Notes for the video "Ionian Revolt: Part 2"
Sardis campaign:
The Battle of the Pamphylian Sea won by the Eretrians against "Cypriots" is from Plutarch's "On the Malice of Herodotus", it doesn't appear in Herodotus's Histories. The Cypriots here are usually interpreted to mean Phoenicians instead (who made up the bulk of the Persian navy) as it would be very strange if the Cyprus kingdoms that join the revolt later that year fought against the Greeks at the beginning of the uprising. I just write that the fleet is "coming from Cyprus", leaving its identity ambiguous.
Eretria being the leading sea power of Greece at the time is a reference to Eusebius's list of Thalassocracies, which lists Eretria from 505-490 BC, so from the time its neighbor and rival Chalkis was taken over be Athens, until its destruction in the first Persian invasion of Greece.
The layout of the city of Sardis in 498 BC is problematic: Herodotus 5.101 describes the Paktolos stream flowing through the city square, where the counter-attacking Persians gather. One would assume that the city square is at the center of the town, but archaeology revealed that the Paktolos stream flowed outside the Lydian (pre-Persian) and the Roman era city walls. The Persians destroyed the city's walls when they captured the city from Kroisos, and as Herodotus describes, all the buildings were made of reeds and other soft materials so there are no significant remains from this era, so it's impossible to verify the town's extent in the relevant period. One theory is that the Persians moved the city west of the earlier Lydian location and later the Greeks or Romans moved it back, but it makes no sense to move the city away from its acropolis. I solve the paradox by extending the city to include both the territory inside the Lydian/Roman walls, and an area on the Paktolos stream added to it. This still has the strange effect that the city square ends up at the edge of the town, not at its center, so I'm not fully convinced about this solution.
The Persian counter-attack inside Sardis is problematic too: Herodotus first describes that the entire lower city is captured, and Artaphrenes and his guards retreat to the citadel. But after this, when the lower city is burning, the Persians gather at the city square to avoid getting trapped by the fires. But where did these Persian come from if the entire city was taken aside from the Acropolis? Some translations solve this by having the Persian break out of the acropolis and rush to the city square from there, but this makes no sense, as the stone fortress at the edge of the city, and 300 meters above it, wouldn't be threatened by the fire in the lower city. So one has to assume that there were still scattered Persian forces in a mostly captured city when the fires broke out.
Plutarch's commentary of Herodotus has a completely different description of the Sardis campaign: there Miletos is under siege, the Greeks attack Sardis in order to lift this siege, and after burning the city they retire to Miletos, having accomplishing what they came for, and not flee to Ephesos as in Herodotus. It's impossible to reconcile this with Herodotus's narrative, so I don't show any of it.
Hdt 5.116 has the 3 son-in-laws of Darius chasing the Greeks who attacked Sardis back to their ships. (5.122 also repeats this claim.) I interpret this as a reference to 5.102, so that the 3 son-in-laws are the Persian reinforcements coming "from the provinces west of the Halys river" and the act of chasing the Greeks to their ships is the ensuing Battle of Ephesos. Based on this identification, I show the 3 Persian generals as participating in the Battle of Ephesos. But the chronology is really confusing here, because Herodotus's narrative makes it sound like the battle of Ephesos happened immediately after the burning of Sardis, and also that the Persians recaptured the Hellespontos immediately after Ephesos, yet in 5.103 the Hellespontos only joins the revolt later. Most likely Herodotus's narrative here is jumping around in time and leaving out long time gaps without mentioning it, instead of providing a strict chronology (which is typical of him). I wouldn't be surprised if in reality weeks or months passed between Sardis and Ephesos, and between Ephesos and the Hellespontos, and this would also make it easier to incorporate Plutarch's description of the campaign.
Miltiades at Lemnos and Imbros:
I place the capture of Lemnos from Hdt 6.140 in 498 BC, based on the idea that this is when the Hellespontine Greeks like Miltiades join the Ionian revolt, and when the island becomes easy prey as it's cut off from the Persian empire. Unfortunately Herodotus doesn't provide any clues about the chronology of this event, and some academics put it c. 510 BC instead, shortly after the Persians capture the island as described in Hdt. 5.26. This makes no sense to me, because it would mean that Miltiades had already revolted from the Persians in c. 510 BC by taking an island from them, yet for the next 12 years he wasn't punished for it, and remained a tyrant under Persian control. It's also hard to imagine Athens holding an island for 12 years that the Persians lay claim to, without this creating a conflict between them. The Athenian embassy asking for Persian help in 507 BC at Hdt. 5.73, for example, is hardly believable if Athens and Persia had a territorial dispute at the time. A third theory by N. G. L. Hammond places Miltiades's takeover of the island before the Persian capture of Lemnos, but this creates even worse paradoxes like that Persia would then take over the island from Athens, not the Pelasgians, but in Herodotus there is no conflict between Athens and Persia at this time yet, and in Hdt 5.26 it's stated that the island was "at that time still inhabited by Pelasgians", not Athenians.
The support for the pre-512 BC date comes from Cornelius Nepos's Life of Miltiades: it places the capture of Lemnos by Miltiades before the 513 BC Scythian expedition, and thus before its capture by the Persians from the Pelasgians in Hdt. 5.26, but Nepos also places Miltiades's escape in Hdt 6.41 at 513 BC after the Danube bridge incident, not at the end of the Ionian Revolt in 493 BC where it should belong. But Nepos's work is riddled with so many basic errors, like mixing up Miltiades the Younger and Miltiades the Elder, putting Karians on Lemnos, Miltiades conquering the Kyklades for the Athenians etc., that I'm inclined to think that he just misinterpreted the (rather convoluted) chronology of Herodotus, especially at Hdt 6.40-41. Note that Herodotus never even explicitly says that Miltiades participated in the Ionian Revolt, it has to be inferred from the context during the episode where he is fleeing the Persian fleet in 6.41, and finding the correct chronological placement of this episode also requires a careful reading of the text. To me it seems like Nepos tried to summarize Herodotus's text without being able to follow the multiple levels of recursion, digressions, and time jumps in the narrative. But Hammond thinks the differences are because Nepos summarizes Hellanicus, not Herodotus.
