Note 1372 — Chapter IX · Sicyon, Megara, Miletus, Ephesus, Leontini, Agrigentum, Cumae

Miletus must have profited enormously by the fall of Polycrates (about 523 B.C.) and the raising of the blockade that he had maintained against all the subjects or allies of the Great King.

Hdt. IV. 137 makes Histiaeus assert that it was thanks to Darius that the Ionian tyrants were on their thrones, and that if the power of Darius was destroyed neither would he (Histiaeus) be able to rule the Milesians nor any other tyrant any other people. But the Greek does not say that Darius had put the tyrants on their thrones, and the words of Histiaeus are described as an opinion, not as an assertion of fact. Herodotus therefore neither states nor suggests that the Ionian tyrannies were due to the active interference of Darius. After the Ionian revolt the Persian satrap “established democracies in the Greek cities,” or in other words openly proclaimed that they might govern themselves.