It is hardly an exaggeration to say that by 580 practically every suitable spare spot for colonization on the Mediterranean coastline had been taken up. There were, of course, non-Greek colonizers, most especially the Phoenicians, who founded the great trading city of Carthage in North Africa. But the Hellenic achievement was remarkable all the same.
Not only did it create a far-flung Greek “world,” but it also threw light on the early development of a corporate Hellenic “personality”—flexible, international, inquiring, and opportunistic.
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Croesus’s neighbors to the east were the kingdoms of Babylon and of Media, which had joined forces to destroy the old Assyrian Empire and sack its capital, Nineveh, in 612. Babylon was one of the great cities of the world. Once free of the Assyrians, its king built high, impregnable walls enclosing about one thousand acres and with eight gates. The most spectacular of these was the Ishtar Gate, faced with glazed blue bricks on which were bas reliefs of various animals, including lions and aurochs. The gate opened onto a grand processional way that led into the heart of the city.
To the northwest of Babylon and south of the Caspian Sea lay Media, a vigorous and newly centralized state. In the first half of the seventh century a founding king, Deiokes, built a great capital on a hill, Ecbatana. If the Greek historian Herodotus is to be trusted, its fortifications were as remarkable as those of Babylon. Looking very much like a ziggurat, they consisted of a series of massive concentric walls, each out-topped by the one within it. Inside the innermost and tallest wall stood the royal palace and the treasury.
The parapets of the first circle are white, of the next black, of the third scarlet, of the fourth blue, of the fifth orange; all these colors being painted. The last two have their battlements coated respectively with silver and gold.
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The rulers of the three states were on reasonably good terms, and had intermarried.
Eastwards in the southwestern part of Iran, roughly coextensive with the modern region of Fārs, there was the small dependent kingdom of Persis. Its new king was the youthful, hook-nosed Cyrus (in Old Persian, Kūruš), an ambitious and energetic ruler. He assembled the Persian tribes in 550 and persuaded them to approve his plan to revolt from his Median overlord. The campaign met with total success, as a Babylonian priest recorded.
King Ishtumegu (Astyages) [of Media] called up his troops and marched against Cyrus, king of Anshan (a city under Persian rule), in order to me[et him in battle]. The army of Ishtumegu revolted against him and they de[livered] him in fetters to Cyrus. Cyrus [marched] against the country Agamtanu (Ecbatana); the royal residence [he seized]; he took as booty silver, gold, (other) valuables…of the country Agamtanu and brought [them] to Anshan.
It was this disaster that captured Croesus’s full attention. He decided that he needed to act rather than wait, like a tethered goat, for Cyrus’s next step, which would very probably be an invasion of Lydia.
However, before making any definite move, he consulted Apollo’s oracle at Delphi.
Croesus wanted to be sure that Delphi and other well-known oracles were all they were cracked up to be, or so writes Herodotus. As a first step he sent delegates to the oracle, instructing them to consult the Pythia on the hundredth day after they had left Sardis, the Lydian capital. They were to ask what the king was doing at that very moment. This they did, and in the versified response the prophetess claimed that she could smell
hard-shelled tortoise
Boiling in bronze with the meat of lamb,
Laid upon bronze below, covered with bronze on top
Croesus was most impressed, for at the relevant time he had chopped up a tortoise and a lamb, and boiled them together in a bronze cauldron with a bronze lid. It was now that the king began to deluge the shrine at Delphi with generous gifts. The god looked after patrons like Croesus, generous and trusting. The king was given priority consultation rights, exemption from fees, and the best seats at Delphi’s festivals.
In due course a second delegation raised a more substantive issue. This was the king’s question: “Croesus, king of the Lydians and other peoples, in the belief that yours is the only true oracle in the whole world, gives you gifts worthy of your prophetic insight, and asks whether he should wage war against the Persians and whether he should seek to add any military force to his own as an ally.”
The god replied that if Croesus were to cross the Halys River, the boundary of his empire, and wage war on the Persians, he would destroy a mighty empire. So victory was guaranteed. The Lydian envoys asked a third question. Would his reign be a long one?
The Pythia answered in cryptic verse:
Wait till a mule becomes king of the Medes,
Then, tender-footed Lydian, run away to the pebbly River Hermus.
And hurry, hurry, don’t feel ashamed of being a coward.
More good news, thought Croesus. He had never heard of a mule ruling a kingdom and he could safely look forward to many years on the throne.
He mobilized his army and led it northeastwards. He found Cyrus in Paphlagonia and an indecisive battle ensued. He attributed his lack of success to his army being much smaller than that of Cyrus. He decided to return to the safety of Sardis and disband his troops, who were all mercenaries. Winter was approaching, when wars were not usually fought, and he would spend the interval before spring seeking allies and reinforcements. He concluded a military alliance with the Bab;ylonians, who could imagine themselves being next on Cyrus’s imperial shopping list if Lydia fell. Apparently he also sent embassies to Egypt, which might regard the emergence of a new and aggressive power in the Middle East with alarm, and to the Spartans, who had no obvious locus in the conflict and were not interested.
Cyrus liked to fight a war of movement, and saw the Lydian withdrawal and demobilization as an opportunity. He followed hot on Croesus’s heels and, much to the king’s dismay, soon appeared outside Sardis. A new army was swiftly raised and Croesus led it out against the Persians. Cyrus unexpectedly used camels as cavalry. They frightened the Lydian horses, which turned around and fled as soon as they caught the camels’ scent. The Lydian infantry fought on bravely, but the day belonged to Cyrus, who now placed Sardis under siege.
Nothing happened for a time. Then one day a Lydian guard on the city’s citadel accidentally dropped his helmet down a cliffside, so precipitous that it had not been fortified. The man scrambled down the slope, retrieved his helmet, and climbed back up without difficulty. A Persian happened to be watching and realized he had witnessed a way into the city. He passed the word to Cyrus.
In this period siege machines and artillery were incapable of destroying strongly built walls, but once a few men had managed by trickery, treachery, or clever observation to bypass the defenses, a city’s fate was usually sealed. Cyrus made good use of the intelligence he had received and Sardis fell.
A legend grew that Cyrus intended to burn Croesus alive, but that a timely rainstorm doused the flames. Perhaps it was the doing of Apollo, feeling a little guilty at having so comprehensively hoodwinked a loyal admirer. What happened to him in truth is unknown. He may have become an adviser at the Persian court. But the Babylonians told a different story.
Cyrus, king of Persia, called up his army and crossed the Tigris….In the month of Aiaru (May/June) he marched against the country of Lydia…killed its king, took his possessions, put there a garrison of his own.
But of one thing there could be no doubt. Croesus had allowed himself to be misled by Apollo’s crooked words. A mule is a cross between a horse and a donkey; in the oracle this signified Cyrus himself, also a mongrel, for his mother was a Mede and his father a Persian. And the empire Croesus had destroyed was his own.