Still more different might have been the result, if the cities generally had had the wisdom to follow a piece of advice which the great philosopher and statesman of the time, Thales, the Milesian, is said to have given them.  Thales suggested that the Ionians should form themselves into a confederation, to be governed by a congress which should meet at Teos, the several cities retaining their own laws and internal independence, but being united for military purposes into a single community.  Judged by the light which later events, the great Ionian revolt especially, throw upon it, this advice is seen to have been of the greatest importance.  It is difficult to say what check, or even reverse, the arms of Persia might not have at this time sustained, if the spirit of Thales had animated his Asiatic countrymen generally; if the loose Ionic Amphictyony, which in reality left each state in the hour of danger to its own resources, had been superseded by a true federal union, and the combined efforts of the thirteen Ionian communities had been directed to a steady resistance of Persian aggression and a determined maintenance of their own independence.  Mazares and Harpagus would almost certainly have been baffled, and the Great King himself would probably have been called off from his eastern conquests to undertake in person a task which after all he might have failed to accomplish.

The fall of the last Ionian town left Harpagus free to turn his attention to the tribes of the south-west which had not yet made their submission—­the Carians, the Dorian Greeks, the Caunians, and the people of Lycia.  Impressing the services of the newly-conquered Ionians and AEolians, he marched first against Caria, which offered but a feeble resistance.  The Dorians of the continent, Myndians, Halicarnassians, and Cnidians. submitted still more tamely, without any struggle at all; but the Caunians and Lycians showed a different spirit.  These tribes, which were ethnically allied, and of a very peculiar type, had never yet, it would seem, been subdued by any conqueror.  Prizing highly the liberty they had enjoyed so long, they defended themselves with desperation.  When they were defeated in the field they shut themselves up within the walls of their chief cities, Caunus and Xanthus, where, finding resistance impossible, they set fire to the two places with their own hands, burned their wives, children, slaves, and valuables, and then sallying forth, sword in hand, fell on the besiegers’ lines, and fought till they were all slain.

Meanwhile Cyrus was pursuing a career of conquest in the far east.  It was now, according to Herodotus, who is, beyond all question, a better authority than Ctesias for the reign of Cyrus, that the reduction of the Bactrians and the Sacans, the chief nations of what is called by moderns Central Asia, took place.  Bactria was a country which enjoyed the reputation of having been great and glorious at a very early date.