READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

THE ASSYRIAN EMPIRE. TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER XIX

LYDIA AND IONIA

I.

THE CENTRAL ANATOLIAN POWERS: PHRYGIA AND SARDES

The Greek settlements in west Asia Minor were favoured, throughout the early stages of their growth, by immunity from molestation at the hands of any really formidable inland power. This happy state of things, however, barely survived the eighth century BC. Some process of social and political development, the result alone of which is known to us, had brought a compact kingdom into being in the middle valley of the Hermus. After about 685 BC (this date is a compromise obtained conjecturally by reckoning backwards from a later moment fixed with fair certainty by Assyrian chronology), that kingdom was directed and developed into an aggressive state by the Mermnad Lydian, Gugu, whom Greeks called Gyges.

Some twenty years earlier another kingdom—Phrygia—the strongest of its day in Asia Minor, had suffered a disaster, which left it as impotent to dominate its neighbours, as a similar disaster, five centuries before, had left the Hattie Kingdom in Cappadocia. The capital of the last had lain some four hundred miles behind the Ionian coast; that of the Phrygian Kingdom, some two hundred and fifty. Now the political centre of gravity in the interior shifted westward once more, and, with the rise of Gyges, stayed in a city which lay at no greater distance from the easternmost Ionian community than might be ridden post in a single summer day. Both those earlier kingdoms, it seems, had exercised in their respective days some political influence all over Anatolia down even to its western littoral—an influence varying in inverse ratio to the eastward distance of their respective centres.

Our sole, but sufficient, warrant for an extension of Cappadocian influence into what would later be Ionia is furnished by the ‘Hittite’ rock-sculptures of the Sipylene district; for such inference as maybe drawn from the Amazonian traditions of Ionian cities are not of much avail in our present uncertainty about the race or civilization to which the Amazons belonged. But, as was hinted in an earlier chapter, those sculptures do not suffice to argue more than the existence of a state attached culturally, but not necessarily politically, to the Cappadocian Hatti. Their isolation, west of a broad belt entirely devoid, so far as we know at present, of ‘Hittite’ monuments, forbids belief in such a Hattie occupation of western Asia Minor as would justify its districts ever being called provinces of a Cappadocian empire. Of the three Sipylene monuments in question only one flanks a road from the interior. The other two stand by a coastal track leading from Ephesus across the neck of the Smyrna peninsula by the pass of Nymphi. One must not, therefore, speak of ‘Hittite satraps’ in Lydia or Sipylus. If, in the thirteenth century BC a kingdom of Hattie derivation, or at least, Hattie culture, existed on the Ionian coast, it seems, so far as our evidence avails, detached from the main Cappadocian kingdom. The Lydian country behind it shows virtually no trace of Hattie civilization, and the Phrygian, behind this again, though touched by Cappadocian influence, had a fundamentally distinct culture.

Very little is known from Greek literary tradition about the Phrygian kingdom which is presumed to have risen upon the ruin of the Hattie; but something can be guessed from the comparative abundance of its extant monuments. Both Herodotus and Strabo (who used the Lydian history of Xanthus) were persuaded by their authorities that the Phrygian people was of Thracian origin; and while the former believed that it was related to the Armenian race, some later writers asserted that it succeeded to a prior Armenian population which had settled awhile in central Asia Minor before migrating eastwards. Strabo dated this immigration from Thrace after the Trojan War. What is known of the later Phrygian language vouches for the Indo­European character of the race, or part of it, and, therefore, supports the Greek tradition of a European immigration. So also does what can be conjectured, on other grounds, about the source and direction of the popular movements which seem to have disturbed Asia Minor in the twelfth century BC. If there was an independent state in Phrygia at a date still earlier, we can claim knowledge of it only by treating the Homeric references to its princes as historical records of the twelfth century. In the Iliad, Phrygians appear as dwellers under princes in fenced cities, and as wielders of a power at least equal to that of Priam who marries a princess of theirs. The only Greek tradition which has reached us about the founding of their monarchy places its earliest centre far up the Sangarius river at Gordium, and implies that its institution ended a period of anarchy. If stress be laid on the reference in the Iliad to a Phrygian war with ‘Amazons’, falling early in Priam’s reign, we may suppose this anarchy to have followed an emancipation from Cappadocian domination which was achieved by the force of immigrants from across the Bosphorus. These would have ascended the natural highway up the Sangarius valley and concentrated at Gordium, as others following that road (e.g. European reinforcements for Alexander the Great) did in ages to come.

This foundation-tradition, transmitted to us by more than one Greek, hesitates between the names of Gordius and Midas for the first Phrygian king; but another tradition, preserved only in an excerpt, makes a Midas lead the Thracian immigrants. Both these names persisted in use to much later times, and it is possible that they were, originally, designations rather of royalty than of personality. Midas seems to be the same as Mita, the name given by Assyrian scribes to at least two kings, who were ruling in south-eastern Asia Minor in the eighth and the seventh centuries BC; and perhaps it is to be detected even earlier in the name of the people, Mitanni, = ‘Mita’s men’. Since Herodotus attests its use also in Macedonia, we must credit (as evidently he did) the Mitanni and the Mushki, as well as the maker of the historic monarchy in Phrygia, with belonging to an immigrant element from Europe, and include them among the invaders who came from the same Balkanic region at different epochs.

If the original seat of Phrygian monarchy had been at Gordium, the presence of royal tombs in the district of later Nacoleia, and the splendour of the other remains there, argue that subsequently its centre shifted about a hundred miles south-west, almost on to the divide between the Sangarius and the Hermus. The date to be assigned to this change must depend partly—the duration to be assigned to Phrygian monarchical power depends almost entirely—upon the view which may be taken of the chronological evidence offered by the rock-monuments of the Nacoleian district. These fall into three groups, of which the earliest, composed of certain tombs whose facades show ‘heraldic’ sculptures, has commonly been ascribed to the ninth century BC; while the latest group—the tombs with architectural facades of Doric type—is dated usually to the Mermnad time, after the downfall of Phrygian primacy. It is to be observed, however, that the principal argument of those who begin the series so late as the ninth century rests upon a view about the date of the Lion Gate at Mycenae which is not now held by the best authorities. If the analogy between this Gate and the Lion Tomb at Ayaz it is considered close enough to approximate the two monuments chronologically (it has been thought so close as to argue that the Mycenae Gate was itself Phrygian work), the beginning of the Phrygian rock monuments must be pushed back at least as far as the eleventh century. Nor can it be said any longer that either those stylistic analogies with Assyrian art which have been remarked in the oldest Phrygian sculptures, or the appearance of inscriptions in Asianic characters upon monuments of a later (the second) group preclude so early a date. We know from the excavations at Ashur that Assyrian art had a very ancient history; and probably no one nowadays would venture to dogmatize about the source from which the Phrygian alphabet was derived, the moment at which it was first adopted, or the length of the period during which it remained in use.

