Read Ebook: The Great Persian War and its preliminaries by Grundy George Beardoe

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TO FACE PAGE Marathon: from the "Soros," looking towards Little Marsh 163 The "Soros" at Marathon 165 Marathon from the "Soros" 187 The Vale of Tempe 231 The Harbour of Corcyra 241 Mountains of Thermopylae, from Phalara 257 Mount OEta and Plain of Malis 259 Asopos Ravine 261 The Gorge of the Asopos 261 Thermopylae, from Bridge of Alamana 263 View from Thermopylae, looking towards Artemisium 264 Channel of Artemisium, from 1600 Feet above Thermopylae 264 On Thermopylae-Elataea Road 265 Thermopylae between Middle and East Gate 290 The East Gate of Thermopylae 291 Summit of Anopaea, looking East 301 Coast at Middle Gate of Thermopylae in 480 310 Thermopylae 311 Thermopylae: the Middle Gate 311 First and Second Mounds, Middle Gate, Thermopylae 312 Plain of Euboea 321 The Narrows at Chalkis 323 Salamis, looking South from Mount AEgaleos, with the Island of Psyttaleia in the Centre 392 Plain of Thebes and Mount Kithaeron 436 Plain of Kopais, from Thebes 452 Plain of Plataea and Kithaeron 454 The First Position at Plataea 460 Plataea: "Island," from Side of Kithaeron 480 Boeotian Plain, from Plataea-Megara Pass 482 Plataea--West Side of ????? 482 Plataea: Panorama from Scene of Last Fight 502

MAPS.

GREEK AND PERSIAN.

The sharp, fierce struggle between Greek and Persian which was fought out on land and sea in the years 480-479, was regarded by those who were contemporary with it, and has ever since been looked upon as the great crisis in the history of the two races. It was a struggle whose results were decisive in the history of the world. From a purely military point of view, it is true, the fighting in those two years was not final. The loser did not issue from it in a condition so crippled that he could not continue the contest. So far from this being the case, Persia, for more than a century after Salamis was fought, continued not merely to show a bold front to Greece, but to maintain the preponderance of her power in the lands east of the AEgean, and to be a cause of dread to the Hellene of Europe. Athens did, in the period succeeding these great years of the war, wrest from Persia most of the Hellenic or semi-Hellenic Islands and coast towns in the Eastern AEgean; but her tenure of many of them was brief, and of all, precarious. The city States on the mainland slip rapidly from her grasp, and the measure of the independence from Persia in the case of some of those who remain on the tribute lists is at least open to discussion. It was long before the Greek world discovered that decay of the great Empire which is so apparent to the student of history who has the story of the fifth and fourth centuries before him. It set in soon after 479; but how far it was caused by the festering of the wounds inflicted in that year cannot now be said. The mischief was internal: it was situate far away in the depths of Asia, beyond the ken of the Greek of the fifth century, and it is not strange that he never appreciated the full extent of the malady.

In reckoning up the results of a great war it is instructive to appreciate what was: it is impossible to ignore what might have been. Of the issues, military, political, and social, of this Graeco-Persian war, the military issue is perhaps the least important from the point of view of world-history. It did, indeed, teach a great lesson, in that it brought into prominence for the first time the strength and weakness of the East and West when brought into contact with one another; but the most extraordinary feature about this special aspect of the matter is that those who had tried the tremendous experiment were all but utterly unconscious of the true bearing of its results; and it was left to the fourth generation from them to appreciate a truth which their forefathers had proved but never realized.

