Lade

In the second half of the sixth century BC the Ionian cities lost their freedom. Lydia under Croesus had already made the mainland cities tributary; when Cyrus the Great destroyed Lydia in 546, Persia inherited the arrangement and extended it, and by the reign of Darius the islands too, Chios among them, were under Persian suzerainty, governed through the convenient mechanism of tyrants whom Persia installed and protected.

In 499 BC the Ionians revolted. The revolt lasted six years, ended in catastrophe, and Chios was at the centre of both.

Herodotus is our essential witness, and he gives Chios an honourable and terrible part. When the Persian counter-offensive came, the Ionian fleets assembled at the island of Lade, off Miletus, in 494 BC. Herodotus lists the contingents in order, and the list is worth reading slowly: Miletus eighty ships; Priene twelve; Myus three; Teos seventeen; Chios one hundred; Erythrae eight; Phocaea three; Lesbos seventy; Samos sixty. Three hundred and fifty-three triremes, against a Phoenician-led Persian fleet which Herodotus puts at six hundred.

Chios's hundred was the largest single contingent by a wide margin, and there is a further detail. Each Chian ship, Herodotus specifies, carried forty epibatai — marines, fighting men on deck as distinct from rowers — and they were picked men, chosen from the citizen body. That is four thousand Chian citizens under arms afloat, over and above the crews. For a single island, it is an extraordinary commitment, and it tells you both how rich Chios was and how seriously it took the revolt.

The battle was lost before it was fought. The Persians had been working patiently on the Ionian contingents through the exiled tyrants of their cities, offering terms; and when the fleets closed, the Samians — most of them — hoisted sail and left. The Lesbians, seeing the Samians go, followed. The line came apart in the middle.

And here Herodotus writes the sentence that Chios never forgot:

They stayed in the line and fought it out. They broke through the enemy formation repeatedly, took a number of ships, and lost most of their own. Those that could still swim made for home.

What followed is among the bleakest passages Herodotus ever wrote, and its bleakness is of a specific and modern kind: not tragedy, but accident.

The damaged Chian ships did not make Chios. They ran for the mainland and beached at Mycale. The crews abandoned the wrecks and set off overland, northward, meaning to reach a friendly coast and cross. Marching by night, they came through the territory of Ephesus. And at Ephesus, that night, the women were celebrating the Thesmophoria, the festival of Demeter from which men were excluded and during which the women went out of the city.

The Ephesians, seeing an armed body of men moving through their fields in the dark, knowing nothing of any battle at Lade, drew the obvious conclusion: pirates, come for their women. They turned out in force, and they killed them.

Herodotus prefaces his account of Lade with two omens that had been sent to Chios beforehand, and they are worth recording because they show what the Greeks thought this kind of disaster looked like from the inside. Of a hundred young men whom the Chians sent as a chorus to Delphi, ninety-eight died of plague and two came home. And in the city itself, at about the same time, the roof of a schoolhouse fell in on a hundred and twenty children who were learning their letters, and one child came out alive.

The Persians took the island in 493 BC, and Herodotus describes the method they used on the islands with a word that has stuck: they sagineuein — they "dragnetted" them. The soldiers formed a line from coast to coast, joined hands, and swept the whole island from one end to the other, so that nobody could be missed. The most beautiful boys were castrated and sent to the King's court as eunuchs; the most beautiful girls were sent to the King; the towns and their temples were burned.

Chios recovered, as Greek cities generally did. But Lade is the founding trauma of Chian civic memory, and it establishes the pattern that would repeat in 86 BC and again, most terribly, in 1822: an island of exceptional wealth and exceptional exposure, with no interior worth defending and no possibility of holding out against a serious enemy who controls the sea. Every subsequent generation of Chian leadership has had that fact somewhere in mind, and it explains a great deal about how the island has behaved when other people started wars.

Persian rule over the islands ended with the Greek victories of 480 and 479. After the battle of Mycale, fought on the mainland within sight of Chios, the Ionians and islanders were admitted to the Greek alliance, and Herodotus records that the Chians, Lesbians, and Samians were bound to it by oath.