A man would say that they are deathless and unaging if he should come upon the Ionians so met together. Mindful, they delight you with boxing and dancing and song, so often as they hold their gathering. Yet in Delos do you most delight your heart for the long-robed Ionians gather in your honor with their children and shy wives. There they honored the god in a festival described in the Homeric Hymn addressed to Delian Apollo: The Ionians also met annually on the island of Delos, the legendary birthplace of Apollo, their patron deity. The confederation, also known as the Dodecapolis, had its common meeting place at the Panionium, on the mainland opposite Samos. This comprised one city each on the islands of Chios and Samos and ten on the mainland of Asia Minor opposite, namely, Phocaea, Clazomenae, Erythrae, Teos, Lebedus, Colophon, Ephesus, Priene, Myus, and Miletus. The Ionian colonies soon organized themselves into a confederation called the Panionic League. remarks, "The Ionian countryside has excellently tempered seasons, and its sanctuaries are unrivalled." He goes on to say that "the wonders of Ionia are numerous, and not much short of the wonders of Greece." Herodotus, describing this migration in Book I of his Histories, writes that the Ionians ended up with the best location in Asia Minor, for they "had the good fortune to establish their settlements in a region which enjoys a better climate than any we know of." Pausanias, in his Description of Greece, written in the second century a.d. The Aeolians gave birth to the lyric poet Sappho the Ionians to Homer and the natural philosophers Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes and the Dorians to Herodotus, the "Father of History." Three Greek tribes were involved in this migration-the Aeolians to the north, the Ionians in the center, and the Dorians in the south-and together they produced the first flowering of Greek culture. A second colony was founded on the same site during the mass migration of Greeks early in the first millennium b.c., when they left their homeland in mainland Greece and migrated eastward across the Aegean, settling on the coast of Asia Minor and its offshore islands. The entrance to the port is still guarded by the marble statues of the two couchant lions from which it took its name, though they are now half-buried in alluvial earth, symbols of the illustrious city that Herodotus called "the glory of Ionia." The Greek geographer Strabo writes that "many are the achievements of this city, but the greatest are the number of its colonizations, for the Euxine Pontus has been colonized everywhere by these people, as has the Propontis and several other regions."Įxcavations have revealed that the earliest remains in Miletus date from the second half of the sixteenth century B.C., when colonists from Minoan Crete are believed to have established a settlement here. The site has been under excavation since the late nineteenth century, so that all of its surviving monuments have been unearthed and to some extent restored, though its ancient harbor, the Lion Port, has long been silted up, leaving Miletus marooned miles from the sea.
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