Heraclido, each one the son of his predecessor, are said to have followed Agron on the throne, their combined reigns giving a total of five hundred years.* Most of these princes, whether Atyadae or Heraclidae, have for us not even a shadowy existence, and what we know of the remainder is of a purely fabulous nature.  For instance, Kambles is reported to have possessed such a monstrous appetite, that he devoured his own wife one night, while asleep.**

* The number is a purely conventional one, and Gutschmid has shown how it originated.  The computation at first comprised the complete series of 22 Heraclidae and 5 Mermnadae, estimated reasonably at 4 kings to a century, i.e. 27 X 25 = 675 years, from the taking of Sardes to the supposed accession of Agron.  As it was known from other sources that the 5 Mermnadae had reigned 170 years, these were subtracted from the 675, to obtain the duration of the Heraclidae alone, and by this means were obtained the 505 years mentioned by Herodotus.

** Another version, related by Nicolas of Damascus, refers the story to the time of Lardanos, a contemporary of Hercules; it shows that the Lydian chronographers considered Kambles or Kamblitas as being one of the last of the Atyad kings.

The concubine of Meles, again, is said to have brought forth a lion, and the oracle of Telmessos predicted that the town of Sardes would be rendered impregnable if the animal were led round the city walls; this was done, except on the side of the citadel facing Mount Tmolus, which was considered unapproachable, but it was by that very path that the Persians subsequently entered the town.  Alkimos, we are told, accumulated immense treasures, and under his rule his subjects enjoyed unequalled prosperity for fourteen years.  It is possible that the story of the expedition despatched into Palestine by a certain Akiamos, which ended in the foundation of Ascalon, is merely a feeble echo of the raids in Syrian and Egyptian waters made by the Tyrseni and Sardinians in the thirteenth century B.C.  The spread of the Phrygians, and the subsequent progress of Greek colonisation, must have curtailed the possessions of the Heraclidas from the eleventh to the ninth centuries, but the material condition of the people does not appear to have suffered by this diminution of territory.  When they had once firmly planted themselves in the ports along the Asianic littoral—­at Kyme, at Phocae, at Smyrna, at Clazomenae, at Colophon, at Ephesus, at Magnesia, at Miletus—­the AEolians and the Ionians lost no time in reaping the advantages which this position, at the western extremities of the great high-road through Asia Minor, secured to them.  They overran all the Lydian settlements in Phrygia—­Sardes, Leontocephalos, Pessinus, Gordioon, and Ancyra.  The steep banks and the tortuous course of the Halys failed to arrest them; and they pushed forward beyond the mysterious regions peopled by the White Syrians, where the ancient civilisation of Asia Minor still held its sway.  The search for precious metals mainly drew them on—­the gold and silver, the copper, bronze, and above all iron, which the Chalybae found in their mountains, and which were conveyed by caravans from the regions of the Caucasus to the sacred towns of Teiria and Pteria.*