This short, and pleasingly readable, book is a welcome addition to scholarship on a crucial region of the Greek world that often evades serious scholarly attention due to a lack of extant ancient historical sources and published archaeological data. M.S.’s new historical study is a fresh and important contribution to a field that is typified by obsequious re-hashing of the same handful of passages from Herodotus and endless speculation about the nature of the semi- (or indeed entirely) mythical Ionian migration. Into this environment M.S. injects a refreshingly critical review of a diverse range of sources and draws out of them a stimulating series of themed discussions around motifs of violence, land and gender in the foundation myths of the Ionian poleis. Even so, M.S. is rightly careful to manage her readers’ expectations of what can be gleaned from such fragmentary sources, and her conclusions consequently lack deep grounding.
In a change from standard approaches that treat ancient historical sources as achronological and monocultural, M.S. confidently sets out her agenda for a new approach to Ionia that puts the place and the date of production of sources front and centre (Chapter 1). By identifying and analysing the unexpectedly rich and diverse local foundation myths of the Ionian poleis M.S. is able to provide a fascinating counter-narrative to the pro-Athenian Herodotean version of Ionian identity in the Classical period.
In Chapter 2, M.S. puts herself methodologically in the Constructivist camp of thought – analysing the construction of cultural difference in context. As such, this book is essentially a study of Ionian literary culture that treats foundation myths – of which several versions were in circulation at any one time – as literary texts and not just as sources of historical evidence. As M.S. says: ‘to reduce the myths to passive transmitters of historical fact would be to rob them of much of their social significance’ (p. 12). As texts these foundation myths undoubtedly had political utility in the complex Ionian world of competing poleis, and M.S.’s work compares both inter- and intra-polis identities and relations within Classical Ionia.
M.S. then introduces the context within which her selected texts are to be understood (Chapter 3), examining how binary opposites such as East/West and Greek/Barbarian, imposed during the Athenian Empire period, must be understood within an Ionian context. ‘The legacy of Ionian between-ness was by [the fourth century b.c.] well established, after three centuries of territorial dispute (between Persia and the Greeks)’ (p. 35). M.S. emphasises the rich local historical tradition, mostly now lost, as well as a wide range of iconography, epigraphy and archaeology, always retaining a strong emphasis on the chronology of her sources (p. 41). As M.S. reminds us, the writing of foundation myths was not a coherent genre of Greek literature until the Hellenistic period (p. 42, citing C. Dougherty, The Poetics of Colonization: from City to Text in Archaic Greece [1993]), and so this is not a comprehensive survey of Ionian foundation myths but an analysis of selected themes that highlight her new approach.
Chapter 4 is the first of M.S.’s thematic discussions, and she takes as her focus the topos of violence in the foundation myths of Miletus. She analyses the evidence for the use of the Carian and the Lydian languages at Miletus (pp. 64–8), dredging up many lesser known foundation myths about the city that contrast with Herodotus’ version with its narrative of massacre and sexual violence (pp. 69–75) and concludes that ‘a different, non-violent narrative was also available’ (p. 74). However, she is less sure of herself when handling the Bronze Age archaeological material, overlooking some publications, counter-arguments and contemporary Anatolian material (pp. 54–5). She concludes that plurality was at the heart of Milesian identity and conflict was a means of interaction between the Ionians, others and themselves.
Drawing together the fragmentary foundation myths of the Ionian island of Chios in Chapter 5, especially the poet Ion of Chios, M.S. concludes that, whereas power and ethnicity were mutable, land and viticulture were enduring motifs within Chian culture and identity (pp. 90–1). In the other major Ionian island state of Samos, its simultaneously European and Anatolian character is represented in foundation myths featuring descendants of Europa and the Maeander river god. Both, therefore, had land as a central theme in their respective foundation mythologies – which is perhaps unexpected for island states – as well as eponymous non-autochthonous founding oikists. However, there is little explanation of the link to the Maeander, and one is left with the impression that the land/sea analogy is being somewhat overstretched and the theme is being promoted at the expense of the details. Nevertheless, it is a stimulating way to tackle what could otherwise be very dry subject matter.
Unusually, the oikist of Colophon/Claros, Manto, was female and this, together with the Amazons of Ephesus/the Artemision (‘the ultimate expression of otherness’, p. 152), gives M.S. the opportunity to explore the role of gender in the foundation myths of these cities and their temples (Chapter 6). Again, alternative foundation stories existed, but Manto appears to have been given prominence over more traditional versions – Colophon evidently having had a strong Lydian identity and different attitudes to gender from its Ionian contemporaries. M.S. concludes that Colophon's culture was typified by ‘acceptance of cultural differences and plurality’ and not the ‘stark polarity’ of more traditional Athenian world views (p. 137). Female oikists emphasise how Ionian political rhetoric controverts its Athenian counterpart, which as ancient historians we are programmed to accept as the ‘norm’ in the ancient Greek world, and M.S. is to be congratulated for formulating this important countervailing point of view, but the reasoning behind her broad interpretations are not fully explored.
In her penultimate chapter (Chapter 7), M.S. tackles what would in any lesser book have been the elephant in the room of any discussion of Ionian identity – the Ionian migration. This dominant cycle of myths has determined how many scholars have viewed Ionia and still do, but M.S.’s book builds up to the conclusion that, when seen in a context of rich and differing Ionian foundation myths, the Ionian migration was just another one of a range of foundation stories available at the time. It was the Ionian migration's political utility that accounts for the significance attached to it by pro-Athenian historians during the period of Athenian expansion and then subsequently. M.S. also examines how the stories themselves do not actually imply a single ‘pure’ Greek identity for the settlers and writes: ‘while the myth of the Ionian migration was certainly used by Athens to justify its control over Ionia, it is evident that the Ionians themselves had something of a different view’ (p. 172). She also examines the so-called Ionian League, the importance of which, like the Ionian migration, has been accorded different levels of historical significance by scholars, and finds it to be a nebulous and unclear historical entity. She again returns to her theme of conflict, re-framing the Melian War as an internecine conflict between Ionians in a cultural milieu that saw warfare as part of polis life, concluding ‘fighting among themselves was a crucial part of what it meant to be Ionian’ (p. 187).
In a brief conclusion, M.S. notes that, whilst producing a definition of Ionian identity is beyond the scope of the book, her work demonstrates that whatever did define Ionian identity, it was not the contemporary Athenian oppositional model that pitted Greek/Barbarian, East/West, Europe/Asia and male/female against one another as binary opposites. Although this oppositional model undoubtedly had traction in contemporary Athenian writing, this was not the Ionian way. Rather, M.S. proposes that ‘this polarized model of cultural difference seems to have been rejected in favour of plurality, complexity and ambiguity’ (p. 202). This is certainly an attractive thesis, but one that still needs further exploration and discussion if the bold promise of her powerful introduction is to be lived up to.
M.S.’s chosen texts, source criticism and interpretations are highly original, and the themes through which she discusses political and social identity in Classical Ionia (i.e. warfare, land and gender) further the debate beyond the simple equivalence of ethnicity with identity. Her writing style and treatment of the material are fresh and engaging but somewhat under-referenced, and the themes themselves work with varying degrees of success. The most successful is her identification of war within the politically potent foundation stories that Ionians told about their own origins – something that is at odds with the traditional Orientalist view of the ‘effeminate’ East.
