6

THE BIRTH OF PHILOSOPHY AND THE PERSIAN WARS

Miletus and the Beginnings  of  Philosophy

The Agora

The Ionian  Revolt  (499–494    BC)

The Persian Wars:   Marathon

The Persian Wars:   Thermopylae,    Salamis,    and Plataea

The Greeks’ contacts with their neighbors to the east were both beneficial and dangerous. Familiarity
with the science and thought of the Babylonians, Persians, and other flourishing civilizations contributed
to the intellectual ferment that produced the earliest philosophers in the sixth century BC in the eastern
Greek city of Miletus. These philosophers were concerned to answer fundamental questions about the
origin and the organization of the universe for the first time without recourse to mythical or supernatural
entities. While they may have been prompted to undertake their enquiries because of contact with the
advanced civilizations of their non-Greek neighbors, it was the open environment of the Ionian Greek
poleis that allowed them to challenge the assumptions of their predecessors and of each other. That same
open environment encouraged the development of the earliest forms of democratic government, just at the
time when the cities of Ionian Greece had become subjected to rule by the expanding Persian Empire. The
remainder of the chapter traces the course of the series of conflicts in the early fifth century BC between
the Greeks and the Persians, a people who spoke, and speak today, an Indo-European language and who
lived, and live today, in what is now Iran. These conflicts began with the unsuccessful Ionian Revolt,
continued with the spectacular Athenian victory over Persian forces at Marathon, and concluded with the
final defeat of the Persians at sea at the battle of Salamis and on land at the battle of Plataea.

We have seen in previous chapters that a number of the most characteristic features of Greek
civilization emerged as a direct result of Greek contact with non-Greek neighbors in western Asia and
Egypt: the alphabet developing from the West Semitic writing system, the pose of Archaic kouroi from
that of Egyptian statuary, the symposium from the oriental practice of reclining on couches, coinage from
the technology of the Lydians. In this chapter, we will examine some further results of that contact: the
invention of philosophy in sixth-century Ionia and the military conflict in the early fifth century that we
refer to, because of our dependence primarily upon Greek sources, as the “Persian Wars.”

Miletus and the Beginnings of Philosophy

In the seventh and sixth centuries BC, the city of Miletus was among the most prosperous and powerful of
Greek poleis. It was located on a peninsula that afforded the Milesians excellent harbors, at the mouth of
the Maeander River, which winds its wayward course down from the interior of Asia Minor (map 9). The
site of Miletus therefore favored contact by sea with the rest of the Greek world and by both land and sea