If Homer really knew any people called Ionians at all, they were Athenian. Meanwhile the people of the Ionian name in Asia were, according to Herodotus, "a mixed multitude," including members of the communities known to Homer as Abantes of Euboea, with forty ships, Phocians, even Arcadians, Cretans, and many others. All these could only be lumped together as "Ionians" after their settlement in Asia, and their alliance with the Ionian colonists from Attica.
If the so-called Ionian emigrants were thus mixed, and if some of them possessed Achaean lays or legends, and at first practised only the rites mentioned by Homer, such as cremation and cairn-burial, it would appear that the pre-Hellenic element among these settlers in Asia overpowered the other elements, or that the Cyclic poets of Ionia were mainly of pre-Hellenic origin. Their poems, at all events, are in harmony with Attic ideas and usages, not with Homer's statements: and, as we shall show, the Ionian poets cannot have tampered much with our Homer, for the two Epics never admit the Ionian manners which are copiously illustrated by the Ionian poets of the Trojan war, the Cyclics.
According to Thucydides as well as Herodotus, the so-called Ionian migration was a movement of mixed peoples. The leading men of various Achaean regions had found an asylum in Attica during the troubles caused by the Dorian incursions, and "so greatly increased the number of inhabitants that Attica became incapable of containing them, and was at last obliged to send colonies to Ionia."[5]
We are thus on almost historic ground when we believe that the settlers in Ionia, though their tendency was to claim Athenian connections, were "a mixed multitude" from many States, mainly of the seacoasts; and it is natural to suppose that they intermarried with Carians at Miletus, as Herodotus says that they also did with Lycians, and other Asiatic civilised peoples. Though alien religions might be accepted by the settlers, these beliefs would be Hellenised, as usual; and the Olympian Poseidon, the Homeric sea-god, patronised the Ionian league of cities.
We really have no historical evidence for the earliest conditions of Ionian life in Asia. Mr. Murray supposes the early settlers to have lost all "tribal obligations," all "old laws," and even "household and family life." "It looks as if the ancestors of the Ionians had in the extreme stress of their migrations lost hold upon their Achaean traditions." But the Ionians had no Achaean traditions to lose! They built walls to their new cities, and inside the wall a man "could take breath. He could become for a time a man again, instead of a frightened beast." A terrible picture is drawn of the sufferings and ferocious cruelties of the invaders, who, however, remain orthodox in religion after all, and confident in "the manifest help of Zeus and Apollo."[6] This is not the condition of frightened beasts. In fact, they were not in that terror-stricken condition when they were able to build walls.
No doubt there was a great deal of rough work; though, as shall be shown, judging from the art of the Dipylon, the Attic colonists were highly civilised men, with large ships, and everything handsome about them, who could make well-organised short voyages, with abundance of stores. Nor, when they landed, were they, like the early Puritans of New England, in a country of naked savages. Lycians and Carians, in Homer, are as much civilised as the Achaeans: a Carian woman was not a bloodthirsty squaw.
It is not to late legends, but to archaeology, that we must look for information: "on archaeology fell, and falls, the burden of proof in this inquiry."[7]
First, as to the culture of the mainland which the colonists left; we do know through excavations at Sparta something about Dorian civilisation there as early as the ninth century B.C., and it is probable that the Ionians in Europe were rather in advance of than behind the contemporary Dorians in the arts of life. The precinct of Artemis Orthia at Sparta has been excavated, and yields "remains of a temple in crude brick with wooden frame-work ... this structure the discoverers" (members of the British School of Athens) "refer to the ninth century B.C." A similar temple "has appeared also in Hellenic Asia, at Neandria in the Aeolic Troad."
Near the Orthian temple was "a great Altar of Sacrifice, whose orientation was the same."[8]