The possible results from a political and social point of view which might have ensued, had the war ended otherwise than it did, have formed the subject of many a surmise for those who have written the history of these years. If Herodotus can be taken as representative of the views and sentiments of men of his time,--the men, that is to say, of the half century which succeeded the critical phase of the long warfare with Persia,--it is evident that those who regarded the great series of events from a near perspective were supremely conscious of the political, and but little, if at all, conscious of the social issue. #THE ISSUES AT STAKE IN THE WAR.# It was perhaps the very intensity of the love of freedom with the Greek that blinded him to all save the fact of the preservation of that freedom. Doubtless that feeling was largely bound up with the social question of the preservation of Hellenic civilization, and with the consciousness of the peril to which any social system must be exposed under a political system alien to it. It is nevertheless strange that, if the peril had been regarded in this instance as a very real one, a historian like Herodotus, whose wide experience of other social systems seems to have had the effect of making him a peculiarly ardent Hellenist, should have failed to notice it. It is perhaps possible to suggest a reason for an omission so remarkable. Herodotus himself had been brought up in one of the Dorian cities of Asia, at a time when it was in a state of vassalage to Persia. He had personal experience of the position of the Greeks under Persian rule. He must furthermore have been intimately acquainted with the life in the great Ionian cities which were subject to the Empire. From the Greek point of view, their political position was the reverse of ideal; but even a Greek could hardly have denied that their position might have been much worse than it actually was. The most objectionable feature,--the Greek tyrant governing in the Persian interest,--had been to a great extent removed before his time; and after the deposition of tyranny the cities seem to have enjoyed a large measure of local independence under Persian suzerainty. Whatever the extent or nature of the tie which bound them to the sovereign government, it certainly does not seem to have been such as to crush social and intellectual development on Hellenic lines; in fact, with regard to intellectual development, these very cities seem to have been first in the field, and to have been infinitely more prominent under Persian than under Athenian rule. Whatever the cause, whether fear or policy, or both, it is plain, on the evidence of the Greeks themselves, that the Persian Government was extraordinarily lenient and liberal in its treatment of subject Greeks. The Hellenism of the fifth century, social and intellectual, was, moreover, no tender plant requiring careful political nurture. It had struck its roots deep into the very being of the race; and it may be doubted whether Persia could, even if she would, have eradicated so strong a growth.

It is therefore possible to exaggerate the consequences which might have resulted to Greek civilization had the issue of the great war been favourable to the Persian. The inherent probabilities of the case do not warrant the assertion that such a victory would have brought about the substitution of an Eastern for a Western civilization in South European lands. It is, moreover, extremely doubtful whether the Great King could have maintained his hold upon European Greece for any prolonged period after the initial conquest; and any attempt to crush the Hellenism of the land would certainly have led to insurrection in a country designed by nature to be the home of communal and individual freedom.

Speculation upon what "might have been" is ever open to the charge of idleness. It is, indeed, futile to attempt it in detail, by reason of the infinity of the factors which modify human action. But, inasmuch as what has been already said with regard to the possible results of the war might leave a wrong impression as to the legitimate deductions to be drawn from the main factors of a possible though imaginary situation, it is necessary to carry the speculation one step farther.

That a Persian victory, even if only temporary, would have immensely modified the political development of Greece in the last three quarters of the fifth century, goes without saying; and such a modification could not but have seriously affected the genius of Hellenism. The splendour of the life and literature of the last half of the century was largely due to the elaboration at Athens of a political and social system, the counterpart of which the world has never seen. Never before, and never since, has existed a community so large in which so great a proportion of its members has had time to think out their own salvation, and to work it out upon their own lines of thought. #EASTERN AND WESTERN CIVILIZATION.# Salvation may seem a strange word to use of a system which produced the pitiful record of the fourth century; and yet, from amid all the evil, failure, and folly of the time there emerged a social order which was infinitely better than anything of the kind which had preceded it, and which was destined to form the foundation of the edifice of civilization in the western world at the present day. A Persian victory at Salamis, or even at Plataea, must have postponed the realization of those ideals which are the glory of the Greek people, and on which rests the claim of their race to the highest place in the history of the nations; and postponement might have made the full realization impossible.

The catastrophe of 480 had been long in maturing. The march of events in South-eastern Europe and Western Asia had been slow. Still, the two paths of development tended in opposite directions; and it was inevitable that those who followed them should meet in a collision, the shock of which would be proportionate to the forces of propulsion. The moral strength of those forces was enormous. The ancient civilization of the East, ages old, strong in development, the one ideal of the millions of Western Asia, came into contact through its most western off-shoot with a civilization which, whatever its origin, and whatever the influences to which it had been exposed, was in striking contrast to it. On the eastern shores of the AEgean the two first met.