To whatever epochs the divers groups of Phrygian monuments respectively belong, it is hardly reasonable to refuse to regard some of them as memorials of the monarchy connected by tradition with the Trojan (Priam’s queen was a princess of Phrygia), which bulked so largely in the imagination of the early poets of the Aeolic Epos. Nor—unless a great period of Phrygian power, in which its political, or at least cultural, influence dominated all western Anatolia even to the Aegean, be allowed to be pre-Ionian—is the impression made by things Phrygian on early Greek cult and myth, which puzzled Grote, readily to be accounted for. We have to explain why the Sipylene Mother was regarded as the eldest of cult-figures, and how a cycle of myth concerning Tantalus and Pelops came to be common to the Peloponnesus and to Phrygia. There are also traditions of a Phrygian thalassocracy in the Aegean, prior to the Carian, and of early Greek borrowings from Phrygia (e.g. in music) which affect the question. As has been well known for the last half­century, certain remarkable remains of forts, towns and tombs exist on the flanks of Sipylus. They are certainly pre-Greek, but whether of the same period as the ‘Hittite’ monuments already mentioned is uncertain. Since they have no distinctively Cappadocian features and do not conform to Hattie architectural styles, it is preferable to regard them as memorials of a later period, that is of a later Sipylene state after Hattie times. The existence of a tomb of distinctly Phrygian type near the Niobe supports the theory that the ‘Tantalid’ remains represent a coastal community dependent culturally, if not politically, on the Phrygian monarchy. If so, the inner country to the east and north up to Mount Ida and the Troad may be regarded as having been also in the Phrygian sphere. Thus the Homeric tradition will be explained. Such a development of Phrygian power on the Aegean littoral may be presumed to have been subsequent to the transference of its centre westward from the Sangarius; but it is probable that the same immigrants who first established it had been seen in the western districts also before the change. More than one ancient historian of repute knew a tradition that Lydia had been invaded by a northern horde, to which the general name, Cimmerian, was attached, long before the historic sack of Sardes, in 652 BC. Eusebius, indeed, pushes the invasion back into the twelfth century.

As for the condition of Lydia during the period of general Phrygian dominance, we may assume that its chiefs owed some sort of allegiance to that power. Moreover, if Strabo is right in his assertion that Sardes came into existence comparatively late—after the Trojan War—we shall ascribe its foundation to this Phrygian period and perhaps to princes of the same racial family as the Phrygians. Possibly it marked the beginning of some social unification of a country previously divided among tribes, and of their reduction to the rule of cities. Hyde, the only settlement in the country to which the Iliad alludes, seems to have preceded Sardes on a neighbouring, or even the same, site. Its name was given, in later times, to the citadel of Sardes; and one of its cults seems to have survived, if we may judge by a Lydian inscription found at Sardes, which cites, among other gods, Tavsas Hudans, Zeus of Hyde.

The first princes, who ruled in Sardes, make the Second or ‘Heraclid’ Lydian Dynasty of Herodotus, to which he ascribes a duration of five hundred and five years. Little as his early chronology is respected by modern commentators, it must be allowed that those figures, reckoned backwards from the accession of his Third, or Mermnad, Dynasty in or about 685 BC, indicate a very likely epoch at which a Dynasty, of more or less Indo-European blood, may have been instituted, namely the first decade of the twelfth century. Hardly anything that is other than pure myth is recorded about these Heraclidae, except the Graecized forms of half a dozen royal names. The only story of their time worthy of serious attention is that told by Herodotus of a migration of part of the Lydian population to the land of the Umbrians. It appears to echo a real event which occurred before Greeks settled on the bay of Smyrna, but after Lydia had begun to use her historical script-characters. Many hold the Heraclidae to have been the first Lydians so-called—a race which had subdued and penned into the upper valley the Maeonians whom alone the Iliad places in Lydia. Pliny states that Maeonians were prior to Lydians; but Strabo admits a dispute in his day, whether they were two peoples, or two names for a single people. We are not in a better position to decide than he; but we may note that no Greek ever includes the Lydian name among those ethnical elements said to have come out of Thrace.

Archaeology hardly helps. Virtually nothing that can be certified to be Heraclid has come to light, except a little stratified pottery at Sardes. These sherds make too small a body of evidence to suggest more than a hypothesis—that the earliest Lydian culture was of the coastal ‘Cycladic’ type, and that this was succeeded by one near akin to that illustrated by scanty ceramic evidence obtained among the Phrygian monuments. But a retrospective inference from other abundant Lydian products of the early Mermnad age found in Sardian tombs may, perhaps, legitimately be drawn. These represent a civilization of very considerable artistic capacity, beginning to be influenced by Ionian culture, but fundamentally native. Later remains of the sixth and fifth centuries show the native element still in vigorous dominance (for example, the Lydian script defied the Ionian till well into the fourth century). It would be a miracle if the pitch of artistic achievement attained by the middle of the seventh century had sprung from barbaric beginnings lying no further back than the accession of the Mermnadae; and it is more reasonable to credit generations before that date with a not inconsiderable Lydian civilization, and to infer that the later Heraclidae and their subjects had gone some way towards emancipation from Phrygian dependence before the Cimmerian invasion of 705 B.C. brought the Midas monarchy to ruin. Of any relations, however, between Heraclid Lydia and the Greek cities we have no notice, beyond what may be implied by a statement that the Mermnad kings had old scores to settle with Ephesus whose colonists long before had pushed Lydians out of their lands; or by that intercourse between Agamemnon, king of Aeolic Cyme, and the last Midas, which led to Damodice, the daughter of the Greek, entering the Phrygian’s harem. At any rate, their mutual communications and also the girl must have traversed the Hermus valley.

II.

GYGES AND THE INDEPENDENCE OF LYDIA

History finds firmer ground in the seventh century. The last of the Heraclidae, whom Herodotus calls Candaules, a name interpreted by Suidas as a divine epithet meaning the Strangler of the Dog or Wolf, was known to the Greeks as Myrsilus. Since this was also the name of the mythical charioteer of Phrygian Pelops, and of a Lesbian (of a rather later time), its resemblance to the Hattie name Murshil may be only accidental. Among this king’s bodyguards, who probably were drawn from a territorial nobility, was one Gyges, a Mermnad (this may signify a member of a people, or clan, or house), son of Dascylus, a name which appears in Phrygia and in the appellation of an important town in Mysia of Phrygo-Lydian origin. He had an intrigue with the queen, killed the king, and ascended his throne, in or about 685 B.C. This event and its circumstance, garnished with fantastic and conflicting stories, have provoked much modern guessing; but whether Gyges was of royal Heraclid blood, or a chief of an oppressed tribe or house, or a representative of an earlier native dynasty, or a Maeonian opposed to Phrygian foreigners, or the first true Lydian to gain power (so some interpret an Assyrian scribe’s statement that his master, Ashurbanipal, had never heard previously of Luddi), or a client-prince of Tyra in the Cayster valley—whether he was any or none of these things, we simply do not know. At all events, his accession seems to have been opposed. We hear of a popular movement against him, to suppress which he had to call a Carian ally to his aid.

