Miletus.

Greek philosophy began in a city-state on the coast of south-west Turkey: Miletus, which claimed that it was founded by a city on Crete called Milatos—probably Mallia on the north coast of Crete—in the Minoan period. If so, the Minoan foundation did not survive the catastrophe that overtook the Bronze Age civilization about 1200 B.C.E., and Miletus was refounded by Ionian Greeks during the age of migrations in the eleventh century B.C.E. The city prospered, and civic life was as turbulent as it was in most city-states in the Early Archaic Period of the seventh and early sixth centuries B.C.E. Around 600 B.C.E., Miletus' independence was threatened by her neighbor, the Lydian Empire. The city of Lydia was ruled by a strongman—a "tyrant" as the Greeks called such men—named Thrasybulus, and...