It is impossible to say on the one hand what was the level of the civilization attained by the Greeks at the time they first settled on these coasts, more than 1000 years before Christ; and it is still less possible to say what was the state of the peoples they found there at the time of their settlement. Whether Lydia at this early age of its development had as yet come into contact with, and been influenced by, the civilization of the lands east and south of Taurus must also be matter of doubt. It is, on the whole, probable that it had; for the number and rapid development of the Greek trading towns on the East AEgean coast point to a considerable and valuable overland trade, whose roots would, in all probability, be in the lands of Mesopotamia, if not still farther east. The caravans from that rich plain would be sure to carry the infection of its civilization to the lands they traversed.

But, in any case, neither the Greek nor this most westerly off-shoot of the Asiatic civilization can have passed beyond an early stage of development, nor, in so far as is known, did the representatives of either seek to inflict their own form of life upon the representatives of the other. Neither side seems to have been strong enough to conquer the other, even if either had been disposed to try. The Greek was content to trade; the various native races were without union, and cannot have been equal to the conquest of a people whose original settlements they had apparently been unable to prevent.

The great Phrygian kingdom which flourished in Asia Minor for several centuries had probably passed the zenith of its greatness when the Greeks first established themselves on the coast; and the Lydian monarchy, still in its infancy, had not developed into the greatness it attained in after-time. In the obscure and uncertain traditions of the Asian Greeks which Herodotus has preserved, this monarchy is represented as having had an existence extending far into the past, under various dynasties; but of its earliest history nothing is really known, and the little that can be conjectured rests on the uncertain foundation of mythical story. The Atyadae or Herakleidae of the earlier dynasties are mere shadow-kings in history. A recurrent theme in Phrygian and Lydian story alike is the fabulous wealth of certain of those rulers. They seem to have afforded the Greek his first glimpse of the splendour of the East.

Though, doubtless, the Greek trader traversed the Western Asian peninsula through and through in his trading journeys, the populations with whom he came in contact remained uninfluenced by a civilization they did not appreciate, and probably could not understand. The Lydians alone afforded an exception to this rule, because their position was exceptional. They were brought into close contact with the Greek, and seem to have implanted on a civilization of an Oriental type certain characteristics derived from Greek social life. #RISE OF THE LYDIAN KINGDOM.# It is doubtful whether such features of this civilization as are known to the modern world were characteristic of the Lydian race as a whole in early days; it is more probable that the mass of the people remained in a comparatively low state of social development, and that the quasi-feudal ruling families of the land evolved for themselves a civilization copied from foreign lands, and were influenced especially by the reports which reached them of the life and glories of the great cities of the Euphrates plain.

The rise of Lydia to greatness seems to date from the early years of the eighth century before Christ. A feudal family established a precarious supremacy over the other feudal families of the land. Nevertheless, the kingdom seems to have acquired a stable unity which it hitherto had lacked; and the westernmost region of the West Asian peninsula gradually developed into a dominion more splendid, if not more powerful, than any which had hitherto existed among the strangely diverse populations of that part of the world.

Geographical convention has assigned this peninsula to Asia; and, under the influence of name-association, it has come to be regarded as being in every sense an integral portion of that great continent. In point of fact, however, it was at this time a borderland between Orient and Occident, approximating ethnographically rather to West than to East; though, in so far as it was influenced by the outside world, affected rather by the preponderant power and splendour of the East than by the comparative weakness and insignificance of the West. The true historical western frontier of Asia has varied at different periods of history between the Hellespont and the Taurus, according as this debateable land has been in possession of an eastern or a western power. But in the earlier days of the Lydian kingdom the region was politically centred within itself, or, rather, was an aggregation of political circles, and not, as in later times, a mere segment of a great circle, whose centre lay far beyond its borders. Those who know by experience the character of the barrier which, in the shape of Mount Taurus, separates this region from the adjacent East, are most emphatic in insisting upon the formidable nature of that wall of separation. It is not difficult to demonstrate that Taurus has been in the past one of the most decisive physical features in the history of the world.

The great systems of civilization have had one of two origins. Either they have sprung up in those great plains of the world whose climate is favourable to ease of existence; or they have been developed by nations whose circumstances have been favourable to wide intercourse with, and experience of, the peoples around them. Egypt, the Euphrates plain, India, and China, are examples of the first; Greece and Great Britain are the most prominent examples of the latter class. As, however, the "civilizations of intercourse" must be largely dependent on navigation, which can itself be alone developed by long experience, it is plain that they must be of later development than the "civilizations of ease of existence." Thus it is that, many centuries before any system of civilization of high development existed in Europe, the plains of the Euphrates basin had given birth to one which, had nature allowed it unimpeded expansion, must have spread to a great distance from its centre. The all but blank, impassable wall of Taurus prevented the West Asian peninsula from being thoroughly orientalized. Thus that civilization which was springing up beyond the AEgean was allowed to develop on its own lines, hardly affected by those pale rays of the glowing life of the East which the narrow passes of Taurus allowed to penetrate to the lands of the West. It was the Taurus, too, which protected the earlier stages of the growth of the Lydian kingdom.

