Buckeyecoinguy's 500th Post Contest

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THE ancient Greek city of Miletus in Asia Minor, on what is now the west coast of Turkey, was the intellectual and commercial center of the Greek world in the century before Athens rose to prominence. It has been called the birthplace of the modern world.

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According to tradition, Miletus was founded about 1400 bc as a Minoan trading colony which fell under the control of the Mycenean Greeks and then the indigenous Carians after Minoan civilization collapsed. Miletus is mentioned in the Iliad, where its Carian citizens are seen fighting with the Trojans against the Greeks. The city is said to have been refounded by mainland Greeks about 1000 bc when Neleus, son of King Kodros of Athens, murdered its Carian inhabitants. This refounding of Miletus was part of the broader Ionian Migration of mainland Greeks to the eastward, during which the celebrated "Twelve Cities of Ionia" were established on the west coast of Anatolia. From the eighth to the sixth century before Christ all these Ionian Greek cities flourished, and Miletus became a major commercial and colonizing center. Almost 100 Milesian colonies were established all around the Black Sea and as far south as Naucratis on the Nile Delta in Egypt.

The prosperity of Miletus came by virtue of its location: a port city at the mouth of a major river—the Greater Meander, or Büyük Menderes—on the eastern edge of the Greek world. Miletus established commercial ties with the non-Greek Lydians to the east, and the Lydians themselves prospered through trade with the Persians and with other cultures in Asia. But the geographical location of Miletus also made it vulnerable from both land and sea. After the Persians under Cyrus the Great conquered Lydia in 546 bc, Miletus was able to remain neutral through diplomacy and bribery for a time, but when the Ionian cities revolted against Persian overlordship beginning in 499 bc, Miletus was besieged and eventually destroyed in 494 bc, despite the provision of twenty additional ships from Athens to aid the city's inhabitants.


The destruction of Miletus in 494 bc was one of the great catastrophes of early Greek civilization. A play by Phrynichus called The Capture of Miletus, written soon after the city was destroyed, caused so much emotional turmoil in Athens that the playwright was fined and future performances were banned (Rosenbloom, 1993). And it was Athens' support of Miletus against Persia that touched off the century-long series of Persian wars that engaged the whole Hellenic world and that led to the eventual rise of Athens as the great naval power of the Mediterranean. Herodotus reports that the Persian king Darius, after he had crushed the revolt in Ionia, kept the flames of war alive in his mind by ordering a servant to whisper three times to him every day, "Master, remember the Athenians."

Darius' invasion of mainland Greece was beaten back at Marathon in 490 bc, and a second invasion led by Darius' son Xerxes was beaten back at Salamis in 480 bc. The Ionian coastline was eventually reconquered by the Greeks, but it was then ceded back to Persia, only to be conquered again by Alexander the Great in 334 bc. Miletus later came under Roman domination, and its large theater, which is still visible today, dates from that period. Though in all these later periods Miletus continued to be an important port, it never regained the greatness it had had during the seventh and sixth centuries. As the ages passed, the river Meander silted up the Milesian harbors and the site was eventually abandoned.