satrap, perhaps understandably, preferred dealing with individual rulers rather than with councils or
assemblies. Therefore, he was generally in the habit of encouraging the establishment of tyrannies in the
Greek poleis under his jurisdiction.
SATRAP The title used to refer to the governor of a formal territorial subdivision (satrapy) of the
Persian Empire.“In the first year of Cyrus the king the same Cyrus the king made a decree concerning the house of
God at Jerusalem, ‘Let the house be builded, the place where they offered sacrifices, and let the
foundations thereof be strongly laid; the height thereof threescore cubits, and the breadth thereof
threescore cubits; with three rows of great stones, and a row of new timber: and let the expenses be
given out of the king’s house.’ ” (Ezra 6: 3–4)We saw in chapter 5 that tyrannies arose in many Greek poleis in the course of the seventh and sixth
centuries. In many instances, the tyrants were welcomed by a substantial portion of the population and
they often came to power as a result of social and political developments within the polis. On the other
hand, the tyrants in the cities under Persian domination, although they were Greeks and natives of the
cities that they ruled, were imposed by an outside power. They owed their authority and their loyalty to
the satrap, who was not even Greek: The satrap was a Persian and his court was located in the city of
Sardis, which had formerly been the capital of Croesus’ Lydian Empire. These newly installed tyrants,
since they could rely on the support of the satrap, with his seemingly limitless military power and
financial resources, felt no need to moderate their rule. Many of them became autocratic and oppressive
rulers of the sort that gave the word “tyrant” the meaning that it has today. So, since their authority rested
upon that of the Persian satrap and the Persian king, their Greek subjects projected these tyrants’ behavior
onto their Persian overlords, and the image arose in the minds of the Greeks that the Persian king was
despotic and “tyrannical.” The contrast between their own oppression and the relative freedom of the
Greek poleis of the Aegean islands, the mainland, and the west cannot have escaped the attention of the
Ionian Greeks. By the end of the sixth century, the Ionian cities were ready to revolt from their local
tyrants and from the Persians who had imposed them.
“Darius the King says, ‘These are the lands that are subject to me, lands of which I became king by
the grace of Ahura Mazda: Persia, Sousiana, Babylon, Assyria, Arabia, Egypt, the lands by the sea,
Lydia, Ionia, Media, Armenia, Cappadocia, Parthia, Drangiana, Areia, Chorasmia, Bactria,
Sogdiana, Gandara, Scythia, Sattagydia, Arachosia, and Maka, a total of twenty-three.' ” (Persian
inscription commissioned by Darius I found in Bisotun, Iran)At this time, the Persian king was Darius I, who ruled from 521 until his death in 486 and who oversaw
the expansion of the Persian Empire to its point of greatest extent. Under Darius, the Persian Empire
stretched from the shores of the Mediterranean Sea to the banks of the Indus River and included Egypt and
a small portion of Europe between the Aegean and Black Seas (map 10). The contrast between the power
and size of the Persian Empire and the insignificance of the Ionian cities on the coast could not have been
greater. The Ionians, in particular, were in a position to comprehend the magnitude of that contrast
because one of them, the Milesian philosopher Anaximander, had earlier in the sixth century created the
first map of the world. Another Milesian, Aristagoras, was the instigator of the Ionian Revolt, which