In the 5th century the name “Ionian” was already falling into discredit. Causes of this were (1) the peace-loving luxury (born of commercial wealth and contact with Oriental life) of the great Ionian cities of Asia; (2) the tameness with which they submitted first to Lydia and to Persia, then to Athenian pretensions, then to Sparta, and finally to Persia again; (3) the decadence and downfall of Athens, which still counted as Ionian and had claimed (since Solon’s time) seniority among “Ionian” states. In the later 4th century the name survives only (a) as a geographical expression for part of the coast of Asia Minor, (b) in European Greece as the name of that section of the Northern Amphictyony in which Athens and its colonies were reckoned.
The traditional history of Asiatic Ionia is generally accepted, and in its broad outlines is probably well founded. Common to all groups of Ionians in the Aegean is a dialect of Greek which has η for α (in Attic only partially) and (in Asiatic Ionian especially) κ for π in certain words. Herodotus states that there were four distinct dialects in Asiatic Ionia itself (i. 142) and the dialect of Attica differed widely from all other forms of Ionic. Earlier phases of Ionic forms are dominant in the language of Homer. Most Ionian states exhibit also traces of the fourfold tribal divisions named after the “children of Ion”; but additional tribes occur locally. (Hdt. v. 66, 69.) All reputed colonies from Attica (except Ephesus and Colophon) kept also the feast of Apaturia; and many worshipped Apollo Patrous as the reputed father of Ion. The few observations hitherto made on the sites of Ionian cities indicate continuity of settlement and culture as far back as the latest phases of the Mycenaean (Late Minoan III.) Age and not farther, supporting thus far the traditional foundation dates.
The theory of E. Curtius (1856-1890) that the Ionians originated in Asia Minor and spread thence through the Cyclades to Euboea and Attica deserts ancient tradition on linguistic and ethnological grounds of doubtful value. Ad. Holm supports it (Gesch. Gr., Berlin, 1886, i. 86), but A. von Gutschmid (Beitr. z. Gesch. d. alten Orients, Leipzig, 1856, 124 ff.) and E. Meyer (Philologus NF. 2, 1889, p. 268 ff.; NF. 3, 1890, p. 479 ff.) follow Herodotus with qualifications. J. B. Bury (Eng. Hist. Rev. xv. 228), though he regards the Ionian peoples as of European origin, thinks that they may have got their name from some part of the Asiatic coast. Ionian culture and art, though little known in their earlier phases, derive their inspiration on the one side from those of the old Aegean (Minoan) civilization, on the other from the Oriental (mainly Assyrian) models which penetrated to the coast through the Hittite civilization of Asia Minor. Egyptian influence is almost absent until the time of Psammetichus, but then becomes predominant for a while. Local and regional peculiarities, however, disappear almost wholly in the 5th and 4th centuries, under the overpowering influence of Athens.
Authorities.—Besides the sections on Ionians in the general histories of Greece and the references given in G. Busolt, Griechische Geschichte, i. (2nd ed., Gotha, 1893), pp. 262, 277 ff., see E. Curtius, Die Ionier vor der ionischen Wanderung (Berlin, 1855), and papers in Gott. Gel. Anz. (1856), p. 1152 f. and (1859), p. 2021 f.; Jahrb. f. kl. Philol. 83 (1860), p. 449 f.; Hermes 25 (1890), p. 141 f.; A. von Gutschmid, Beiträge z. Gesch. d. alten Orients (Leipzig, 1856), p. 124 ff.; E. Meyer, Philologus 47 (NF. 2, 1889), p. 268 ff. and 49 (NF. 3, 1890), p. 479 ff.; V. Boehlau, Aus ionischen und äolischen Necropolen (Cassel, 1897); H. W. Smyth, The Ionic Dialect (1889). P. Cauer, “De dialecto attica vetustiore quaestiones epigraphicae,” in G. Curtius, Studien z. gr. u. lat. Gramm. 8 (1875), p. 223, 399; Karsten, De titulorum Ionicorum dialecto (Halle, 1882); F. Bechtel, Die Inschriften des ion. Dialekts (Göttingen, 1877). For the political history of the Ionian Greeks see [Greece]: History, and [Ionia]; for the special history and characteristics of individual Ionian cities, the respective names.
(J. L. M.)
[1] Yunān is still a popular synonym for Oroum, a Greek, among the Arabs; in India Yavana was long the generic name for all foreigners from the north and west, a use dating probably from Alexander’s day and the Graeco-Bactrian monarchs.
IONIAN SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. Under this name are included a number of philosophers of the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. Mainly Ionians by birth, they are united by a local tie and represent all that was best in the early Ionian intellect. It is a most interesting fact in the history of Greek thought that its birth took place not in Greece but in the colonies on the Eastern shores of the Aegean Sea. But not only geographically do these philosophers form a school; they are one in method and aim. They all sought to explain the material universe as given in sensible perception; their explanation was in terms of matter, movement, force. In this they differed from the Eleatics and the Pythagoreans who thought in the abstract, and explained knowledge and existence in metaphysical terminology. In tracing the development of their ideas, two periods may be distinguished. The earliest thinkers down to Heraclitus endeavoured to find a material substance of which all things consist; Heraclitus, by his principle of universal flux, took a new line and explained everything in terms of force, movement, dynamic energy. The former asked the question, “What is the substratum of the things we see?”; the latter, “How did the sensible world become what it is; of what nature was the motive force?”
The first name in the list of the Ionian philosophers—and, indeed, in the history of European thought—is that of Thales (q.v.). He first, so far as we know, sought to go behind the infinite multiplicity of phenomena in the hope of finding an infinite unity from which all difference has been evolved. This unity he decided is Water (πάντα ὔδωρ ἐστίν). It is impossible to discover precisely what he conceived to be the relation of this unity to the plurality of phenomena. Later writers from whom we derive our knowledge of Thales attributed to him ideas which seem to have been conceived by subsequent thinkers. Thus the suggestion preserved by Stobaeus that he conceived water to be endowed with mind is discredited by the specific statement of Aristotle that the earlier physicists (physiologi) did not distinguish the material from the moving cause, and that before Anaxagoras no one postulated creative intelligence. Again in the De anima (i. 5) Aristotle quotes the statement that Thales attributed to water a divine intelligence, and criticizes it as an inference from later speculations. It is probably safest to credit Thales with the bare mechanical conception of a universal material cause, leaving pantheistic ideas to a later period of thought.