East of the chain the Assyrian empire was living out a life of stormy magnificence. The records of its kings,--a wearisome tale of murder, conquest, tribute, and torture,--give, it may be, only one side of its history, and that not the best. Their exploits have as little perspective as their presentment of them. The immediate object is all that is sought; the past is dead; the present alone is living; the future is of no account. A land is conquered; its population is either decimated, wiped out, or removed elsewhere. Its wealth is plundered; and, if there is anything left on which tribute can be laid, tribute is laid upon it. Such is the record of one year. #ASSYRIA.# A few years later, even in the case of lands previously reported as left desolate, the same process is repeated. There is no rest for the ruling race. For some inscrutable reason, its kings seem not to have had foresight enough to establish a strong system of administration for the conquered provinces. These are merely treated as sources of revenue, doomed to tribute,--a heavy burden indeed, but, at least in the case of regions not bordering immediately on Assyria proper, the only burden laid upon them.

Of the great empires which arose at different periods in this part of the world, Assyria seems to have been the least enlightened. Its real field of operation was bounded by the great mountain-systems on the north and east, by the Great Sea on the west and the desert on the south. Any operations undertaken outside these well-defined limits seem to have been of the nature of punitive expeditions directed against mountain tribes who had raided within these boundaries. Their lands were too poor to excite the cupidity of this brigand empire. If they remained quiet, Assyria left them alone, and devoted its energies to the exaction of tribute from the richer lands of the plain or of the Syrian coast. There are few records of expeditions west of the Taurus; and, though some lands are asserted to have paid tribute, there is no evidence whatever of anything like permanent conquest. The great mountain chain acted as a groyne which diverted the flood of invasion from the Euphrates region southward along the Syrian coast Thus it was that the growing kingdom of Lydia never came into hostile contact with the great empire. Yet the commercial intercourse between them must have been carried on upon a large scale; and, indeed, the prosperity of Lydia and of the Greek colonies on the Asian coast was due to their acting as middlemen in the commerce between East and West which passed along that route which formed in later Persian times the line of the royal road to Susa. It was an interruption of this intercourse, and a threatened diversion of this route, which brought about the opening of diplomatic relations between the two realms.

In the latter half of the eighth century before Christ, the plains of Asia and East Europe were disturbed by one of those movements of thrust which are ever recurrent in their history; and a tide of migration was set up which was destined to have many more remarkable counterparts in later story. Under pressure of a race which may with a certain amount of probability be identified with the Massagetae of after times, those mysterious peoples, the Cimmerians and Scythians, were driven from their homes in the northern plains and invaded in whole or in part the West Asian peninsula. Of the two, the Cimmerians settled in the region of the North bordering on the Euxine, and by continual raids made life a burden to the Phrygians and White Syrians of those parts. Some thirty unhappy years seem to have passed thus. The Phrygian kingdom was gradually broken up, and by 670 B.C. the Cimmerians found themselves on the north borders of Lydia, which had just taken a new lease of life under Gyges, one of the ablest and most energetic of its successive rulers. The possibility of invasion was only part of the danger which threatened Lydia. That Gyges could and did ward off in a fierce struggle with the northern hordes; but his resources were, unaided, not equal to the task of reopening the great trade route to the East which passed through the lands of which these hordes were in possession. He began negotiations with the mighty Empire of the East which, under the energetic rule of Assur-bani-pal, was at the height of its power. He sought to get aid in the heavy task which lay before him. There were difficulties about the interpretation of the message which his envoys carried to Nineveh; but these were overcome, and he received fair words in answer to his request. More than this he did not get. Assur-bani-pal had his hands full nearer home. He and his line seem to have been past-masters of the art of creating difficulties to be overcome; but the king seems to have had no desire to interfere in the affairs of a land whose geographical position was vaguely known to him as being near the "crossing of the sea." He had enough self-created troubles at his very gates without going abroad to find them.

