The Historians' History of the World 02 [Israel, India, Persia, Phoenicia, Minor Nations of Western Asia]

The story of the overthrow of Candaules, as told by Herodotus, is one of the most stirring and famous of that author’s narratives. That it must be regarded as half mythical, however, is evident from the fact that other Greeks had different traditions as to the same event. Thus Plato tells a fabulous tale of the finding by Gyges of a ring which had the property of rendering him invisible at pleasure, which ring became the means through which he succeeded in winning the favour of the wife of Candaules, and ultimately in overthrowing that monarch. All these tales, taking thus the characteristic cast of ancient narratives, agree, however, in the one essential point, namely, the overthrow of the dynasty by Gyges and the establishing of himself and his successors on the throne.

If tradition is to be credited, Gyges was a man of no small merit as an administrator; in particular, it is believed that he first invented a system of coinage. The alleged fact rests on somewhat insecure evidence; still, in default of another claimant, it is usually accepted by modern historians, and this alone should be sufficient to preserve the name of Gyges, to the remotest posterity.

The name of Gyges, however, has attained no such popular notoriety as that of his successor, Crœsus, of about a century later. It is, indeed, the story of Crœsus and his overthrow by Cyrus, as told by Herodotus, that has done more than anything else to preserve the name of Lydia. Thanks to the father of history, the name of Crœsus has stood as a synonym of wealth through all the centuries since that monarch lived, and the tragic story of the overthrow of the mighty autocrat through overweening confidence in himself and an underestimate of his enemy will continue, no doubt, to point a moral for successive generations of readers so long as history is read.

Among all the names of antiquity there is, perhaps, no other more widely and popularly known than that of Crœsus, and there is certainly no other name in ancient or modern history so famous, whose possessor achieved so little. The wealth of Crœsus was largely a heritage from his predecessors, and his share in the only important Lydian war of which we have record, was far from a glorious one. The place of this famous monarch in history is, therefore, as unique as it is interesting.a

THE LAND

It is difficult to fix the boundaries of Lydia very exactly, partly because they varied at different times, partly because we are still but imperfectly acquainted with the geography of western Asia Minor.

The name is first found, under the form of Luddi, in the inscriptions of the Assyrian king Asshurbanapal, who received tribute from Gyges about 660 B.C. In Homer we read only of Mæonians, and the place of the Lydian capital Sardis is taken by Hyde, unless this was the name of the district in which Sardis stood. The earliest Greek writer who mentions the name is Mimnermus of Colophon, in the 37th Olympiad. According to Herodotus the Meiones (called Mæones by other writers) were named Lydians after Lydus, the son of Attys, in the mythical epoch which preceded the rise of the Heraclid dynasty. In historical times, however, the Mæones were a tribe inhabiting the district of the Upper Hermus, where a town called Mæonia (now Mennen) existed. The Lydians must originally have been an allied tribe which bordered upon them to the northwest, and occupied the plain of Sardis, or Magnesia, at the foot of Tmolus and Sipylus. They were cut off from the sea by the Greeks, who were in possession, not only of the Bay of Smyrna, but also of the country north of Sipylus as far as Temnus, in the Boghaz, or pass, through which the Hermus forces its way from the plain of Magnesia into its lower valley. In an Homeric epigram the ridge north of the Hermus, on which the ruins of Temnus lie, is called Sardene. Northward the Lydians extended at least as far as the Gygæan Lake (Lake Colœ, now Mermereh) and the Sardene range (now Dumanly Dagh). The plateau of the Bin Bir Tepe, on the southern shore of the Gygæan Lake, was the chief burial-place of the inhabitants of Sardis, and is thickly studded with tumuli, among which the “tomb of Alyattes” towers to a height of 260 feet.