However the reign began, epigraphic evidence from contemporary Assyria attests and dates certain events in its course so well that they are based as soundly as any in Ancient History. Gyges found himself menaced after a few years by a northern horde of ‘Gimirrai’ or Cimmerians, drawn either from the same source as that whence the invaders of Phrygia and of Cappadocia a generation earlier had come, or freshly from beyond the Euxine. Gimirrai, under a king, Teushpa, who were raiding Armenia, and fighting with troops of Esarhaddon of Assyria in 679 B.C., had perhaps been headed westwards. Gyges applied for help to Esarhaddon’s successor, Ashurbanipal, and after 663 obtained sufficient material assistance to defeat the northerners and send two of their chiefs in chains to Nineveh. A little later, in 660, we find him and his people definitely enrolled among the feudatories of Ashurbanipal; but very soon after, the Lydian king joined in the movement which Psammetichus I of Egypt excited against Assyria. His suzerain’s chronicles record with satisfaction that, as a result of this defection, ‘Gugu’ was attacked by the Gimirrai, defeated and killed. This happened, according to the received Assyrian canon, in 652 BC. Herodotus tells us that the enemy followed up the broken army into Sardes itself, but could not take its citadel. Since he puts this disaster in the reign of Ardys, we must assume that Gyges had been killed in the first shock.

Thus we have some leading events of the reign well authenticated, and a date for its close. Nor is there less reasonable certainty about another important fact, added by Herodotus, that Gyges inaugurated an aggressive policy against his Greek neighbours on the west. Mimnermus, writing a generation or two later, confirms. We hear that the Lydian attacked, at one time or another, Miletus, Colophon, Magnesia ad Sipylum, and perhaps also Smyrna. There was a series of raids. Nicolaus of Damascus says of Gyges’ warfare against Magnesia, that he made several incursions into its territory. He seems not to have captured the citadels of any of those cities, and such positions as he did take (for example, the lower town of Colophon) he did not occupy permanently. Evidently he failed to enter any part of the city of Miletus, and after raiding its fields, came to terms with it. If this exceptional act of his policy be rightly connected with another recorded act—his permission to the Milesians to colonize, and assume control of, Abydos on the Hellespont—and if the two acts are rightly to be accounted for by fear (ultimately justified) of fresh Thracian danger, then his Milesian raids may be conjectured to have ended about the same time (663 B.C.) as that at which we find him applying to Assyria for help. The rich offerings which were shown to Herodotus at Delphi as gifts of Gyges may, like the throne dedicated there by Midas, have been also fruits of the constraint, under which Anatolian princes were placed by the constant ‘Cimmerian’ menace, to conciliate the mother cities of Greek outposts on the Hellespont and Euxine.

Some modern commentators have seen in Gyges’ initiation of war between Lydia and Ionia the reasoned aggression of a national king determined to secure ports for his people. The same reason might also be pleaded for his extension of Lydian dominion northwards to Adramyttium and the Troad, which, as Strabo states (no doubt, following Xanthus), became wholly his. But his failure to occupy Ionian territory, and his abstention from attacking Cyme and Ephesus, the most convenient of the port towns, do not support that view. On the whole, his proceedings in regard to Ionia, like those of all his successors before Croesus, look like annual razzias of the Assyrian sort, each raid being but a swoop for plunder, as Herodotus says of Cimmerian attacks; and the latter’s well-known assertion that, not until the reign of Croesus were Greek cities enslaved, i.e. brought under permanent over­lordship, is probably to be understood to imply that none of the earlier kings did more than devastate and depart.

Mermnad rule must have rested on a much better organized society than Heraclid if Gyges, within a few years of his accession, could risk aggressive action of this recurrent sort against the western cities, which had so long been left alone. Lydia had evidently taken a long stride forward in civilization since her society passed from tribal to civic life. The wealth ascribed by Greeks to her first Mermnad king, as well as the hint of luxury conveyed in the story of his paederastic relations with a Smyrniote bard, indicate that she had succeeded to that hegemony of Anatolia which had been Phrygian. Control of not only the natural riches of the home valley, but also those of the western lands of the Phrygians, famous for fruits and flocks, lay behind such swift political growth. But whether it owed anything to a new administrative system, or a new national spirit engendered by the accession of an indigenous dynasty, we do not know.

The condition of the Greek cities, when this inland menace first declared itself, is hardly less obscure than that of their enemy, and in dealing with them at this moment one must use generalities for the most part. All the Ionian cities seem already to have abandoned constitutional monarchy for the rule of noble clans. The executive was usually in the hands of a president or Prytanis elected by the ruling clique and constitutionally responsible to his electors, but not to the population as a whole. Outside Ionia, it is uncertain whether kingship had yet disappeared. Cyme in Aeolis retained a king till at least the closing years of the eighth century. About political conditions in the Doric Hexapolis at this time we have no information.

The Ionian cities, with two exceptions, Ephesus and Colophon, had met since an early date, certainly prior to the accession of Gyges, for common religious celebrations at the Panionium on Mt Mycale; but they obeyed no single political leader among them or any national obligation to assist another in defence or offence, unless the other were a political dependency, as Priene seems to have been of Miletus, or there were an agreement ad hoc, such as appears to have existed between Miletus and Chios a little later than this moment. On the contrary, there were chronic enmities, as, for example, between Miletus and Samos, and attacks on one city by another were common.

To these causes of general military weakness must undoubtedly be added the effect of colonial expansion during the ninth and eighth centuries. Drained of their fighting men, the cities gained only commercial advantages by becoming ‘mothers.’ No colony seems to have come to the aid of its metropolis during the Lydian wars. Meanwhile the Ionian cities, and in chief, Miletus, already showed symptoms of wealth and luxury. As entrêpots for the raw materials of the richest part of Anatolia (notably for wool), and exporters of its and their own manufactures in textiles, metal-work, dyes, and fine articles of household use, they had begun to breed merchant-princes able to lend money to inland kings, and, though the full bloom of their culture was not quite yet, men free to devote their time to the practice of philosophy, literature and the fine arts. Citizens took mercenary service abroad, but their cities do not seem to have hired soldiers. The nobles and their squires had long sufficed them.

There was now, however, to be a new need; for, as we have seen, a ‘Cimmerian’ inroad followed on the attacks of the Mermnad. The slayers of Gyges came on westward down the valleys of the Hermus and the Cayster, and by the latter route fell on Magnesia ad Maeandrum and Ephesus, burning the former, but at the latter proving unable to capture more than the Artemisium outside the walls. Whether they extended their depredations to other Ionian cities—their array certainly suggested a theme to Clazomenian painters—or how long they stayed in Ionian territories, we do not know. The Ephesians, at any rate, seem to have been able to occupy and restore Magnesia, and we know that by 650 the leader of the horde, Tugdamme, as Assyrians called him, or Lygdamis, as the Greeks record his name, was gone to eastern Asia Minor to meet his death in Cilicia (or, perhaps, rather Cappadocia). His name, if really Lygdamis, would belong to the Aegean world; but more probably it was Dygdamis. One authority (quoted by Strabo) said that Lycians took part with the Cimmerians.

