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A marble statue, representing a man seated upon a dolphin, was erected at Tænarus to commemorate this event, where it remained for centuries afterward, a monument of the wonder which Arion had achieved. At length Alyattes died and Croesus succeeded him. Croesus extended still further the power and fame of the Lydian empire, and was for a time very successful in all his military schemes.

The reason that peace was made was an eclipse of the sun, which happened in the midst of a great battle, which struck both armies with superstitious fears. On the conclusion of peace, the son of the Median king, Astyages, married the daughter of the Lydian monarch, Alyattes, and an alliance was formed between Media and Lydia. The early history of this country is involved in obscurity.

But the great work of Alyattes' reign, and the one which seems to have had the most important consequences for Lydia, was the war which he undertook for the purpose of expelling the Cimmerians from Asia Minor.

The rulers of the dynasty of the Mermnadae, Gyges and his successors, spread the Lydian dominion until it extended to the Hellespont, and included Mysia and Phrygia. Alyattes was able to extirpate the Cimmerian hordes from the Sea of Azoff, who had overrun the western part of Asia Minor, and to make the Halys his eastern boundary.

With Miletus, indeed, the hostility of the Lydians became hereditary, and was renewed with various success by the descendants of Gyges, until, in the time of his great-grandson Alyattes, a war of twelve years with that splendid colony was terminated by a solemn peace and a strict alliance.

When the herald whom Alyattes sent to Miletus was about to arrive, Thrasybulus collected all the corn, and grain, and other provisions which he could command, and had them heaped up in a public part of the city, where the herald was to be received, so as to present indications of the most ample abundance of food.

If, as contended for by Larcher, still more ably by Wesseling, and since by Mr. Clinton, we agree that Croesus reigned jointly with his father Alyattes, the difficulty vanishes at once. Clinton for the suggestion of two authorities. Aeneas Tacticus, in his Treatise on Sieges, chap. iv., and Frontinus de Stratagem., lib. iv., cap. vii.

He felt under this obligation because Astyages was his brother-in-law; for the latter had married, many years before, a daughter of Alyattes, who was the father of Croesus. This, as Croesus thought, gave him a just title to interfere between the dethroned king and the rebel who had dethroned him.

Candaules is assassinated. Gyges succeeds. The Lydian power extended. The wars of Alyattes. Destruction of Minerva's temple. Stratagem of Thrasybulus Success of the stratagem. A treaty of peace concluded. Story of Arion and the dolphin. The alternative. Arion leaps into the sea. He is preserved by a dolphin. Death of Alyattes. Succession of Croesus. Plans of Croesus for subjugating the islands.

On the right of the throne were Alcseus, son of the hero and of Omphale; Ninus, Belus, Argon, the earlier kings of the dynasty of the Heracleidae, then all the line of intermediate kings, terminating with Ardys, Alyattes, Meles or Myrsus, father of Candaules, and finally Candaules himself.