Miletus

The richest Greek city in Asia Minor, the one that started the Ionian Revolt, and the place where Greek philosophy begins. Miletus stood at the mouth of the Maeander with four harbours, and founded some ninety colonies around the Black Sea - more than any other Greek city - which gave it the grain and fish trade of an entire sea. Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes all taught there in the sixth century, and are conventionally the first philosophers because they explained the world by natural causes rather than by gods. Anaximander drew the first map of the known world and argued that living things had come out of the sea. Hecataeus wrote the first prose geography, and Hippodamus, born there, gave his name to the grid plan. Under Persian rule the city was governed by a tyrant, and in 499 that tyrant's son-in-law Aristagoras, on the advice of Histiaeus in Susa, raised Ionia in revolt and asked Athens for help. Athens sent twenty ships and Sardis was burned - the pretext for the Persian invasions of Greece. The revolt was crushed at Lade in 494. Miletus was besieged, taken, its men killed and the survivors deported to the Tigris; when a playwright staged a tragedy about it in Athens the audience wept and the city fined him for reminding them of their own failure. Miletus was rebuilt on Hippodamus's grid and never mattered as much again. The city's colonies outlasted it. Sinope, Cyzicus, Olbia and Panticapaeum were Milesian foundations, and the grain that fed classical Athens came down the Bosphorus through them. Miletus itself silted up: the Maeander deposited so much sediment that the harbours closed and the site now lies several miles inland, which is why the ruins are unusually well preserved and why nothing was built over them.

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