#LYDIA AND THE GREEKS.#

So Gyges got no help from Nineveh, and was obliged to content himself with having successfully warded off the invasion of his own territories. For some years at any rate the great route eastward must have been difficult, if not actually impassable. This interruption of commercial relations by land with the East may well have led to that development of Lydian intercourse with Egypt of which the Assyrian records afford evidence.

The history of the Lydian kingdom, except in so far as it affects the fortunes of the Greeks in Asia and Europe, forms no part of the design of the present volume.

In the reign of Gyges, however, the relations between Lydian and Greek entered upon a new stage. The Lydian rulers had hitherto lived on friendly terms with most of the Hellenic towns on the adjacent coasts. Gyges went still further, and by assiduous cultivation of the Delphic oracle attracted the attention and regard of the Greeks of Europe, who thus for the first time became intimate with one of the great monarchies of the East.

For the new relations with Egypt, the Greek trader formed the connecting link. It was almost inevitable that an energetic ruler like Gyges should seek to get direct control of the main, if not the only, means of communication with an ally whose alliance flattered his vanity, and with a country whose wealth could not fail to benefit Lydian trade. It is evident, however, that he did not feel himself strong enough to attempt an overt attack on the Greek cities. That could only have resulted in a formidable resistance on the part of those centres of liberty and wealth. He devised a better plan, slow working but terribly effective, and destined in later days to lead to the undoing of the liberties of Greece.

Lydia was now a considerable power, extending to the Halys on the east; and as such it presented itself to the European Greek of the later years of the seventh century. To Lydia accordingly turned the thoughts of Aristomenes, the hero of the Messenian wars of independence against Sparta, when as a refugee he sought safety across the AEgean. ?Paus. iv. 24. 2, 3.? Death overtook him before he had time to carry out his intention of appealing to Ardys for help.

Having attained a frontier on the east beyond which further attempts at expansion were dangerous, Ardys' attention was naturally directed westward, where the thickly dotted line of Greek colonies practically cut Lydia off from communication with the AEgean littoral. They held the natural exits of that overland trade to which the prosperity of Ardys' kingdom must have been largely due, and must have absorbed a large proportion of those trade profits which the Lydian might not unreasonably regard as his own. #STRATEGIC POSITIONS OF ASIATIC GREEKS.# Moreover, the relations of Lydia with the great trading towns of Smyrna, Kolophon, Klazomenae, Miletus, and Priene, were no longer of the friendly character of former days. The policy of Ardys consequently aimed specially at the reduction or absorption of these towns.

The inevitable was about to happen. The very nature of the peninsula made it all but certain that whenever a great State acquired command of the upper part of the great valleys of the Hermus, Maeander, and other streams, the towns which stood on their western exits must succumb to that State.

A glance at the map of Western Asia will show this.

The main physical characteristics of the country from the Halys to the AEgean are, a great interior plateau; a series of parallel mountain chains running from east to west, between which rivers, following the same direction, run down towards the AEgean, so that their valleys form a series of natural lines of communication between the plateau and the coast. There is no cross-chain running north and south, at the head of these valleys, to form a natural barrier towards the east. Access to them is unimpeded from that direction.

This physical conformation of the land was alike a curse and a blessing to the Greek trading towns of the coast. The valleys formed, on the one hand, natural routes for commerce of immense value to those who held their exits; but they also afforded natural highways for attack to any power coming from the interior which assailed the holders of those exits.

The disadvantage had not been so apparent while Lydia was still a comparatively weak State; but it was sure to come into prominence so soon as she attained to any degree of power. The weakness of the strategic position of those Greek cities is not less striking than the advantages of their positions from a commercial point of view. Their territories, besides being this void of any line of defence towards the east, were separated from one another by the ranges which divided the river valleys; and intercommunication by sea was rendered difficult by the long projecting promontories which separate the deep gulfs at the head of which most of the cities were situated. From the point of view of joint action this was a very serious drawback. Nature had been doubly unkind to them in this respect. Not content with having made a base of combination on land impossible, she had made combination on sea difficult. Prosperity without liberty was the natural birthright of these Asian towns. Even when backed up by all the naval strength of the Athenian empire, their independence of the power on the mainland seems to have been in most cases partial, and in all precarious; and even independence gave them little more or better than a change of masters.

