SECTION 9. LYDIA

It must have been in the hour of that disaster, or but little before,
that a Mermnad prince of Sardes, called Guggu by Assyrians and Gyges by
Greeks, threw off any allegiance he may have owed to Phrygia and began
to exalt his house and land of Lydia. He was the founder of a new
dynasty, having been by origin, apparently, a noble of the court who
came to be elevated to the throne by events differently related but
involving in all the accounts some intrigue with his predecessor's
queen. One historian, who says that he prevailed by the aid of Carians,
probably states a fact; for it was this same Gyges who a few years later
seems to have introduced Carian mercenaries to the notice of
Psammetichus of Egypt. Having met and repulsed the Cimmerian horde
without the aid of Ashurbanipal of Assyria, to whom he had applied in
vain, Gyges allied himself with the Egyptian rebel who had just founded
the Saite dynasty, and proceeded to enlarge his boundaries by attacking
the prosperous Greeks on his western hand. But he was successful only
against Colophon and Magnesia on the Maeander, inland places, and failed
before Smyrna and Miletus, which could be provisioned by their fleets
and probably had at their call a larger proportion of those warlike
"Ionian pirates" who had long been harrying the Levant. In the course of
a long reign, which Herodotus (an inexact chronologist) puts at
thirty-eight years, Gyges had time to establish his power and to secure
for his Lydians the control of the overland trade; and though a fresh
Cimmerian horde, driven on, says Herodotus, by Scythians (perhaps these
were not unconnected with the Medes then moving westward, as we know),
came down from the north, defeated and killed him, sacked the
unfortified part of his capital and swept on to plunder what it could of