the land as far as the sea without pausing to take fenced places, his
son Ardys, who had held out in the citadel of Sardes, and made his
submission to Ashurbanipal, was soon able to resume the offensive
against the Greeks. After an Assyrian attack on the Cimmerian flank or
rear had brought about the death of the chief barbarian leader in the
Cilician hills, and the dispersal of the storm, the Lydian marched down
the Maeander again. He captured Priene, but like his predecessor and his
successor, he failed to snatch the most coveted prize of the Greek
coast, the wealthy city Miletus at the Maeander mouth.

Up to the date of our present survey, however, and for half a century
yet to come, these conquests of the Lydian kings in Ionia and Caria
amounted to little more than forays for plunder and the levy of
blackmail, like the earlier Mesopotamian razzias. They might result in
the taking and sacking of a town here and there, but not in the holding
of it. The Carian Greek Herodotus, born not much more than a century
later, tells us expressly that up to the time of Croesus, that is, to
his own father's time, all the Greeks kept their freedom: and even if he
means by this statement, as possibly he does, that previously no Greeks
had been subjected to regular slavery, it still supports our point: for,
if we may judge by Assyrian practice, the enslaving of vanquished
peoples began only when their land was incorporated in a territorial
empire. We hear nothing of Lydian governors in the Greek coastal cities
and find no trace of a "Lydian period" in the strata of such Ionian and
Carian sites as have been excavated. So it would appear that the Lydians
and the Greeks lived up to and after 600 B.C. in unquiet contact, each
people holding its own on the whole and learning about the other in the
only international school known to primitive men, the school of war.

Herodotus represents that the Greek cities of Asia, according to the