greatest dangers and hardships, and when he became perfected in the
military art, as in the case of Caesar amid the marshes and forests of
Gaul and Belgium. The fame of Caesar rests as much on his conquests of
the Celtic barbarians of Europe as on his conflict with Pompey; but
whether Cyrus obtained military fame or not in his wars against the
Turanians, he doubtless proved himself a benefactor to humanity more in
arresting the tide of Scythian invasion than by those conquests which
have given him immortality.

When Cyrus had cemented his empire by the conquest of the Turanian
nations, especially those that dwelt between the Caspian and Black seas,
his attention was drawn to Lydia, the most powerful kingdom of western
Asia, whose monarch, Croesus, reigned at Sardis in Oriental
magnificence. Lydia was not much known to distant States until the reign
of Gyges, about 716 B.C., who made war on the Dorian and Ionian Greek
colonies on the coast of Asia Minor, the chief of which were Miletus,
Smyrna, Colophon, and Ephesus. His successor Ardys continued this
warfare, but was obliged to desist because of an invasion of the
Cimmerians,--barbarians from beyond the Caucasus, driven away from
their homes by the Scythians. His grandson Alyattes, greatest of the
Lydian monarchs, succeeded in expelling the Cimmerians from Lydia. After
subduing some of the maritime cities of Asia Minor, this monarch faced
the Medes, who had advanced their empire to the river Halys, the eastern
boundary of Lydia, which flows northwardly into the Euxine. For five
years Alyattes fought the Medes under Cyaxares with varying success, and
the war ended by the marriage of the daughter of the Lydian king with
Astyages. After this, Alyattes reigned forty-three years, and was buried
in a tomb whose magnificence was little short of the grandest of the
Egyptian monuments.