Miletus
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"The Milesians, who were a colony of Greeks, and spoke the Ionic dialect, excelled all the neighbouring nations in ingenuity, and first caught from the Persians this rage for fiction: but the tales they invented, and of which the name has become so celebrated, have all perished. There is little known of them, except that they were not of a very moral tendency, and were principally written by a person of the name of Aristides, whose tales were translated into Latin by Sisenna, the Roman historian, about the time of the civil wars of Marius and Sylla. Huet, Vossius, and the other writers by whom the stories of Aristides have been mentioned, concur in representing them as short amatory narratives in prose; yet it would appear from two lines in Ovid's " Tristia," that some of them, at least, had been written in verse"--History of Fiction (1814) by John Colin Dunlop |
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Miletus was an ancient city on the western coast of Anatolia (in what is now Aydin Province, Turkey), near the mouth of the Maeander River in ancient Caria. Evidence of first settlement at the site has been made inaccessible by the rise of sea level and deposition of sediments from the Maeander. The first available evidence is of the Neolithic.
In the early and middle Bronze age the settlement came under Minoan influence. Legend has it that an influx of Cretans occurred displacing the indigenous Leleges. The site was renamed Miletus after a place in Crete.
The Late Bronze Age, 13th century BCE, saw the arrival of Luwian language speakers from south central Anatolia calling themselves the Carians. Later in that century the first Greeks arrived, calling themselves Achaeans. The city at that time rebelled against the Hittite Empire. After the fall of that empire the city was destroyed in the 12th century BCE and starting about 1000 BCE was resettled extensively by the Ionian Greeks. Legend offers an Ionian foundation event sponsored by a founder named Neleus from the Peloponnesus.
The Greek Dark Ages were a time of Ionian settlement and consolidation in an alliance called the Ionian League. The Archaic Period of Greece began with a sudden and brilliant flash of art and philosophy on the coast of Anatolia. The first Greek science was devised by the Milesian School of philosophy.
Milesians
The Milesians of Hellenic (Greek) civilization were the inhabitants of Miletus, a city in the Anatolia province of modern-day Turkey, near the coast of the Mediterranean Sea and at the mouth of the Meander River. Settlers from Crete moved to Miletus sometime in 16th century BC. By the 6th century BC, Miletus had become a maritime empire, and the Milesians spread out across Turkey and even as far as the Crimea, founding new colonies.
Famous Milesians:
- Miletus (mythological founder)
- Thales - "first" Greek natural philosopher; "the father of science".
- Anaximander - philosopher; pupil of Thales
- Anaximenes - philosopher; friend or pupil of Anaximander
- Eubulides - philosopher; formulated the "liar paradox"
- Hecataeus of Miletus - historian
- Hesychius Illustrius - chronicler and biographer
- Aristides - writer
- Isidorus - architect
- Timotheus - poet
- Cadmus - historian, perhaps mythical
See also
- Alexander Cornelius
- Cities of the ancient Near East
- Milesians
- Milesian school
- Milesian tale
- Pergamon Museum
- Miletus (mythology)
- Milesian tale
