come out for any more training.

 Well, inevitably, the Persian fleet went on the attack. The Greeks sailed out to face them, but by now, both discipline and morale were low. We hear that the Chians fought bravely, but the divisions from Samos, Lesbos, and others fell away one by one. This battle was a long shot to begin with, since the Ionians reportedly had 353 ships against a Persian fleet of 600. After a decisive victory at sea, the Persian army attacked Miletus with everything they had. And before long, they broke in and completely overwhelmed the city. Most of the men were killed. The women and children were taken to be kept or sold as slaves.

 The fall of Miletus was a shock to the Greek world. It had been the gem of the Ionian cities. Not only a great cosmopolitan trading center, but the crucible of Greek philosophy, the home of famous thinkers like Thales, Anaximander, and Hecataeus. All of that now came to an abrupt end.

 Athens had stayed aloof from the Ionian revolt after the debacle at Sardis. But the destruction of Miletus touched a raw nerve. That feeling of Ionian kinship ran deep. One particular event illustrates how profoundly the disaster affected them. A playwright by the name of Phrynichus staged a tragedy called The Capture of Miletus. We usually think of Greek tragedies as taking their subject matter from myth, but some were based on historical events, even quite recent ones. The play itself is lost, but we hear that it had a tremendous emotional impact on the audience. So much so that the Athenians imposed a heavy fine on Phrynichus for reminding them of “familial evils.” The word I’m translating as “familial” is οικεια. Which is hard to render into English, but it’s based on οικος, the word for a household. For the Athenians, the fall of Miletus was like a death in the family.

 After taking Miletus, the Persians had some mopping up to do in the Hellespont and other places, but for all practical purposes, the Ionian revolt was over. They made good on their threats of harsh punishment after the rebel cities were subdued. As unpleasant as it is to contemplate, boys were castrated and sent off to serve as eunuchs. Girls were sent off to be slaves of the king, with everything that entailed. After the dust settled, Artaphernes took measures to ensure peace, establishing compacts between Greek cities to keep them from fighting among themselves. Interestingly, the Persians seem to have decided that their policy of keeping Greek tyrants as client kings wasn’t effective, so they deposed any tyrants in those cities and set up democracies. And so, after five years of rebellion, Ionia was pacified. But the Persians hadn’t forgotten about Athens and Eretria. Now that they’d taken part in the revolt, they were on a collision course for a confrontation with the Persian Empire.

 And that concludes Episode 30. I hope you’ve found the Ionian revolt as fascinating as I do. If you’d like to ask questions, offer comments, or correct any errors I’ve made, please get in touch! You can reach me at scott@epicgreekhistory.com or leave a comment on Facebook or Instagram. I’m Scott Emmons. The music for my theme song was composed and produced by Parry Gripp. My logo and other artwork are by Chris Harding. Until next time, 

εὐτυχεῖτε! Be well.