An island close adjoining to the coast, or an outlying tongue of land connected with the continent by a narrow isthmus, and presenting some hill sufficient for an acropolis, seems to have been considered as the most favorable situation for Grecian colonial settlement. To one or other of these descriptions most of the Ionic cities, conform.[297] The city of Milêtus at the height of its power had four separate harbors, formed probably by the aid of the island of Ladê and one or two islets which lay close off against it: the Karian or Kretan establishment, which the Ionic colonists found on their arrival and conquered, was situated on an eminence overhanging the sea, and became afterwards known by the name of Old Milêtus, at a time when the new Ionic town had been extended down to the water-side and rendered maritime.[298] The territory of this important city seems to have comprehended both the southern promontory called Poseidium and the greater part of the northern promontory of Mykalê,[299] reaching on both sides of the river Mæander: the inconsiderable town of Myûs[300] on the southern bank of the Mæander, an offset seemingly formed by the secession of some Milesian malcontents under a member of the Neleid gens named Kydrêlus, maintained for along time its autonomy, but was at length absorbed into the larger unity of Milêtus; its swampy territory having been rendered uninhabitable by a plague of gnats. Priênê acquired an importance greater than naturally belonged to it, by its immediate vicinity to the holy Pan-Ionic temple and its function of administering the sacred rites,[301]—a dignity which it probably was only permitted to enjoy in consequence of the jealousies of its greater neighbors Milêtus, Ephesus, and Samos.[302] The territories of these Grecian cities seem to have been interspersed with Karian villages, probably in the condition of subjects.
It is rare to find a genuine Greek colony established at any distance from the sea; but the two Asiatic towns called Magnêsia form exceptions to this position,—one situated on the south side of the Mæander, or rather on the river Lethæus, which runs into the Mæander; the other more northerly, adjoining to the Æolic Greeks, on the northern declivity of Mount Sipylus, and near to the plain of the river Harmus. The settlement of both these towns dates before the period of history: the tale[303] which we read affirms them to be settlements from the Magnêtes in Thessaly, formed by emigrants who had first passed into Krête, under the orders of the Delphian oracle, and next into Asia, where they are said to have extricated the Ionic and Æolic colonists, then recently arrived, from a position of danger and calamity. By the side of this story, which can neither be verified nor contradicted, it is proper to mention the opinion of Niebuhr, that both these towns of Magnêsia are remnants of a primitive Pelasgic population, akin to, but not emigrants from, the Magnêtes of Thessaly,—Pelasgians whom he supposes to have occupied both the valley of the Hermus and that of the Kaïster, anterior to the Æolic and Ionic migrations. In support of this opinion, it may be stated that there were towns bearing the Pelasgic name of Larissa, both near the Hermus and near the Mæander: Menekratês of Elæa considered the Pelasgians as having once occupied most part of that coast; and O. Müller even conceives the Tyrrhenians to have been Pelasgians from Tyrrha, a town in the interior of Lydia south of Tmôlus. The point is one upon which we have not sufficient evidence to advance beyond conjecture.[304]
Of the Ionic towns, with which our real knowledge of Asia Minor begins, Milêtus[305] was the most powerful; and its celebrity was derived not merely from its own wealth and population, but also from the extraordinary number of its colonies, established principally in the Propontis and Euxine, and amounting, as we are told by some authors, to not less than seventy-five or eighty. Respecting these colonies I shall speak presently, in treating of the general colonial expansion of Greece during the eighth and seventh centuries B. C.: at present, it is sufficient to notice that the islands of Ikarus and Lerus,[306] not far from Samos and the Ionic coast generally, were among the places planted with Milesian settlers.
