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I at once allowed him to take as much gold away as he could carry. What think you did Alkaemmon on this? sent for high Lydian riding-boots, an apron and a basket, had the one secured behind him, put the others on, and filled them all with gold, till they could hold no more.
I also went in for jewelry, loading my fingers with flashy rings, wearing bracelets on both wrists, two or three on each, always two necklaces and even earrings, for which I had my ears pierced, like a Lydian. When I conned myself in my dressing-room mirror, arrayed in such a superfluity of decorations and fripperies, I felt sure that no one would take me for a Roman.
Poussin, in his directions to artists who came to study at Rome, used to say that "the remains of antiquity afforded him instruction that he could not expect from masters;" and in one of his letters to M. de Chantelou, he observes that "he had applied to painting the theory which the Greeks had introduced into their music the Dorian for the grave and the serious; the Phrygian for the vehement and the passionate; the Lydian for the soft and the tender; and the Ionian for the riotous festivity of his bacchanalians."
But I don't find Zopyrus' proposal a bad one." "Then so let it be," said Darius, yielding. "In that case Oroetes must provide us with the uniform of Lydian Taxiarchs." "You'd better take the splendid dress of the Chiliarchs at once, I think," cried Gyges. "Why, on such young men, that would excite suspicion directly." "But we can't appear as common soldiers." "No, but as Hekatontarchs."
True to that dark article of Grecian faith which punished remote generations for ancestral crimes, the Pythian replied, that Croesus had been fated to expiate in his own person the crimes of Gyges, the murderer of his master; that, for the rest, the declarations of the oracle had been verified; the mighty empire, denounced by the divine voice, had been destroyed, for it was his own, and the mule, Cyrus, was presiding over the Lydian realm: a mule might the Persian hero justly be entitled, since his parents were of different ranks and nations.
Gyges, to you I give this Lydian lyre; let its tones recall the giver to your memory. For you, Zopyrus, I have a golden chain; I have witnessed that you are the most faithful of friends; and we Egyptians are accustomed to place cords and bands in the hands of our lovely Hathor, the goddess of love and friendship, as symbols of her captivating and enchaining attributes.
It was not until a later period that allegorical phantasms, such as Death, and Sleep, and Dreams were introduced, and still later when the whole system was affected by Lydian, Phrygian, Assyrian, and Egyptian ideas. Not only thus from their intrinsic nature, but also from their recorded gradual development, are we warranted in imputing to the greater part of the myths an indigenous origin.
He dispatched a Median named Mazares, an officer of his army, at the head of a strong force, with orders to go back to Sardis, to deliver Tabalus from his danger, to seize and put to death all the leaders in the Lydian rebellion excepting Pactyas. Pactyas was to be saved alive, and sent a prisoner to Cyrus in Persia. Pactyas did not wait for the arrival of Mazares.
As soon as some degree of order was restored in the city, a large funeral pile was erected, by his directions, in a public square, and Croesus was brought to the spot. Fourteen Lydian young men, the sons, probably, of the most prominent men in the state, were with him. The pile was large enough for them all, and they were placed upon it. They were all laid upon the wood.
This is the last act that we can ascribe to the great Median king. He can scarcely have been much less than seventy years old at this time; and his life was prolonged at the utmost three years longer. According to Herodotus, he died B.C. 593, after a reign of exactly forty years, leaving his crown to his son Astyages, whose marriage with a Lydian princess was above related.
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