Diodorus 10.19 seems to place the expulsion of the Pelasgians around c. 510 BC too, but it's not clear if the ordering of the fragments of his Book 10 represents a real chronological order. He writes that the Lemnians led by Hermon left their island because of their fear of the Persians. I assume the fear of the Persians refers to Lycaretos's opression of the Pelasgians before he died (Hdt 5.27). But things are complicated further by Zenobios 3.85 which places Miltiades's capture of the island around the time when Darius conquered Thrace (c. 512 BC) and seems to imply that what they feared was that Darius would invade them too.
It doesn't help that there is a hole in the manuscript at Hdt 5.27 so we never learn how Lycaretos, the Persian governor of Lemnos, died. I could imagine that the Lemnians led by Hermon revolted and killed the Persian governor, then Miltiades took over the island, this could explain the Diodoros and Zenobios fragments, and allow Miltiades to capture the island in c. 510 without challenging the Persians, but this is very speculative.
Imbros: Herodotus never actually states that Miltiades captured Imbros (or that he handed it over to Athens), he only says these things about Lemnos. But it seems like an obvious inference, as the island is halfway between Miltiades's Chersonessos and Lemnos, and the fact that he escapes to Imbros in Hdt. 6.41 implies that it was under his control when the Ionian Revolt ended. Both islands were inhabited by the same Pelasgian nation, they were captured together by the Persians in Hdt 5.26, and they both gained the same special status in the Athenian empire later - it seems that the fate of the two islands was interlinked at every stage. Based on this I show Imbros captured and handed over to Athens together with Lemnos.
There is no date provided for the expulsion of the Lemnians from Attika in Hdt. 6.137, the only clue is that "at that time neither they [the Athenians] nor the other Hellenes as yet had household servants". Solon's laws in the beginning of the 6th century BC already deal with slavery, so I simply write in the video "more than a century earlier".
Herodotus doesn't tie the Pelasgians of Lemnos to Tyrrhenia, but Thucydides 4.109 and Diodoros 10.19 both call them Tyrrhenians, and the inscriptions on the Lemnos Stele resemble the Etruscan language.
There are further problems with the status of Lemnos and Imbros after the Ionian revolt too: Book 6 of Herodotus ends on a triumphant tone with Miltiades capturing Lemnos and ending the long standing feud with Athens, writing "And that was how the Athenians came to take control of Lemnos", implying that this is the beginning of the island's long history of being an Athenian colony with a special status, that lasted for almost a century. But actually Lemnos must have been recaptured by the Persians in either 493 or 492, so Athenian control only lasted 5 or 6 years, and it was permanently liberated only after 480 BC: Hdt 8.11, and 8.82 show the Lemnians fighting in Xerxes's army in 480 BC, and Suda i.544 has Hippias retiring to Lemnos after the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC (although Cicero Att. 9.10 says he died at Marathon). Lemnos and Imbros lie along the invasion path of Mardonios's campaign in 492 BC, so even if the Phoenician fleet failed to retake it at the end of the Ionian Revolt in 493, Mardonius's fleet must have captured it. One could argue that the earlier proposed date for Miltiades capturing Lemnos (c. 510 instead of 498) fits better since it leaves at most 20 years for the Athenians to colonize the island before losing it, not just 5 or 6.
Cyprus:
There were about a dozen different kingdoms on Cyprus at this time, but unfortunately Herodotus only describes the role played by 4 of them in the Ionian Revolt (Salamis, Amathous, Kourion, Soloi) and later name drops a fifth one, Paphos. The Persian siege of Paphos dated to the revolt is known only from archaeology. I highlight a few others that are guaranteed to have existed in this era because they are mentioned in the relevant time frame by Thucydides or Diodoros (Marion, Kition, Lapethos, Keryneia) and Idalion, which is known from inscriptions from this period.
Herodotus states that all the Cypriot kingdoms joined the revolt except for Amathous (5.104), but some academics question the participation of the Phoenician kingdoms, claiming that only the Greek ones would have joined. My impression after reading up on the ancient cities of Cyprus is that almost every city had both Greek and Phoenician elements, and there was no sharp dividing line between Greek and Phoenician kingdoms. e.g. Marion is considered fully Greek, and pseudo-Skylax singles it out as Hellenic, yet it had Phoenician kings and Phoenician inscriptions on its coins. While Kition, the quintessential Phoenician city, is called "a Greek city that had received Phoenician colonists" by one ancient writer, and its famous people were Greeks. As a result, I show the entire island joining the revolt.
My interpretation of Hdt 5.108 is that it was the Phoenicians who carried Artybios's army from Kilikia to Cyprus, and then they had to round the "Keys of Cyprus" promontory to get from a landing place on the northern coast to Salamis. - this is the only explanation I could come up with to explain why the Phoenicians had to go around the headland.
Amathous: I assume that Onesilos must have lifted the siege of the city to free up his army for the Battle of Salamis, but Herodotus's narrative just jumps from the siege to the battle. That the men of Amathus cut off the head of Onesilos, and took it to their city suggests that Amathous participated in the Battle of Salamis on the Persian side, but I didn't want to draw another arrow on the already crowded map to show this.
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