What was this people, or peoples, whose raids with their consequences make so large a proportion of our meagre knowledge of Asia Minor in the seventh and eighth centuries and perhaps earlier still? Assyrian scribes, contemporary with events in the first half of the seventh century, speak only of Gimirrai (Hebrew, Gomer), when recording both the campaigns of Esar- haddon and Ashurbanipal, and also the fortunes of Gyges, against northern hordes. Herodotus, also, in relating both the Lydian and the Greek history of Asia Minor, speaks only of Cimmerians. But Strabo distinguishes the sackers of Magnesia as Treres, a race which we know subsequently in Bulgaria during the fifth century BC. At the same time he calls these, in one passage, a Cimmerian people, and in another, Cimmerians passing under another name. Treres, if from Bulgaria, must have come by way of the Hellespont; and whatever may have been the route taken by the first northern horde which broke into Asia Minor in the eighth century BC (Herodotus brings it round the east of the Euxine), there can be no doubt that it was from the Balkans that other northern elements entered subsequently. Hence the Hellespontine policy of Gyges and the long tenure of Antandrus by Cimmerians.

We know, in fact, too little about these northern hordes in Asia Minor to restrict their incursions to two appearances or to any definite number; or to regard them as derived from only one ethnic stock or locality; or, indeed, to be sure that all who appeared in the west were composed wholly of newcomers. It is quite possible, for example, that the horde which attacked Gyges had started no farther afield than Sinope, where we know that a ‘Cimmerian’ settlement had been formed towards the end of the previous century. As for the common name Cimmerian, Herodotus certainly makes it cover more than one people; and apparently with both Assyrians and Greeks it stood for any non-Scythian horde, which invaded from the north. In any case, fresh reinforcements from the Balkans or the Euxine ceased to accrue within the seventh century. One account says that Ardys expelled the last ‘Cimmerians’ from Asia Minor (some think it was he who fought with and slew ‘Lygdamis’ in Cappadocia) after Scythians had broken up their settlement at Sinope, and opened a way for Milesian colonists to reoccupy that place; and that the last ‘Cimmerian’ chief was killed before 630 BC by the Scythian Madyes, in the Mysian country. Strabo’s authority made this chief a Trerian. The other account, that of Herodotus, postpones the catastrophe of the ‘Cimmerians’ to the reign of Alyattes.

III

LYDIAN AGGRESSION

Except for that disputed success against the slayers of his predecessor, Ardys is little more than a name, though Herodotus assigns to him a long spell of rule. No doubt it was under the Assyrian aegis that he was able to restore peace to Lydia (he seems to have repaired his predecessor’s breach with Ashurbanipal), and it must have been when all danger from Thracians and other northerners was at an end, that he resumed, as Herodotus relates, Gyges’ practice of raiding west, but without respect for Gyges’ Milesian policy. For not only did Ardys attack Miletus, but he captured her dependency, Priene. If the motive assigned above for Gyges’ complacency towards the Milesians be correct, it is intelligible that his successor, who had not to fear the same danger, should have disregarded the obligation of that policy. He did not succeed, however, in taking Miletus, nor did his two successors, who are said to have conducted, one after the other, not less than twelve raiding campaigns into its territories. Alyattes, says Herodotus, made a point of devastating the Milesian fields year by year, but of sparing the farm-steads. Thus he hoped to preserve to the farmers some inducement to return and to plough for the coming spring. This is the policy of a looting raider, not of a national statesman desirous of securing the port of Miletus. There is no reason to suppose that any Lydian ever assaulted the city itself. In the end, Alyattes, during his sixth raid, resumed the policy of Gyges and came to terms with the great Ionian community which had sustained successfully not only his shock but also a Samian attack (perhaps concerted with him) on Priene.

Alyattes, like his predecessor, found himself either involved, or likely to be involved, in an inland war. This time it was with the Medes, who came down into Cappadocia about 590 BC to avenge, says Herodotus, a refusal by Alyattes to hand over certain Scythians; but more probably to make good the inheritance of Asia Minor which went with their succession to the Assyrian rights, but was menaced by the Lydian extension over Phrygia to the Halys. Some five years of warfare, which, on the whole, must have been favourable to the Lydian, led to the greater king agreeing that Alyattes’ farthest limit, the Halys river, should be his formal boundary; and the pact was clinched by a marriage between the royal houses, Astyages, son of Cyaxares the Mede, taking to wife Aryenis of Lydia. This event is fixed with fair certainty to 585 BC by the mention of an eclipse which interrupted the last battle before the agreement. In that year, though no line of totality struck the Halys, astronomical authorities are agreed that an eclipse of magnitude sufficient to have constituted the portent implied in Herodotus’ story did occur in Asia Minor. Most remarkable is a statement by the latter that two kings, one of Cilicia, the other of Babylon, mediated between the Mede and the Lydian. If this were indeed so, then each mediator must be presumed a friend of one or the other principal party; but of which, respectively, we cannot say for certain. Since there had been a Lydian understanding with Babylon at the time of Gyges’ defection from Assyria, and this understanding was still potent in Croesus’ day, and since Cilicia is mentioned by Herodotus as a part of Asia Minor ‘within the Halys’ which Croesus did not hold, it is more probable that it was the Babylonian than the Cilician who acted for Alyattes.

Herodotus, however, ascribing Alyattes’ pact with Miletus to none of these things, tells how the king, after his fifth raid, sent to Delphi, asking why he had been stricken with illness. The Pythia bade him make atonement for sacrilege committed upon a shrine of Athena at Assessus near Miletus. Of this reply Periander, tyrant of Corinth, was able to inform Thrasybulus, tyrant of Miletus, before a herald appeared from Sardes with Alyattes’ offer of no better than truce for such time as might be necessary for the rebuilding of the temple; and Thrasybulus threw dust in the envoy’s eyes by the time-worn expedient of collecting all the city’s resources into his view and convincing him that there was abundance in reserve. On receipt of his report at Sardes, Alyattes amended his offer to one of peace and alliance. Better ground for the king’s change of purpose than the effect of a stale trick may be demanded without rejection of the rest of the tale; but, at the same time, one may suspect that, if Alyattes consulted Delphi in the midst of war with the richest of Greek cities, he was seeking a plausible pretext for coming to terms with it. It was a war by which, in any event, neither Miletus nor the Pythian foundation stood to gain.

