Remembering the Other Greeks

For much of Western history, “Ancient Greece” has been associated with three cultural phenomena (at the least within popular consciousness). The first is the world of “Greek Mythology,” an indeterminate period in which Hercules battles Hydras and other monsters, Theseus battles Minotaurs and other creatures of folklore, and Helen and Andromache are rescued from the fires of Troy. This world (fittingly) is an ahistorical time in which togas and sandals are worn by handsome and beautiful heroes and gods still speak to men and women.  The second cultural phenomenon popular imagination associates with “Ancient Greece” is Alexander the Great, or a horse riding prince among men who conquered a large slice of the known world and ultimately died “in a blaze of glory.” The third and final phenomenon that the average Joe or Jill associates Ancient Greece with is “Athens and Sparta.” It is generally known that there was a time in which Athens and Sparta were “city states” that housed figures such as Plato, Socrates, and Leonidas.

This threefold view of Greece is not entirely wrong. However, it neglects much of the Greek world. Athens and Sparta were not the only Greek city states, though they are the most famous in the modern world. Greek influence stretched across the Mediterranean, which was the Greek city of Massilia— the modern-day French city of Marseille that was founded in 600 B.C. Greeks had a substantial presence in southern Italy, and, through the efforts of Alexander, Greek culture penetrated deep into central Asia. There was also a Greek presence in Ionia, located on the west coast of modern-day Turkey. Ionia is the topic of Truman State University history professor Joshua P. Nudell’s recent work from the University of Michigan Press, Accustomed to Obedience? Classical Ionia and the Aegean World, 480-294 BCE.

Nudell begins his work with the conflict between the rising Roman Republic and the Seleucid King Antiochus III in second-century B.C. While the Romans championed themselves as advocates of Greek liberty against alleged Asiatic autocracy, Antiochus claimed control of Ionia, including Aeolia to the north as being Greek lands traditionally subject to foreign rule. Nudell argues that Antiochus’s statement is both true and false. It is true that Ionians had been subject to foreign powers, but they also had been ruled by Greek city states as well as by Macedonians. At the same time, the notion that Ionia was merely a “subject” Greek area is misguided.

Nudell makes it explicit that his goal in Accustomed to Obedience? is to note that Athens and Sparta were among “more than a thousand independent poleis scattered across the breadth of the Mediterranean and Black Seas bound by language, culture, genealogy, and Panhellenic institutions that created an imagined community of ‘Greeks.’” Nudell’s work, as he notes, is the first study of Classical Ionia, which is part of a wider scholarly effort to broadened contemporary understanding of what it means to be Greek beyond just “Athens” and “Sparta.”

Nudell further notes the turn of Ionian or Yauna was used by many in the ancient world to denote Greeks themselves, not simply those who lived on the west coast of Asia Minor. However, in the sixth-century, the term did have a specific attachment to Greeks who undertook the Ionian Migration. Ionian is identified by Herodotus, but, as Nudell argues, the land is strangely divided by mountain ranges; thus, it does not seem to form a coherent topographical or geographic unit. The collection of Ionian cities, or the “Panionion,” included twelve city states and the more famous Samos, Chios, and Ephesus. (Smyrna was later added during the Hellenistic period.)

Major Greek migration from Ionia began in the eighth-century during the “Archaic period.” Ionians settled in the Black Sea, and it was the Ionian city of Phocaea that settled Massilia in southern France. Ionian merchants further traded in Egypt and Syria, and Ionian mercenaries even served in Egyptian armies. Drawing from scholar Mary Bachvarova, Nudell further argues the possibility of Greek epic poetry having— at least— some roots in Ionia. Ionia was also famously the home of such pre-Socratic philosophers as Pythagoras, Anaximenes, Thales, and Heraclitus.

Ionians lived in tension with their neighbors, including the famous Lydian King Gyges. Surprisingly, during this conflict, there was little military cohesion among the cities of Ionia. The Ionian cities were ultimately forced to pay tribute to the Lydians. Ionian was later conquered in the 540s by the Persian King Cyrus. However, Nudell points out that Persian rule was not necessarily substantially more severe than Lydian. The later Persian ruler named Darius undertook an administrative reform after 522 and attempted to integrate Ionia more tightly into the Persian bureaucratic structure.

The Ionians eventually began a series of revolts beginning in 499. There are many causes to this revolt, which scholars have proposed. Nudell argues that a strong case can be made for Ionian popular uprising in response to Persian tyranny. Regardless, Persia responded by crushing the revolt in a manner so brutal that Greek audiences wept during the production of a play about the suppression of the Ionian revolt titled The Capture of Miletus. The author of the play, Phyrnicus, was further fined a thousand drachmae, and the play was banned. Eventually Ionia would be “liberated” by the Hellenic League in 479, but Nudell argues that this liberation may have simply been yet another conquest—this time by fellow Greeks.

In our own day, “Ionia” is simply the name of an older part of the (complicated and many-layered) nation state known as “Turkey.” Turkey itself is viewed as a (albeit more secularized) “Muslim country,” which is part of the larger “Islamic World,” a term that either conjures fearful disdain or Orientalized adulation in the Western mind. The truth of the matter is that the world is and always is much more diverse than that crafted by the perennial politicized popular imagination. The attempt to bulldoze Greekness into ready-made formulations is foolish. At the same time, the attempt to completely deconstruct and even eradicate notions of Greekness as merely arbitrary is equally wrong. As Josh Nudell demonstrates in Accustomed to Obedience?, there were many types of Greeks who remained Greek despite the efforts at eradication. Perhaps, there is time—both for scholars and for popular admirers of Ancient Greece—to follow the Greek adage of “all things in moderation” and aim for a complicated and multilayered but nonetheless authentic and appreciative understanding of Greece.

Accustomed to Obedience? Classical Ionia and the Aegean World, 480-294BCE
By Joshua P. Nudell
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023; 270pp

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