meeting of Alyattes of Lydia with Kyaxares the Mede on the Halys, some
years later than the date of our present survey, are well founded. If
they are, then Lydia's sphere of influence may be assumed to have
included Cilicia on the south-east, and its interests must have been
involved in Cappadocia on the north-east. It is not unlikely that the
Mermnad dynasty inherited most of what the Phrygian kings had held
before the Cimmerian attack; and perhaps it was due to an oppressive
Lydian occupation of the plateau as far east as the Halys and the foot
of Anti-Taurus, that the Mushki came to be represented in later times
only by Moschi in western Armenia, and the men of Tabal by the equally
remote and insignificant Tibareni.


SECTION 10. THE GREEK CITIES

Of the Greek cities on the Anatolian coast something has been said
already. The great period of the elder ones as free and independent
communities falls between the opening of the eighth century and the
close of the sixth. Thus they were in their full bloom about the year
600. By the foundation of secondary colonies (Miletus alone is said to
have founded sixty!) and the establishment of trading posts, they had
pushed Hellenic culture eastwards round the shores of the peninsula, to
Pontus on the north and to Cilicia on the south. In the eyes of
Herodotus this was the happy age when "all Hellenes were free" as
compared with his own experience of Persian overlordship. Miletus, he
tells us, was then the greatest of the cities, mistress of the sea; and
certainly some of the most famous among her citizens, Anaximander,
Anaximenes, Hecataeus and Thales, belong approximately to this epoch, as
do equally famous names from other Asiatic Greek communities, such as
Alcaeus and Sappho of Lesbos, Mimnermus of Smyrna or Colophon, Anacreon