Alyattes attacked other Ionian cities or their lands, and these operations also should be placed before the Median war. His horsemen pushed farther into Ionia than those of his predecessors. They reached the walls of Clazomenae, after taking the city of Smyrna and devastating it so drastically that the surviving population did not refortify the place or repair their civic organization, but remained living in open villages. But the attack on Clazomenae was not successful, and probably such raiding was not repeated after 590 BC. Both tradition and archaeology indicate a period of peace between Lydia and the Greeks, which covered all the latter half of Alyattes’ reign. Intercourse between the two evidently developed apace, and resort to Sardes became common with Greeks. Even under the previous reign, if Pausanias’ story about the intention of the exiled Aristomenes be well founded, a distinguished Peloponnesian could regard the court of Sardes as a safe refuge. As for Alyattes, records multiply of relations between him and his house of the one part, and Greeks of Ephesus, Mitylene, and even Corinth and Athens of the other. If Solon really visited Sardes, it must have been in this reign, not in that of Croesus, whom, however, he may have seen as a child at his father’s court. Periander catered for Alyattes’ pleasures with three hundred Corcyrean youths, and the ruling house of Pythagoras at Ephesus formed a tie of intermarriage with the Lydian royal family, which saved the city’s lands from the fate constantly befalling those of Colophon on the one hand and Miletus on the other. Colophon, owing perhaps to its inland position near the road from Sardes to Ephesus, seems to have been permeated sooner and more completely than any other Ionian city by Lydian influence. Its Asian luxury became notorious, and in Roman times we find a priestly family of the place still boasting descent from Ardys the Lydian. A late story represents Colophonian horsemen, invited treacherously to Sardes by Alyattes, accepting his overture without surprise.

Archaeological evidence supplied by the American excavations at Sardes shows a steady increase of Greek influence in Lydia from the period of Gyges to that of Alyattes. Under Croesus, and the early Persian hegemony, we see a still more rapid growth. The earliest wheel-made slipped and painted ware, which overlies a stratum containing sherds with incised and occasionally painted decoration of the class that precedes the ‘sub-Mycenaean’ ware of Ionia, is of a ‘geometric’ kind more akin to the Early Iron Age pottery of Cyprus and of Phrygian sites than to any other wares. Belonging to the ninth and eighth centuries BC, it shows no demonstrably Western influence. But superimposed on it are sherds of the same kind of vessels as were found in the earliest tombs of the necropolis on the west of the Pactolus; and these are clearly of the first part of the seventh century. Throughout the series which follows, representing the rest of that century and all the sixth, not only do imitations of Greek forms and decoration become continuously more frequent, but so do also actual objects of Greek manufacture, including some from overseas.

IV

LYDIA AND THE TYRANNIES

With Lydia rests partial responsibility for a change in the spirit and the action of Ionian cities, which becomes evident early in the sixth century BC. Though little is known of them at this epoch, beyond the tradition and the fragmentary remains of their intellectual productivity, two facts are certain—first that they passed, one after another, from oligarchical rule and the Prytanis to the control of Tyrants; second that their efforts in foreign colonization practically ceased. The last fact was in some measure an effect of the first; for, as has been already shown, Greek colonial expansion everywhere had been to a great extent an expression of democratic, or at least, anti-oligarchic feeling, although encouraged by the oligarchs themselves as a salutary vent. The Tyrants were the creation of that same feeling; but anti-oligarchs as they were by birth, raised to power by those who were subjects or unprivileged, their interest lay in closing a vent by which periodically the plebeian manhood of the community was depleted, and new oligarchies were instituted elsewhere. Lydia played into their hands by exposing the incapacity of the oligarchs to defend the city’s lands against a foreign foe—such an exposure as often befell the landed chivalry of European countries in after ages; and also played into the hands of the Tyrants by creating an atmosphere of apprehensive militarism, favourable to the concentration of executive power in single hands. That the sixth-century Tyrants, except in rare instances (as at Mitylene), worked, as soon as might be, to consolidate their personal power at the expense of the democracy does not alter the fact that the Tyrannis in Ionia was a stage— probably a necessary stage—in the evolution of democracy. It was not destined however to bear its natural fruit there nearly as quickly and fully as in western Greece or even the isles; for its development was arrested by the same cause which had helped to initiate it—the pressure of an external power. As is well known, Persia, so soon as she assumed the Ionian heritage of Lydia, insisted everywhere on the indefinite continuance of the Tyrannis in the interest of the security and facility of her own domination. We are not told what action Lydia may have taken to control the politics of the cities during the short space of time in which she was suffered to hold Ionia in a subjection which seems to have been somewhat less complete; but such stories as have come down to us about friendly relations between Alyattes or Croesus and Greek cities almost all refer to intercourse with tyrants or with members of tyrannical houses. It appears, therefore, likely that Lydia, for the same reasons as Persia, anticipated the latter’s policy in respect of the Tyrannies.

The only accounts of consecutive events in Greek societies of Asia that we possess, even in outline, for the period under review —the latter part of the reign of Alyattes—concern Mitylene and Samos. Unfortunately their conditions differed from those of the Ionian mainland in one most important regard. Though Mitylene, for example, was threatened by the Lydian occupation of Adramyttium, and had certain interests on the mainland, particularly at the mouth of the Hellespont, where her commercial aims were even now clashing with the nascent ambitions of Athens, she could not feel anything like the same apprehension as weighed on, say, Ephesus or Miletus. Her history, therefore, cannot be taken as typical of civic development in mainland Ionia. Moreover, the process of her political evolution came to be distinguished from that of almost any other city, of which we know anything at all at this time, by the leadership of an honest democrat, who worked out the salvation of the unprivileged class, not as a tyrant (if we are to believe later authorities and not the hints of his local enemy, Alcaeus), but as an aesymnetes or dictator, elected for a definite term.

The decennial regime of Pittacus (c. 585—575), which fell in the middle years of Alyattes’ reign, was, however, in effect, a Tyranny which was preceded by stages typical of the process by which the democratic process developed contemporaneously in most cities of Greece, and therefore, in all likelihood, in Ionia. We hear at first of a dominant close oligarchy exercised by a clan descended from the house of Penthilus, formerly royal. Its increasingly licentious oppression brings on a rising, led by nobles of other clans, among whom we are told the name of the Cleanactidae. The net result of a popular success is the establishment of a wider oligarchy but an oligarchy still. This quickly develops an oppressive attitude under leaders, of whom the names Myrsilus and Megalopyrus have come down, as well as those of the famous lyrist, Alcaeus, and his brother, Antimenidas. A foreign danger had already created, on a small scale, something of the atmosphere of apprehensive militarism prevalent on the mainland. The Athenians had sailed to wrest from the Mityleneans the key of the Hellespont, which the latter thought to have secured by occupying Sigeum, in despite of a prior Athenian claim. The Lesbian levy fought these claimants; one at least of the oligarchs, Alcaeus, disgraced himself by flight and was so little ashamed to own it, that evidently his failure in a patriotic affair was not much accounted by his friends in comparison of his fidelity to their own political aim. A long war was not successful and in the end the Lesbians had to submit before 590 BC to the friendly arbitration of Periander of Corinth who gave the enemy his desired footing on the Hellespont while he relegated the Lesbians to the less eligible Achilleum site nearby. Exasperated and apprehensive, the nobles of the opposition excited the lower classes which, doubtless, had been given arms and training for the Sigean War. They were successful; but since oligarchy had become impossible, the administration was confided to the single hands of a popular hero, Pittacus, who was connected by marriage with the old royalty. He thus became an ‘elective tyrant,’ as Aristotle calls the Prytaneis elsewhere, laid hands on ex-oligarchs, including Alcaeus and his brother (he is said soon to have released them on condition hat they exiled themselves), and governed Mitylene for an agreed term of ten years.

