The reign of Cyrus properly begins with the conquest of Media, or rather its union with Persia, B.C. 549.  We know, however, but little of the career of Cyrus after he became monarch of both Persia and Media, until he was forty years of age.  He was probably engaged in the conquest of various barbaric hordes before his memorable Lydian campaign.  But we are in ignorance of his most active years, when he was exposed to the greatest dangers and hardships, and when he became perfected in the military art, as in the case of Caesar amid the marshes and forests of Gaul and Belgium.  The fame of Caesar rests as much on his conquests of the Celtic barbarians of Europe as on his conflict with Pompey; but whether Cyrus obtained military fame or not in his wars against the Turanians, he doubtless proved himself a benefactor to humanity more in arresting the tide of Scythian invasion than by those conquests which have given him immortality.

When Cyrus had cemented his empire by the conquest of the Turanian nations, especially those that dwelt between the Caspian and Black seas, his attention was drawn to Lydia, the most powerful kingdom of western Asia, whose monarch, Croesus, reigned at Sardis in Oriental magnificence.  Lydia was not much known to distant States until the reign of Gyges, about 716 B.C., who made war on the Dorian and Ionian Greek colonies on the coast of Asia Minor, the chief of which were Miletus, Smyrna, Colophon, and Ephesus.  His successor Ardys continued this warfare, but was obliged to desist because of an invasion of the Cimmerians,—­barbarians from beyond the Caucasus, driven away from their homes by the Scythians.  His grandson Alyattes, greatest of the Lydian monarchs, succeeded in expelling the Cimmerians from Lydia.  After subduing some of the maritime cities of Asia Minor, this monarch faced the Medes, who had advanced their empire to the river Halys, the eastern boundary of Lydia, which flows northwardly into the Euxine.  For five years Alyattes fought the Medes under Cyaxares with varying success, and the war ended by the marriage of the daughter of the Lydian king with Astyages.  After this, Alyattes reigned forty-three years, and was buried in a tomb whose magnificence was little short of the grandest of the Egyptian monuments.

Croesus, his son, entered upon a career which reminds us of Solomon, the inheritor of the conquests of David.  Like the Jewish monarch, Croesus was rich, luxurious, and intellectual.  His wealth, obtained chiefly from the mines of his kingdom, was a marvel to the Greeks.  His capital Sardis became the largest in western Asia, and one of the most luxurious cities known to antiquity, whither resorted travellers from all parts of the world, attracted by the magnificence of the court, among whom was Solon himself, the great Athenian law-giver.  Croesus continued the warfare on the Greek cities of Asia, and forced them to become his tributaries.  He brought under his sway most of the nations to the west of the Halys, and though