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For when I sent to ask whether I should begin the war with Cyrus, he returned this answer: I should destroy a mighty kingdom by crossing the river Halys.
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.
Halys he sends to join them, and Phegeus, pierced right through the shield; then, as they ignorantly raised their war-cry on the walls, Alcander and Halius, Noëmon and Prytanis. Lynceus advanced to meet him, calling up his comrades; from the rampart the glittering sword sweeps to the left and catches him; struck off by the one downright blow, head and helmet lay far away.
Swiftly the wind blew, as the goddess Hera planned, so that most quickly Aeaean Medea might reach the Pelasgian land, a bane to the house of Pelias, and on the third morn they bound the ship's stern cables to the shores of the Paphlagonians, at the mouth of the river Halys. For Medea bade them land and propitiate Hecate with sacrifice.
With this evidence before them, it is only natural they should conclude against our existence. All the more when they hear the oracles saying that some one The Halys crossed, o'erthrows a mighty realm, but not specifying whether that realm is his own or his enemy's; or again O sacred Salamis, thou shalt slay Full many a mother's son.
War begets war; and the successes of Cyaxares up to the present point in his career did but whet his appetite for power, and stimulate him to attempt further conquests. In brief but pregnant words Herodotus informs us that Cyaxares "subdued to himself all Asia above the Halys."
Croesus was aroused from the dejection and stupor into which the death of his son had plunged him, as related in a former chapter, by this threatening danger. He began to consider very earnestly what he could do to avert it. The River Halys, a great river of Asia Minor, which flows northward into the Black Sea, was the eastern boundary of the Lydian empire.
Firm in his plan of fighting in the heart of the Ottoman kingdom, he avoided their camp, dexterously inclined to the left, occupied Cæsarea, traversed the salt desert and the river Halys, and invested Angora; while the Sultan, immovable and ignorant in his post, compared the Tartar swiftness to the crawling of a snail.
The friendship of the great power of Western Asia, secured by this union, had set Lydia free to pursue a policy of self-aggrandizement in her own immediate, neighborhood. Rapidly, one after another, the kingdoms of Asia Minor had been reduced; and, excepting the mountain districts of Lycia and Cilicia, all Asia within the Halys now owned the sway of the Lydian king.
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.
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