The most important Ionian tyrant of this epoch, Thrasybulus of Miletus, is a shadowy figure, about which much modern conjecture has been hazarded. In fact, we know next to nothing about him—neither when he gained power nor whether he was prior to Thoas or Damasenor, whose names have been handed down as those of Milesian tyrants in early days; nor again, how long he retained his power. It is probable that he was raised to his seat in the course of the Eleven Years’ War with Lydia, and certain that he maintained relations with the powerful Periander of Corinth. It has been proposed to transfer to his credit the eighteen years of Milesian thalassocracy, which Eusebius dates half-a-century earlier; but the latter’s dating synchronizes well with the highest activity of Milesian colonizing effort, which had slackened almost to nothing by the close of the seventh century.

We do know, however, that his reign was followed, either immediately or after a very short interval, by a long period of intestine strife. Herodotus, who records that this period preceded the great prosperity of Miletus in the years before the Ionian Revolt, says its duration was for two generations of men. It must, therefore, have begun well before the middle of the seventh century and have covered the whole reign of Croesus, if not some part also of that of Alyattes. It looks as if the Tyrannis had excited in Miletus just such a phase of democratic ebullition as is heard of at about the same time in Samos, Mitylene and elsewhere; but this did not end, as in some other communities, with the establishment of democratic government. On Miletus, as elsewhere in Ionia, we know that the action of Persia imposed the Tyrannis afresh, if, indeed, its tenure had ever been interrupted.

V

LYDIAN CONQUEST OF IONIA

Internal strife and external pressure in one and the same age are grave disadvantages; but, to judge by the brilliant succession of Ionian names of the seventh century which were held in honour by Greek tradition, and also by the remains of the Ionian art of the period—for example those found in the lowest stratum of the Ephesian Artemisium—the removal of the oligarchies, by allowing racial genius to express itself widely and fully, more than counteracted the evil conditions.

Alyattes died after a long reign, and his son Croesus ascended his throne at the age of thirty-five. The precise year of his accession is doubtful, depending, as it does, on back reckoning from a disputed date for his fall; but it was certainly not before 560, and probably not after 557 BC. His mother was Carian; and, owing to another marriage of his father to an Ionian woman, and to the marriage of his sister with Melas of Ephesus, more of the spirit of the West breathed upon his early years than upon those of any previous heir of Lydia. Nicolaus of Damascus records that his father sent him to govern Adramyttium and the plain of Thebe. If he really saw and spoke with Pittacus of Mitylene, who was dead by 570, it was probably during his sojourn on that neighbouring coast, and he must have been commissioned to the province as little more than a boy, as is not at all unlikely. We are told further that in his governorate the young prince showed an unbridled temper which posterity contrasted with the balanced piety of his mature years. Other early relations of his with Greeks were remembered by tradition—for example, with the Ephesians Pindarus, his sister’s son, and the banker, Pamphaes. The usual kind of harem intrigue seems to have been set on foot by the Ionian queen to forestall her lord’s nominee; and an attempt to poison Croesus is alluded to by Plutarch. How much violence had to be used to secure his succession we do not know; but certainly he put an end to his would-be rival.

He succeeded to a wide ‘empire’ of the Oriental kind, acquired mainly by his father. His sphere of exclusive influence embraced, says Herodotus, all the peoples of Asia Minor ‘within the Halys,’ except the Lycians and the Cilicians (probably southern Cappadocians as well as Cilicians south of the Taurus). The inland peoples, doubtless, had been reduced already to the second stage of ancient Oriental subjection—liability to ordinary and regular tribute; but the Ionian Greeks and probably also the Dorian and most of the Aeolic, were in the first stage—liability to extraordinary occasional levies. Very few except residents in some Lydian colony, like Adramyttium, had passed into the third stage— subjection to territorial sovereignty. The lord of the interior now proposed to force all the coastal societies into the second stage. He opened operations, says Herodotus, with the Ephesians, possibly out of particular hostility to his nephew, Pindarus, the local ruler. The city saved itself from sack by the famous device of linking its walls by a rope to the precinct of Artemis, but Pindarus, says a late authority, had to fly. The inhabitants, we are told, were forced to dismantle their hill forts and take up residence in the indefensible plain; and, content with this precaution, the Lydian, minded to conciliate their goddess, gave substantial aid to the restoration of her temple which had been in progress since the ‘Cimmerian’ sack about a century before.

The other Ionian cities, and also the Aeolic, were all, as we are told without details, approached, one after another and, upon various pretexts, summoned to admit the Lydian arms. They had long been at peace with Lydia, and Herodotus says that the new king’s griefs against them were often very small matters. Once they had submitted, Herodotus implies that there was little if any subsequent recalcitrance. They were sworn to render annual tribute and contingents of troops on occasion; but it does not appear that they were garrisoned, or indeed, subjected to alien governors. One city, Miletus, succeeded in obtaining specially favourable terms, as is known from their endorsement by Cyrus; but wherein exactly its exceptional advantage consisted, we are not informed. It looks as if, at any rate, this one city was not entered like the rest; but we have no warrant for supposing that it was excused tribute. Herodotus records no exception to the general subjection of the Ionian cities to levies of money and men.

In the sequel little sign was to appear that this action of Croesus in Ionia left a bitter memory among Greeks. Their later tradition about him personally is singularly favourable, and it must be remembered that within half a generation of their subjection, great cities refused to aid his enemy. Any patriotic intransigeance, that might have developed in them, was, no doubt, counteracted powerfully by the commercial spirit of the communities in general, and many particular individuals. Ionian trade with the interior had been developing rapidly throughout the latter part of Alyattes’ reign, as has already been implied in our consideration of the evidence obtained from Sardian tombs. This was the age in which the Lydian invention of coined money spread not only to Ionia but into the Aegean, Samos adopting it as early as did Miletus. Even if the most primitive electrum pieces, which usually are dated well before Alyattes’ time, have rightly been explained as private tokens rather than royal coinage, Alyattes himself seems certainly to have had his mint; and about the moneys struck by Croesus there is no doubt at all. It was probably in Alyattes’ time also that Greeks learned from the Lydians, as Herodotus asserts, to be kapeloi. This word should imply some calling more novel than that simply of a retailer, which, already, for centuries must have been practised in Ionian commerce. A special use of the word in Greek of the next century signifies inn-keeper. Herodotus therefore may have meant that the Lydians were the first to establish khans along trade-routes. The uses of these for buying and selling are well known still to all travellers in the Near East; and without them caravan trade would be a small matter. Or equally well, he may have meant caravanners themselves—itinerant merchants who, unbinding their wares at every stage of a journey between distant points, are the chief agents of retail trade in Eastern lands. Until a Greek had begun to push his own wares in inland countries, neither of these callings would naturally have been his. They do not belong to coastwise trade, which seems to have been the chief commercial activity of Greeks before their peace with Alyattes.