?H. i. 15.?

The comparative failure at Miletus did not discourage Alyattes in his enterprises against the towns. Kolophon, which had regained or reassumed its independence at the time of the Cimmerian trouble, was brought into subjection once more; ?H. i. 16.? Smyrna, as a town, was destroyed, and its inhabitants forced to take up their abode in unwalled settlements. Klazomenae well-nigh experienced the same fate. Alliances were made with other cities, such as Ephesus and Kyme. Alyattes would doubtless have prosecuted further his designs against the Greek cities, had not his attention been at this moment called away to the eastern frontier of his kingdom.

It was not from Assyria that the trouble threatened. That great empire had come to an end some years before, under circumstances of which the details do not directly affect the Greeks. A Scythian incursion, so prolonged that it seemed likely to terminate in permanent settlement, had broken it. #MEDO-LYDIAN WAR.# The final death-blow had been inflicted by two peoples--the Medes, who inhabited the mountainous uplands beyond the Zagros chain which bounds the plain of the Tigris on the east and north-east, and the Babylonians, who had ever chafed under Assyrian rule.

Within a short period the Medes had pushed their frontier westward beyond the Taurus, and had reduced to subjection the country between that range and the Halys, a region which at times came within the sphere of Assyrian influence, but cannot be said to have formed part of that empire.

With all the vigour inspired by recent success, the Mede sought to push his way westward; and a fierce frontier war seems to have been waged for several years upon the Halys between Alyattes and Cyaxares, the Median king.

Of the war itself but little is known, except the important fact that it came to an end in a remarkable way. The opposing armies were drawn up for a battle, when an eclipse of the sun took place, which caused both sides to shrink from the engagement. It is calculated that such eclipses took place in Asia Minor in the years 610 and 585, of which the latter seems to be the more probable date of this unfought fight. ?H. i. 74.? A peace was concluded through the mediation of a Babylonian whose name Herodotus gives as Labynetos; but in what capacity he acted as mediator is not known. The celebrated Nebuchadrezzar was ruling in Babylon at the time. Lydia apparently sacrificed Pteria and the region east of Halys, and that river became the definite frontier between the two States.

The story of this Median kingdom has come down to posterity in a form so imperfect that it is difficult to extract the small historical from the large mythical element contained in it. Its chief importance in history is that its kings are the first of that series of Iranian dynasties which, whether Median, Persian, or Parthian, were paramount in the eastern world for many centuries. From this time forward the Iranian took the place of the Semite as the suzerain of the East; for the Babylonian realm of Nebuchadrezzar was but of comparatively brief splendour, and was soon absorbed by the less civilized but more virile power which became heir to its partner in the destruction of Assyria.

The Median king Cyaxares, who had warred with the Lydians on the Halys, lived but one year after the close of the campaign, and was succeeded by his son Astyages, whose chief claim to fame is that he was the last of the brief line of Median kings. Little is known of him. For the Greek the truth concerning him and his was lost in that mirage of legends which accumulated round the personality of the man who overthrew him, Cyrus the Great.

The myths, fables, and legends which the ever lively imagination of the East invented with regard to the founder of the Persian dynasty, have crowded the greater part of the real story of his life out of the pages of history. Their adoption by Greek historians was all but complete; though some, like Herodotus, sought to rationalize a few of the incidents reported. Did there exist no other records of his life than those which have survived in the Greek historians, it would be difficult to assert with confidence which of the reported details are true. Comparatively recent discoveries in the East have brought to light, however, certain annals of a Babylonian king, Nabonidus, a successor of Nebuchadrezzar, and a contemporary of Cyrus. From these records it is possible to reconstruct the story of some of the main events of what must have been a very stirring time in that part of the world.

Astyages the Mede had reigned a quarter of a century, when Cambyses, the prince of one of the vassal principalities of the Median empire, died, and was succeeded by his son Kurush, the Cyrus of the Greeks. This was about the year 559. The name of the principality appears in the records as Anshan. Its inhabitants were the Persians of history.

