bargain it had made.


SECTION 4. FALL OF LYDIA

Cyrus must have met with little or no opposition in the western Median
provinces, for we find him, within a year or two of his recognition by
both Persians and Medes, not only on his extreme frontier, the Halys
river, but able to raid across it and affront the power of Lydia. To
this action he was provoked by Lydia itself. The fall of the Median
dynasty, with which the royal house of Lydia had been in close alliance
since the Halys pact, was a disaster which Croesus, now king of Sardes
in the room of Alyattes, was rash enough to attempt to repair. He had
continued with success his father's policy of extending Lydian dominion
to the Aegean at the expense of the Ionian Greeks; and, master of
Ephesus, Colophon and Smyrna, as well as predominant partner in the
Milesian sphere, he secured to Lydia the control and fruition of
Anatolian trade, perhaps the most various and profitable in the world at
that time. A byword for wealth and luxury, the Lydians and their king
had nowadays become soft, slow-moving folk, as unfit to cope with the
mountaineers of the wild border highlands of Persia as, if Herodotus'
story is well founded, they were ignorant of their quality. Croesus took
his time, sending envoys to consult oracles near and far. Herodotus
tells us that he applied to Delphi not less than thrice and even to the
oracle of Ammon in the Eastern Sahara. At least a year must have been
spent in these inquiries alone, not to speak of an embassy to Sparta and
perhaps others to Egypt and Babylon. These preliminaries at length
completed, the Lydian gathered the levies of western Asia Minor and set
out for the East. He found the Halys in flood--it must have been in late
spring--and having made much ado of crossing it, spent the summer in