Whether Croesus did much, or indeed anything, to organize his inland sphere of empire is as uncertain as what Alyattes may have done there before him. But, at any rate, at some time, his forces were acting in the north-west against the Bithynian community of Prusa. The Greeks knew him evidently as a king who sat in his capital, receiving all and sundry amid the greatest wealth and luxury known in their world. Not yet thoroughly schooled to set a gulf between themselves and ‘barbarians,’ they seem to have regarded him almost as one of themselves; and it was the most natural thing in the world for Ephesians to accept his help in their restoration of the Artemisium, or for Spartans to take his gold, or for Delphi to be enriched with his dedications to Apollo. Seen as he was by his visitors leading a life hardly distinguished from the Ionian except by its greater splendour, the friendship which he showed to the Greek city-states was accepted in the spirit in which it was tendered. Herodotus implies, in the digression on Peisistratus which he intercalates into his narrative of the reign of Croesus, that the latter made it his business to be informed about western Greeks. He devoted most attention to the Spartans, but did not neglect Athens, one of whose nobles, Alcmaeon, volunteered to be his ally and agent in transactions with Delphi, and was rewarded so lavishly that he made the political fortunes of his house.

VI

CROESUS AND THE EAST

From some years of peace, two of which (says Herodotus) were spent in mourning the untimely death of a favourite son, Atys, accidentally killed while hunting boar on the Mysian Olympus, Croesus was roused by a menace in the East. The Median power which had been connected, since 585, by alliance and marriage with his dynasty, was subverted, before 550, by Cyrus, king of Anshan; and the frontier of the Lydian empire on the Halys, assured during the past thirty years by treaty with the coterminous power, lay once more open. The interests of Croesus, his family sentiment, and, probably, obligations under his father’s treaty, combined to stir him to action on behalf of the dispossessed king Astyages, his own brother-in-law. Herodotus says that the Lydian believed the power of Cyrus to be still so small that prompt action might restore the Median position. Croesus’ long preparation, the repeated missions sent to consult distant oracles, and the tone of both his questions to these and their replies, argue that his original purpose was as far-reaching as Herodotus implies. But it is quite possible that, when nearly, if not quite, two years later, he actually set forth eastwards from Sardes, he had realized better the Persian position, or was aware that his own delays had betrayed his first hope. If so, another statement of Herodotus in a later passage, that his determining motive was to add Cappadocia to his own empire, may be a correct account of his second thoughts.

A phrase used by Herodotus perhaps implies that the first step taken by Croesus was to summon Cyrus to release the captive Median king, and that only on its failure did he dispatch his first missions to the chief oracles of Greece and Libya. That first step may have been taken as early as 548. The further steps in the leisurely process of making up his mind to war occupied a period of unknown length, which, however, at the shortest, cannot have been completed much under two years, and may have needed more. Whereas Delphi and the Boeotian shrines at Abae and Lebadea could be reached in a few days, Dodona in little more, and Branchidae in less, a visit to the Ammonium, at modern Siwa, entailed a journey of months. A hundred days, says Herodotus, were allowed by Croesus for all his envoys to reach their respective destinations; until that interval should have elapsed none was to present himself before any oracle, near or far. The king’s object evidently was to preclude any one oracle from framing a response on the report of any other previously approached. If, further, the historian is to be believed that no reply was unsealed at Sardes till all the replies had come to hand, some seven to eight months at least must be allowed for the completion of the function of the first missions. Croesus then proposed to consult Delphi a second time and had offerings prepared for his commissioners to convey thither and to Lebadea—elaborate works in precious metals, which a century later Herodotus saw at the Pythian shrine and at Thebes. The time necessary for their preparation, then for the second mission to go and return, then for a third mission to perform its office, finally for embassies to reach Sparta and Egypt, prefer their requests for active assistance, and come back to Sardes—all these delays must have consumed at least as much time as was occupied by the first missions.

By the time the king’s mind was made up, and his mercenary levies were ready to march eastward from Sardes, Cyrus had had full time not only to consolidate his position, but also to obtain as ample information about his enemy’s plans as that enemy may have acquired about the real power of the Persian. The statement of Herodotus, therefore, that, before ever Cyrus set out from Ecbatana to march towards the Halys, he dispatched heralds to the Ionian cities to persuade them to rise in the rear of Croesus, is easily credible. We are informed of the result—that the cities refused the overture; but not of their reasons. Doubtless they knew little of the Persian strength but much of the Lydian; doubtless their commercial interests seemed to them involved in the maintenance of the kingdom of Croesus; perhaps the latter had had the foresight to take hostages of Ionia: Thales of Miletus, for example, is said to have been in his camp on the Halys. The mercenaries, of whom the Lydian expeditionary force was largely composed, must, in any case, have been in some proportion Greek; but we have no warrant for saying that contingents were actually sent to Croesus from Ionian cities. The severity with which Cyrus would receive their envoys after the latter’s defeat, as well as the exceptional favour shown by him to Miletus, are both readily accounted for without either the last city having withheld official help from the Lydian, or the other cities having accorded it.

Croesus reached the Halys, and crossed the recognized frontier of his empire by some method of which Herodotus had no certain knowledge. He believed it was by nothing more unusual than boat-bridges. Later Greeks credited a tradition that Thales, the Wonder-worker of popular story, divided the stream. If there is anything in this story, the place of crossing is more likely to have been on the lower waters in the Bafra plain than in the gorges of the river’s middle course. A northern point for Croesus’ irruption into Cappadocia perhaps is indicated also by Herodotus’ localization of the Pterian district, which the Lydians entered first, as ‘somewhere over against Sinope.’ If, on the one hand, the geographical knowledge of the ‘waist’ of Asia Minor shown by Herodotus is too vague to justify much reliance on this indication, on the other, the modern identification of the chief stronghold of the district, which Croesus captured, with the Hattie city at Boghaz Keui, rests on no sound basis. So far as we know, this city had been in ruins and probably deserted for some centuries before the sixth BC.

Wherever the Pterian district may have been, somewhere within its limits the progress of the Lydians, after some considerable time spent in raids, was arrested by the arrival of Cyrus with an army evidently more numerous. The battle which ensued upon the Lydian king’s refusal of homage, even if it did not result in a definite Lydian defeat (as authorities later than Herodotus believed), indisposed Croesus towards further operations with his existing forces. To the surprise, therefore, of the enemy (so Herodotus) he broke camp, recrossed his frontier and marched his army back to Sardes. The mercenary levies were paid off at once, as winter was approaching; messengers were dispatched to all who were under treaty with Lydia, for example to the Spartans, to Amasis of Egypt, and to Nabonidus, destined to be last native king of Babylon; and these allies were requested to prepare contingents against the spring and send them to take the field in the fifth month. Fresh mercenary levies were to be raised, and a Greek, Eurybates, was commissioned to enlist men in western Greece.

