CHAPTER XIII - Asiatic Ionians

Summary

There existed at the commencement of historical Greece in 776 B.C., besides the Ionians in Attica and the Cyclades, twelve Ionian cities of note on or near the coast of Asia Minor, besides a few others less important. Enumerated from south to north, they stand—Milêtus, Myûs, Priênê, Samos, Ephesus,Kolophôn, Lebedus,Teôs, Erythræ, Chios, Klazomense, Phôkæa.

That these cities, the great ornament of the Ionic name, were founded by emigrants from European Greece, there is no reason to doubt. How or when they were founded, we have no history to tell us: the legend, which has already been set forth in a preceding chapter, gives us a great event called the Ionic migration, referred by chronologists to one special year, 140 years after the Trojan war. This massive grouping belongs to the character of legend—the Æolic and Ionic emigrations, as well as the Dorian conquest of Peloponnesus, are each invested with unity and imprinted upon the imagination as the results of a single great impulse. But such is not the character of the historical colonies : when we come to relate the Italian and Sicilian emigrations, it will appear that each colony has its own separate nativity and causes of existence. In the case of the Ionic emigration, this large scale of legendary conception is more than usually conspicuous, since to that event is ascribed the foundation or re-peopling both of the Cyclades and of the Asiatic Ionian cities.