one of the three important ethnic divisions of the ancient Greeks, the other two being the Aeolians and the Dorians. Attica was the center of the Ionic culture on the mainland. The island of Euboea and most of the Cyclades were also regarded as Ionic but the name IONIA, (q.v.) was confined to the narrow strip along a western coast of Asia Minor. The name Iones or Iavones was current in remote antiquity; Javan, a variant form, occurs in Gen. 10:2, as a son of Japeth. To the Hebrews the name represented the entire Greek race; to the Persians, the Greeks were known as Jauna. In Hesiod’s genealogy Ion was the son of Xuthus and the brother of Achaeus. In Homeric times the Ionians lived in Attica. According to Herodotus their original home was in the northeast Peloponnesus; expelled by the Achaeans, they went to Attica and later, to escape the conquering Dorians, to the Cyclades and to Asia Minor. Some authorities regard the Ionians as the foremost wave of Greek-speaking peoples to reach Greece and as the promoters of the Mycenaean culture. Greater artistic and literary ability is attributed to them than to either the Aeolians or Dorians.

Ionic, their dialect, was one of the four linguistic divisions of the ancient Greek language, the other three being Aeolic, Doric, and Arcado-Cyprian or Achaean. Ionic (with admixtures of Aeolic) was the language of Homer and Hesiod. It developed into the Attic dialect which, in classical times (6th–4th cent. bc), was the language of the great playwrights Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, the orator Demosthenes, the philosopher Plato, and the historians Thucydides and Xenophon.