Half the winter, however, had not elapsed before such help had become vain. Cyrus, whose army was composed largely of tribesmen of the Armenian uplands, levied on his march from Ecbatana, was not deterred by the season; and so soon as he was assured of the retreat of his enemy, he followed up so quickly that Croesus is said to have been unaware of the pursuit until the Persian was within striking distance of Sardes itself. The mercenaries had gone and the allies were still unready. Only levies of the Lydians themselves could be collected and thrown across the Persian’s path. The wide vale of the middle Hermus favoured the famous mounted spearmen of Lydia, but their advantage was lost when their horses refused to face a screen of baggage-camels thrown forward on the advice (says Herodotus) of Harpagus the Mede. The dismounted riders and the footmen sustained the battle awhile, but broke before the end of the day. Cyrus followed the rout to Sardes and Croesus shut himself into the citadel. He had sent urgent summons to his allies, and we hear that, on receipt of the news of his defeat, the Spartans, though embarrassed by an Argive war, put in hand the preparation of a fleet.

Eurybates, on the other hand, is said to have transferred without more ado his fealty and that of his levies to Cyrus. Time, however, was not granted to either faithful or faithless to avail in the matter, before further news arrived of the fall of the fortress and the capture of its king, after a siege which had lasted but two weeks. Differing stories have come down to us concerning the manner of the catastrophe. That told by Herodotus of an escalade by a neglected path is recommended by the historical fact that its feasibility was demonstrated subsequently in a historical surprise of the same fortress.

According to Herodotus and Ctesias, who derived information from independent sources, the life of Croesus was spared1. That the fallen king had more than one narrow escape before the second thoughts of his conqueror guaranteed his safety is likely enough; and the miraculous garniture of the tradition may be taken as a natural growth on a fact of ‘providential’ escape. If he was ever on the pyre, as Greek literary and artistic tradition believed, it may remain an open question whether Cyrus condemned him to execution, or rescued him from self-immolation —from such a pageant of suicide as despair has often driven proud defenders to contrive. The date of this catastrophe is fixed usually to the year 547 or 546.

VII

THE PERSIAN CONQUEST

Cyrus must have stayed in Sardes a considerable time; for we hear that, after he had dismissed the envoys who had been commissioned in nervous haste by the Greek cities of Aeolic and Ionian Asia, he was still accessible when these had had opportunity to apply to Sparta and she to send a ship and a herald back to the Ionian coast. He had promised peace to none but the Milesians; the rest he dismissed with a bitter jest as eastern potentates ever love to dismiss those they despise. The Dorian cities of the south held aloof behind the fancied security of their Carian and Lycian backgrounds.

On the return of the Ionian envoys, the prospect was seen to be grave, and all the cities, except Miletus, agreed by their delegates at the Panionium to apply for the help of Sparta. Pytharmus of Phocaea, the spokesman of their embassy, did not prevail in the Lacedaemonian Assembly; but a single scoutingship of Sparta was sent across to Phocaea, and one, Lacrines, landed and went up as a herald to Sardes, where, if Herodotus is to be believed, Cyrus still tarrying heard with amusement and scorn how a tiny state beyond his ken would not tolerate Persian rule over any Greek city.

Not to this brutum fulmen, but to Cyrus’ departure for Inner Asia and events which followed in Lydia, did the Greeks owe a brief respite. The employment of a native, Pactyas, to help the new satrap, Tabalos, to collect and pack the treasures of Croesus ended in the Lydian absconding to the sea-coast, hiring troops with the money he had carried off, and returning to raise his countrymen and beleaguer Sardes. The citadel held out long enough for Cyrus to hear and to send back a force under Mazares, a Mede, on whose approach Pactyas threw up the game and fled to Cyme. Demanded thence by the Mede, he was passed on to Mitylene, and farther, to Chios, before he was dragged from an altar of Athena and surrendered for dispatch to Cyrus. Then the Lydians were disarmed, and from this moment Greek tradition dated rapid decline of their virility.

With the failure of Pactyas vanished the last chance of the Greek cities to be delivered from vengeance to come. Mazares crossed to the Cayster, seized and desolated Colophon and Priene, and pillaged all the middle plain of the Maeander. The rest of Ionia waited a few months longer in fear and trembling, the agony being protracted by the sudden death of the enemy’s general. So critical did the case of the cities appear, we are told, to Thales the Milesian that he propounded to them (but whether before or after the ratification of his own city’s agreement with Cyrus is not said) a project for the political unification of Ionia with Teos as its centre. The jealous cities, however, elected to fight, each for herself; and fight they did. Harpagus, who had succeeded Mazares, came down the Hermus valley to Phocaea. This city, which, like the rest, had dismantled its walls a dozen years before at the bidding of Croesus, had been newly refortified at the cost of a foreign friend, the king of Tartessus. But neither were the Phocaeans eager to defend their wall (probably because they were conscious, that, if this attack failed, others would be made continually by the masters of the Hermus), nor was Harpagus eager to storm it, and devastate a convenient port. He made a golden bridge, granting respite from assault, with full knowledge that the citizens would use it to launch their galleys and fly. The refugees applied first to the Chians for license to occupy a little archipelago, which lies oft' the homes of both; but the islanders, who stood well with the Persian for having delivered up Pactyas, and well also with Miletus, refused to be compromised or to foster a possible rival in their own waters. Thereupon the exiles turned their prows homeward for a last vengeance, and fell on the garrison which Harpagus had installed; but when they would push off again, it was found that half their number preferred servitude to a second flight. The rest sailed for the western seas where they had long had colonists and friends; but after five years in Corsica they were forced out again by a combination of Carthaginians and Etruscans, and at the last settled down in the toe of Italy at Velia.

One other Ionian city, Teos, followed their example (says Herodotus), but after stouter resistance. Harpagus had to prosecute a siege in form, and raise a mound, after the Mesopotamian fashion of warfare, to the height of the wall before a part of the defenders took to the water and sailed north to recolonize Abdera. Bias of Priene is said to have urged a like course on the Panionian delegates. Better, he said, the cities should empty themselves, than await Harpagus; by a mass migration they might wrest Sardinia from Carthage and rule the western seas. Whether this counsel suggested to the Phocaeans and Teians their action, or was itself suggested by their example, we do not hear. In any case, it was offered in vain. The other Ionians stayed to defend and lose their fields. None of the cities, it seems, had to pay the terrible penalty of enslavement in which recent support of Pactyas had involved Priene; but all were compelled to accept not only tributary status and obligation of military service, but also tyrants of Persian choice. The insular societies are said by Herodotus to have submitted like those of the mainland. Certainly, the Chians and the Lesbians, who had mainland possessions, complied with the Persian summons; but about the rest one is less sure. In any case, no real Persian control can have been established; for a very few years later, Polycrates, unhampered by the lords of the mainland, was ruling not Samos only, but other Aegean isles.

As for the Dorian cities of the south, we hear only that Cnidus, after putting a bold face on the matter, repented and admitted Harpagus. The Carians of the interior had made little show, or reality, of resistance; the Caunians and the Lycians fought in vain. The Aeolic cities and the Ionian colonies of the north were subjugated, but whether bloodlessly or not we remain uninformed. They were placed under a satrap in Dascylium, even as their southern fellows had been placed under one in Sardes; and we may take it that, by 540 BC, all Anatolia, Greek and native, obeyed the writ and paid the dues of Cyrus the Persian.

CHAPTER XX

THE GROWTH OF THE DORIAN STATES

THE ASSYRIAN EMPIRE. TABLE OF CONTENTS