Miletus

Miletos (Balat)

The southernmost of the major cities of Ionia (western Asia Minor)—near its border with Caria—situated in ancient times at the mouth of the rich valley of the river Maeander (Büyük Menderes), but now five miles from the sea. According to Ephorus, the settlement was founded by Sarpedon from Milatos (Mallia) in Crete (or from Lycia?), a claim which may be substantiated by the discovery of successive strata of Bronze Age (Minoan and Mycenaean) occupation, culminating in a late efflorescence at the end of the Mycenaean epoch. About 1200 however, as excavation has shown, the fortifications of the town were wrecked beyond repair. In Homer's account, the people of Miletus (the only place on the whole Ionian coast mentioned in his poems) were apparently Carians. According to later Greek tradition, they lost the city (and their wives) to Ionian settlers under Neleus or Neileos (whose grandfather had come to Athens from Pylos); and it is demonstrable, from archaeological evidence, that Ionian colonists arrived from across the Aegean, probably before 1000 BC.

Subsequently Miletus became the most important, and probably the largest, city in Ionia. It derived renown from the neighboring shrine of Apollo at Didyma (qv), and extended its possessions twenty or thirty miles up the river valley. During the seventh and sixth centuries, despite perpetual rivalry with Samos, Milesians sailed from one or another of their four natural harbors (one in a bay to the east of the habitation area, and the others filling inlets to its west) to found many colonies—estimated to number more than sixty—on the Black Sea and its approaches, between the Hellespont (Dardanelles) and Tauric Chersonese (Crimea). Miletus also had much to do with the Greek penetration of Egypt, possessing representatives at the Fort of the Milesians and Naucratis; and its shipowners and businessmen engaged in a large-scale wool trade with Sybaris (Sibari) in southeastern Italy.

Miletus' coinage (at first of electrum, pale gold) started as early as the seventh century. But from that time onward the city not only suffered from grave internal strife between rich and poor—represented by the factions of wealth (Ploutis) and Cheromacha (Labor) respectively—but was often at war with the kings of Lydia in the hinterland. One of these, Alyattes, made peace with Thrasybulus, at that time (c 600) the autocratic ruler (`tyrant’) of the city. Later, however, Miletus seems to have acknowledged the suzerainty of the Lydian monarch Croesus, though maintaining a privileged and prosperous position; its population at this time perhaps amounted to 60,000. After Croesus' fall at the hands of the Achaemenid Persians (546), Miletus, too, came under Persian domination. In 499, however, under the direction of Aristogoras, the son-in-law of its last tyrant Histiaeus, it led the Ionian Revolt, which five years later, following a naval defeat off Lade (qv) terminated in the capture and sack of the city, whereupon its male survivors were removed to the mouth of the Tigris, and all the women and children were enslaved; Phrynichus' tragedy relating to the disaster caused great distress at Athens, and he was fined. The Milesian school of Pre-Socratic philosophy (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes) had belonged to the sixth century; Hecataeus, the forerunner of Greek history, advised against the Ionian revolt.

After the Persian defeat by the Greeks at Mycale (479), Miletus joined Athens' Delian League, but in the middle years of the century the Athenians imposed a garrison on its inhabitants. During the Peloponnesian War it rebelled in favor of Sparta (412), but then came successively under the rule of Persian satraps (386) and Mausolus of Caria (c 350). It was during the fourth century that Apollo of Didyma became the principal type of the local silver coinage. In 334 the Milesians opposed Alexander the Great on his southward march, submitting only after a siege, whereupon he established a royal mint in the city. During the two centuries that followed, the principal Hellenistic kingdoms—Antigonids, Seleucids, Ptolemies, Attalids—competed for influence over Miletus.

After the creation by the Romans of their province of Asia (133), it suffered seriously during their wars against Mithridates VI of Pontus (120–63), and then again in the civil strife that accompanied the fall of the Republic. St. Paul visited the city cAD 51. Subsequently, although Miletus, where the harbor increasingly suffered from silting, had become eclipsed by the grandeur of Ephesus and Pergamum, second-century emperors continued to spend large sums adorning its streets with new buildings. Apollo of Didyma remained prominent on its coinage, and successful resistance to a Gothic siege in 263 was attributed to the god's miraculous intervention.

The earliest city extended northward along a peninsula from the lofty Kalabaktepe (where the `tyrants’ may have built their acropolis) to the Lion Harbor, centering round a temple of Athena. After the Persian Wars the habitation center was displaced in a northeasterly direction to the head of that harbor, where the North Agora was built, flanked by shrines of Asclepius and Apollo (the Delphinium); another recently uncovered temple area, at Humeitepe, has been tentatively ascribed to Demeter. The new city built at this time displayed the right-angled regularity associated with the name of the famous town planner, Hippodamus, himself a Milesian.

The most impressive surviving building is a theater, perhaps the finest in Asia Minor, dating from the third century BC but rebuilt by the Romans with a capacity of at least 15,000. The South Agora of Hellenistic times, the largest known agora of the entire Greek world, further indicates the massive scale on which the public edifices of the city were laid out at this period, when shrines of the Ptolemaic god Serapis and of king Eumenes II of Pergamum—one of the city's greater builders—can also be identified, in addition to a gymnasium of Eumenes, and a stadium and palaestra that were perhaps likewise attributable to his generosity. A western agora belongs to the end of the Hellenistic epoch.

During the Roman imperial epoch even more magnificent architectural enterprises followed. The reign of Hadrian (AD 117–38) witnessed the construction of a grandiose north gateway to the South Agora, now in the Pergamon Museum in East Berlin. Outside the gateway was a council house, set in a colonnaded courtyard; and an elaborately decorated three-storey nymphaeum (fountain building) stood nearby. A bathing establishment to the south of the agora was the gift of Faustina the Younger, the wife of Marcus Aurelius, after her vist to the city in 164. The city's earliest churches of the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries AD have now been investigated, and mosaics belonging to the bishop's palace ware preserved.