#MEDE AND PERSIAN.#

This people, which was destined to play so great a part in the two following centuries, were of the same race as the Medes. The only possible deduction to be drawn from subsequent events is that the connection between the two nations was very close. Its exact nature can only be guessed at. Any difference between the two must have been rather nominal than real; for the supremacy of the one race does not appear to imply the subjection of the other; and when, somewhere about 552, Cyrus revolted, and defeated Astyages, the Median army came over immediately to his side. It is hardly credible that such a thing should have taken place, had not the Medes regarded Cyrus and his family as being in some very real sense a part of themselves, and as possessed of some title to be their rulers. Both races were certainly Iranian. They were alike in religion and very near akin in language. It may even have been that the Persian was a tribesman of the nation to which the name Mede was given. Their nearest neighbours, the Babylonians, recorded the change of ruler, but not in language which could lead to the supposition that they regarded it as an event of great magnitude. They seem to have looked upon it as more or less of a domestic matter, an internal revolution.

The Persian empire was indeed the empire of the Mede under a new name; stronger and more vigorous than its forerunner, because the helm of government passed into abler hands. The Greeks themselves hardly recognized the distinction between the two, and used the names Mede and Persian in a general sense as synonymous terms. Nor has the perspective of centuries sensibly altered the nature of the picture as it presented itself to those who regarded it from a nearer point of view. The two nations, one in religion, one in civilization, one in social system, appear as one in the making of the history of the three centuries during which they played the foremost part in Western Asia.

During the thirty years of Astyages' rule in Media, the Lydian kingdom enjoyed a continuous career of expansion. Whether owing to troubles at home, or to the severity of the check administered in the campaign on the Halys before 585, Astyages made no attempt to extend the Median frontier towards the West. It is probable that he had his hands full with the work of consolidating the wide dominion which his race had so recently won, and the revolt of Cyrus may have been but the last of a series of insurrections on the part of his subordinate rulers. Be that as it may, Lydia was given a breathing space from attack, which, under the energetic rule of Alyattes, she used to the full.

The renewal of the assault on the liberties of the Greek towns of the AEgean coast followed immediately upon the close of the fighting with the Medes. Before five years had elapsed, the Troad and Mysia, with the AEolian Greek cities of the Hellespontine region, had been reduced. Even Bithynia seems to have been invaded about this time, and part of it secured by strongholds built at important strategical points. In the south-west Caria proved a harder conquest. Its population, from which the earliest professional soldiery in the Levant had been drawn, did not give up the struggle until about the year 566, well-nigh at the close of Alyattes' reign. The Dorian cities on the coast seem to have shared its fate. On this occasion, at any rate, they were partners in its adversity.

It was in this campaign that Croesus, that figure of pathetic magnificence, destined later to cast both light and shadow on the historical records of the Greek, first came into prominence. The mingled admiration and commiseration of after-time exaggerated his personality into the very type of human fortune and misfortune; and the picture of his life as drawn by Herodotus is probably no more than a truthful reproduction of the impression of him which prevailed a century after his death. Nevertheless the thread of fact runs unbroken through the maze of fiction, and it is possible to reconstruct his history with more reliability than can be claimed for the records of his predecessors.

#CROEUS. LYDIAN CIVILIZATION.#

As a youth he had incurred the displeasure of his father Alyattes by his extravagance, and had imperilled his chances of succession by the distrust which his conduct excited among an influential section of the population, composed probably of staid merchants, who would be unlikely to sympathize with irresponsible and expensive frivolity. The danger brought him to his senses; and he apparently made up his mind that the Carian war afforded him an opportunity of winning a good opinion he had never tried to earn. How he succeeded is not known. He did succeed; for the fortunate issue of the war was largely attributed to his exertions and ability. He was just in time to save the situation for himself, since the years of his father's life were numbered. About B.C. 561, Alyattes died, not before he had raised the Lydian kingdom to a greatness beyond what it hitherto had known.

It stood, indeed, on the same level as the great contemporary monarchies of the East, while as yet the Mede had not succeeded to the full heritage of that Assyria which he had helped to destroy. It absorbed for the time the attention of the Greek, when he gave his attention to anything beyond his home affairs. Its very splendour became a barrier of light which the Greek eye could not pierce so far as to see clearly what was going on in the region beyond, so that even the great Cyrus came not within the field of Hellenic vision until he had emerged from the comparative darkness of the lands beyond the Halys.

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