The Lydian monarch, on his side, did not scruple to challenge a contest.  The long strife which his father had waged with the great Cyaxares had terminated in a close alliance, cemented by a marriage, which made Croesus and Astyages brothers.  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.  Contented with his successes, and satisfied that the tie of relationship secured him from attack on the part of the only power which he had need to fear, Croesus had for some years given himself up to the enjoyment of his gains and to an ostentatious display of his magnificence.  It was a rude shock to the indolent and self-complacent dreams of a sanguine optimism, which looked that “to-morrow should be as to-day, only much more abundant,” when tidings came that revolution had raised its head in the far south-east, and that an energetic prince, in the full vigor of life, and untrammelled by dynastic ties, had thrust the aged Astyages from his throne, and girt his own brows with the Imperial diadem.  Croesus, according to the story, was still in deep grief on account of the untimely death of his eldest son, when the intelligence reached him.  Instantly rousing himself from his despair, he set about his preparations for the struggle, which his sagacity saw to be inevitable.  After consultation of the oracles of Greece, he allied himself with the Grecian community, which appeared to him on the whole to be the most powerful.  At the same time he sent ambassadors to Babylon and Memphis, to the courts of Labynetus and Amasis, with proposals for an alliance offensive and defensive between the three secondary powers of the Eastern world against that leading power whose superior strength and resources were felt to constitute a common danger.  His representations were effectual.  The kings of Babylon and Egypt, alive to their own peril, accepted his proposals; and a joint league was formed between the three monarchs and the republic of Sparta for the purpose of resisting the presumed aggressive spirit of the Medo-Persians.

Cyrus, meanwhile, was not idle.  Suspecting that a weak point in his adversary’s harness would be the disaffection of some of his more recently conquered subjects, he sent emissaries into Asia Minor to sound the dispositions of the natives.  These emissaries particularly addressed themselves to the Asiatic Greeks, who, coming of a freedom-loving stock, and having been only very lately subdued, would it was thought, be likely to catch at an opportunity of shaking off the yoke of their conqueror.  But, reasonable as such hopes must have seemed, they were in this instance doomed to disappointment.  The Ionians, instead of hailing Cyrus as a liberator, received his overtures with suspicion.  They probably thought that they were sure not to gain, and that they might possibly lose, by a change of masters.  The yoke of Croesus had not, perhaps, been very oppressive; at any rate it seemed to them preferable to “bear the ills they had,” rather than “fly to others” which might turn out less tolerable.