The Persian Conquest of Ionia and Asia Minor

After Cyrus took Sardis, around 547 BCE, his generals spent several years conquering the Greek cities of the Aegean coast of Asia Minor and their neighbours in Caria and Lycia. The Median commander Harpagus finished the work, city by city, using siege mounds against their walls. The conquest brought the Ionian Greeks under Persian rule for half a century and set the scene for the Ionian Revolt and the Persian Wars.

A fable for the Ionians

The Greek cities of Ionia, among them Miletus, Ephesus, Phocaea, Teos and Priene, had been subjects of Lydia and paid tribute to Croesus. Before the war, Cyrus had invited them to desert Croesus and they refused. Once Sardis fell, they sent envoys asking to serve Cyrus on the same terms as before.

Herodotus (1.141) says Cyrus answered with a fable. A piper played to the fish in the sea, hoping they would come ashore. They did not, so he cast a net, hauled them in and watched them leap about. Then he told them it was too late to dance now, since they had refused to dance when he played. Only Miletus, the largest Ionian city, received a treaty on the terms it had had with Croesus. The rest began repairing their walls.

A warning from Sparta

The Ionians met at the Panionium, their shared sanctuary, and asked Sparta for help. The Spartans refused to send an army but dispatched a ship and an envoy, Lacrines, to tell Cyrus not to harm any Greek city. Herodotus (1.153) says Cyrus asked who the Spartans were. On being told, he replied that he had never feared men who set aside a place in the middle of their city where they met to cheat one another on oath, a jab at the Greek marketplace. The story shows how Greeks later imagined the Persian view of them: small, quarrelsome traders.

The revolt of Pactyes

Cyrus himself left the west for Ecbatana, with Babylon, Bactria and the eastern peoples still before him. He left a Persian, Tabalus, in command at Sardis and gave a Lydian, Pactyes, charge of the gold. As soon as the king was gone, Pactyes hired Greek soldiers from the coast and besieged Tabalus in the citadel.

Cyrus sent a Median general, Mazares, to crush the revolt. Herodotus says Croesus, now at Cyrus’s side, persuaded him not to enslave the Lydians but to disarm them and push them towards music and shopkeeping, so they would never rebel again. The tale is moralising, and it became a Greek stereotype of the soft, luxurious Lydians.

Pactyes fled to Cyme, then to Mytilene on Lesbos, and finally to Chios. The Chians handed him over to the Persians in exchange for the mainland district of Atarneus. Mazares then punished the cities that had helped him: he enslaved the people of Priene and plundered the Maeander valley and Magnesia, before dying of illness.

Harpagus and the siege mounds

Command passed to Harpagus, the Mede who, in Herodotus’s story, had saved the infant Cyrus and later helped him overthrow Astyages (see Cyrus the Great: Birth, Legends and Rise to Power). Greek cities trusted to their walls. Harpagus’s answer was to drive the defenders inside and then pile up great ramps of earth against the walls until his troops could fight their way over. City after city fell this way.

The Phocaeans sail away

At Phocaea, Harpagus offered easy terms: knock down one tower of the wall and dedicate one house to the king. The Phocaeans asked for a day to think, used it to load their families, goods and temple statues onto their ships, and sailed away. Most of them settled at Alalia on Corsica, where they had founded a colony earlier; after a costly sea battle with Etruscans and Carthaginians, the survivors moved on and founded Elea (Velia) in southern Italy. Herodotus says more than half of the emigrants grew homesick and went back to Phocaea, breaking their oath.

Teos and the other cities

The people of Teos did the same, sailing to Thrace to refound the city of Abdera. The other mainland Ionians fought, were defeated and submitted. The Ionians on the islands, Herodotus says, gave themselves up without a fight. He also records two proposals that might have changed Ionian history: Thales of Miletus had once urged the cities to form a single government with its council at Teos, and Bias of Priene now urged them all to sail together to Sardinia and found one great city. Neither plan was followed.

Caria and Lycia

Harpagus then marched south with Ionian and Aeolian troops in his army. The Carians submitted with little resistance. The people of Cnidus tried to turn their peninsula into an island by cutting a channel across its neck, but stopped when the Delphic oracle told them that if Zeus had wanted an island, he would have made one. The Pedasians held out on a fortified mountain for a time before they too were taken.

Lycia gave the hardest fight. Herodotus (1.176) says the men of Xanthos met the Persians on the plain, were driven back into the city, gathered their wives, children, slaves and possessions on the acropolis and set it on fire. Then they went out and fought until every one of them was killed. The Xanthians of his own day, he says, were descended from eighty families who had been away from home. The people of Caunus acted much the same way.

Xanthos was rebuilt and flourished under Persian rule. Its later rulers erected the tall pillar tombs seen in the photograph. The texts on the city’s Inscribed Pillar, carved around 400 BCE, describe the local dynast as a son of a man named Harpagus. Some historians have taken this as a sign that the conqueror’s family ruled Lycia as Persian vassals; others think the name is a coincidence.

How Persia ruled the Greek cities

Persia did not station large armies in each city. The coast was governed from Sardis, which became the seat of a satrap, and each city paid tribute and supplied troops and ships when called on. Persia usually worked through local Greek tyrants who owed their position to the king. This arrangement held for about fifty years, until in 499 BCE the tyrant of Miletus led the cities into the Ionian Revolt, the event that drew Athens into war with Persia. The wider conflict is outlined on The Greco-Persian Wars: An Overview.

The name the Persians gave these Greeks lived on in the Persian language. Old Persian inscriptions call them Yauna, from “Ionians”, and modern Persian still calls Greece یونان Yunân.