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But what a people so suddenly risen into splendour, governed by a wise prince, and stimulated perhaps to eventual liberty by the example of the European Greeks, ought to have become, it is impossible to conjecture; perhaps the Hellenes of the East. At this period, however, of such power and such promise, the fall of the Lydian empire was decreed.
The Death of Hipparchus. Cruelties of Hippias. The young Miltiades sent to the Chersonesus. The Spartans Combine with the Alcmaeonidae against Hippias. The fall of the Tyranny. The Innovations of Clisthenes. His Expulsion and Restoration. Embassy to the Satrap of Sardis. Retrospective View of the Lydian, Medean, and Persian Monarchies. Result of the Athenian Embassy to Sardis.
His beautiful songs soon procured him the rights of a Lacedaemonian citizen. He was appointed to the head-directorship in the entire department of music in Lacedaemon and succeeded in naturalizing the soft Lydian music. His language was the Doric-Laconian. After a life devoted to song, the pleasures of the table and of love, he is said to have died of a fearful disease.
A war between these two powers was terminated by the marriage of the daughter of the Lydian king with the son of the Median monarch, Cyaxares, who shortly after laid siege to Nineveh, but was obliged to desist by a sudden inroad of Scythians.
Empire in our sense was alien to the instincts of the Greek race; but Miletus was for centuries recognised as the foremost member of a great commercial and political league, the political character of the league becoming more defined, as first the Lydian and then the Persian monarchy became an aggressive neighbour on its borders.
When the Pharaoh ceased to speak, he accosted Croesus suddenly with the following question: "I would know, Lydian, whether the snow still covered the mountains, when ye left Persia."
When all these conquests had been added to the Lydian empire, and the prosperity of Sardis was now at its height, there came thither, one after another, all the sages of Greece living at the time, and among them Solon, the Athenian.
The battle being thus divided, the Lacedaemonians first beat off the Persians; and a Spartan, named Arimnestus, slew Mardonius by a blow on the head with a stone, as the oracle in the temple of Amphiaraus had foretold to him. For Mardonius sent a Lydian thither, and another person, a Carian, to the cave of Trophonius. The latter, the priest of the oracle answered in his own language.
All antecedent historical parallels the ruin and captivity of the Lydian Croe'sus, the expulsion and mean life of the Syracusan Dionysius, both of them impressive examples of the mutability of human condition sink into trifles compared with the overthrow of this towering Persian colossus.
Long free, Ionia became tributary to the Lydian kings, and afterward to the great Persian monarchy. In the islands of Cos and Rhodes, and on the southern shores of Caria, spread the Dorian colonies planted subsequently to the Ionian by gradual immigrations. If in importance and wealth the Aeolian were inferior to the Ionian colonies, so were the Dorian colonies to the Aeolian.
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