The colonization of Ephesus by Androklus appears to be connected with the Ionic occupation of Samos, so far as the confused statements which we find enable us to discern. Androklus is said to have lingered upon that island for a long time, until the oracle vouchsafed to indicate to him what particular spot to occupy on the continent; at length the indication was given, and he planted his colonists at the fountain of Hypelæon and on a portion of the hill of Korêssus, within a short distance of the temple and sanctuary of Artemis; whose immediate inhabitants he respected and received as brethren, while he drove away for the most part the surrounding Lelegians and Lydians. The population of the new town of Ephesus was divided into three tribes,—the pre-existing inhabitants, or Ephesians proper, the Bennians, and the Euônymeis, so named (we are told) from the deme Euonymus in Attica.[307] So much did the power of Androklus increase, that he was enabled to conquer Samos, and to expel from it the prince Leôgorus: of the retiring Samians, a part are said to have gone to Samothrace and there established themselves, while another portion acquired possession of Marathêsium near Ephesus, on the adjoining continent of Asia Minor, from whence, after a short time, they recovered their island, compelling Androklus to return to Ephesus. It seems, however, that in the compromise and treaty which ensued, they yielded possession of Marathêsium to Androklus,[308] and confined themselves to Anæa, a more southerly district farther removed from the Ephesian settlement, and immediately opposite to the island of Samos. Androklus is said to have perished in a battle fought for the defence of Priênê, which town he had come to aid against an attack of the Karians. His dead body was brought from the field and buried near the gates of Ephesus, where the tomb was yet shown during the days of Pausanias; but a sedition broke out against his sons after him, and the malcontents strengthened their party by inviting reinforcements from Teôs and Karina. The struggle which ensued terminated in the discontinuance of the kingly race and the establishment of a republican government,—the descendants of Androklus being allowed to retain both considerable honorary privileges and the hereditary priesthood of the Eleusinian Dêmêtêr. The newly-received inhabitants were enrolled in two new tribes, making in all five tribes, which appear to have existed throughout the historical times at Ephesus.[309] It appears too that a certain number of fugitive proprietors from Samos found admission among the Ephesians and received the freedom of the city; and the part of the city in which they resided acquired the name of Samorna, or Smyrna, by which name it was still known in the time of the satirical poet Hippônax, about 530 B. C.[310]
Such are the stories which we find respecting the infancy of the Ionic Ephesus. The fact of its increase and of its considerable acquisitions of territory, at the expense of the neighboring Lydians,[311] is at least indisputable. It does not appear to have been ever very powerful or enterprising at sea, and few maritime colonies owed their origin to its citizens; but its situation near the mouth and the fertile plain of the Kaïster was favorable both to the multiplication of its inland dependencies and to its trade with the interior. A despot named Pythagoras is said to have subverted by stratagem the previous government of the town, at some period before Cyrus, and to have exercised power for a certain time with great cruelty.[312] It is worthy of remark, that we find no trace of the existence of the four Ionic tribes at Ephesus; and this, when coupled with the fact that neither Ephesus nor Kolophôn solemnized the peculiar Ionic festival of the Apaturia, is one among other indications that the Ephesian population had little community of race with Athens, though the œkist may have been of heroic Athenian family. Guhl attempts to show, on mistaken grounds, that the Greek settlers at Ephesus were mostly of Arkadian origin.[313]
Kolophôn, about fifteen miles north of Ephesus, and divided from the territory of the latter by the precipitous mountain range called Gallêsium, though a member of the Pan-Ionic amphiktyony, seems to have had no Ionic origin: it recognized neither an Athenian œkist nor Athenian inhabitants. The Kolophonian poet Mimnermus tells us that the œkist of the place was the Pylian Andræmôn, and that the settlers were Pylians from Peloponnesus. “We quitted (he says) Pylus, the city of Neleus, and passed in our vessels to the much-desired Asia. There with the insolence of superior force, and employing from the beginning cruel violence, we planted ourselves in the tempting Kolophôn.”[314] This description of the primitive Kolophonian settlers, given with Homeric simplicity, forcibly illustrates the account given by Herodotus of the proceedings of Neileus at Milêtus. The establishment of Andræmôn must have been effected by force, and by the dispossession of previous inhabitants, leaving probably their wives and daughters as a prey to the victors. The city of Kolophôn seems to have been situated about two miles inland, but it had a fortified port called Notium, not joined to it by long walls as the Peiræeus was to Athens, but completely distinct. There were times in which this port served the Kolophonians as a refuge, when their upper town was assailed by Persians from the interior; but the inhabitants of Notium occasionally manifested inclinations to act as a separate community, and dissensions thus occurred between them and the people in Kolophôn,[315]—so difficult was it in the Greek mind to keep up a permanent feeling of political amalgamation beyond the circle of the town walls.
It is much to be regretted that nothing beyond a few lines of Mimnermus, and nothing at all of the long poem of Xenophanês (composed seemingly near a century after Mimnermus) on the foundation of Kolophôn, has reached us. The short statements of Pausanias omit all notice of that violence which the native Kolophonian poet so emphatically signalizes in his ancestors: they are derived more from the temple legends of the adjoining Klarian Apollo and from morsels of epic poetry referring to that holy place, which connected itself with the worship of Apollo in Krête, at Delphi, and at Thebes. The old Homeric poem, called Thebaïs, reported that Mantô, daughter of the Theban prophet Teiresias, had been presented to Apollo at Delphi as a votive offering by the victorious epigoni: the god directed her to migrate to Asia, and she thus arrived at Klarus, where she married the Kretan Rhakius. The offspring of this marriage was the celebrated prophet Mopsus, whom the Hesiodic epic described as having gained a victory in prophetic skill over Kalchas; the latter having come to Klarus after the Trojan war in company with Amphilochus son of Amphiaraus.[316] Such tales evince the early importance of the temple and oracle of Apollo at Klarus, which appears to have been in some sort an emanation from the great sanctuary of Branchidæ near Milêtus; for we are told that the high priest of Klarus was named by the Milesians.[317] Pausanias states that Mopsus expelled the indigenous Karians, and established the city of Kolophôn; and that the Ionic settlers under Promêthus and Damasichthôn, sons of Kodrus, were admitted amicably as additional inhabitants:[318] a story probably emanating from the temple, and very different from that of the Kolophonian townsmen in the time of Mimnermus. It seems evident that not only the Apollinic sanctuary at Klarus, but also the analogous establishments on the south of Asia Minor at Phasêlis, Mallus, etc., had their own foundation legends (apart from those of the various bands of emigrant settlers), in which they connected themselves by the best thread which they could devise with the epic glories of Greece.[319]
Passing along the Ionian coast in a north-westerly direction from Kolophôn, we come first to the small but independent Ionic settlement of Lebedus—next, to Teôs, which occupies the southern face of a narrow isthmus, Klazomenæ being placed on the northern: this isthmus, a low narrow valley of about six miles across, forms the eastern boundary of a very considerable peninsula, containing the mountainous and woody regions called Mimas and Kôrykus. Teôs is said to have been first founded by Orchomenian Minyæ under Athamas, and to have received afterwards by consent various swarms of settlers, Orchomenians and others, under the Kodrid leaders Apœkus, Nauklus, and Damasus.[320] The valuable Teian inscriptions published in the large collection of Boeckh, while they mention certain names and titles of honor which connect themselves with this Orchomenian origin, reveal to us at the same time some particulars respecting the internal distribution of the Teian citizens. The territory of the town was distributed amongst a certain number of towers, to each of which corresponded a symmory or section of the citizens, having its common altar and sacred rites, and often its heroic eponymus. How many in number the tribes of Teôs were, we do not know: the name of the Geleontes, one of the four old Ionic tribes, is preserved in an inscription; but the rest, both as to names and number, are unknown. The symmories or tower-fellowships of Teôs seem to be analogous to the phratries of ancient Athens,—forming each a factitious kindred, recognizing a common mythical ancestor, and bound together by a communion at once religious and political. The individual name attached to each tower is in some cases Asiatic rather than Hellenic, indicating in Teôs the mixture not merely of Ionic and Æolic, but also of Karian or Lydian inhabitants, of which Pausanias speaks.[321] Gerrhæidæ, or Cherræidæ, the port on the west side of the town of Teôs, had for its eponymous hero Gerês the Bœotian, who was said to have accompanied the Kodrids in their settlement.
The worship of Athênê Polias at Erythræ may probably be traceable to Athens, and that of the Tyrian Hêraklês (of which Pausanias recounts a singular legend) would seem to indicate an intermixture of Phœnician inhabitants. But the close neighborhood of Erythræ to the island of Chios, and the marked analogy of dialect which Herodotus[322] attests between them, show that the elements of the population must have been much the same in both. The Chian poet Iôn mentioned the establishment of Abantes from Eubœa in his native island, under Amphiklus, intermixed with the preëxisting Karians: Hektor, the fourth descendant from Amphiklus, was said to have incorporated this island in the Pan-Ionic amphiktyony. It is to Pherekydês that we owe the mention of the name of Egertius, as having conducted a miscellaneous colony into Chios; and it is through Egertius (though Iôn, the native poet, does not appear to have noticed him) that this logographer made out the connection between the Chians and the other group of Kodrid settlements.[323] In Erythræ, Knôpus or Kleopus is noted as the Kodrid œkist, and as having procured for himself, partly by force, partly by consent, the sovereignty of the preëxisting settlement of mixed inhabitants. The Erythræan historian Hippias recounted how Knôpus had been treacherously put to death on ship-board, by Ortygês and some other false adherents; who, obtaining some auxiliaries from the Chian king Amphiklus, made themselves masters of Erythræ and established in it an oppressive oligarchy. They maintained the government, with a temper at once licentious and cruel, for some time, admitting none but a chosen few of the population within the walls of the town; until at length Hippotês the brother of Knôpus, arriving from without at the head of some troops, found sufficient support from the discontents of the Erythræans to enable him to overthrow the tyranny. Overpowered in the midst of a public festival, Ortygês and his companions were put to death with cruel tortures and the same tortures were inflicted upon their innocent wives and children,[324]—a degree of cruelty which would at no time have found place amidst a community of European Greeks: even in the murderous party dissensions of Korkyra during the Peloponnesian war, death was not aggravated by preliminary tortures. Aristotle[325] mentions the oligarchy of the Basilids as having existed in Erythræ, and as having been overthrown by a democratical revolution, although prudently managed: to what period this is to be referred we do not know.
Klazomenæ is said to have been founded by a wandering party, either of Ionians or of inhabitants from Kleonæ and Phlius, under Parphorus or Paralus: and Phôkæa by a band of Phokians under Philogenês and Damon. This last-mentioned town was built at the end of a peninsula which formed part of the territory of the Æolic Kymê: the Kymæans were induced to cede it amicably, and to permit the building of the new town. The Phokians asked and obtained permission to enrol themselves in the Pan-Ionic amphiktyony; but the permission is said to have been granted only on condition that they should adopt members of the Kodrid family as their œkists; and they accordingly invited from Erythræ and Teôs three chiefs belonging to that family or gens,—Deœtês, Periklus, and Abartus.[326]