their
safeguard. The Cimmerians seized town after town;** they descended from
the basin of the Sangarios into that of the Bhyndakos; they laid waste
the Troad, and, about 670 B.C., they established themselves securely in
the stronghold of Antandros, opposite the magnificent AEolian island of
Lesbos, and ere long their advanced posts were face to face on all sides
with the outposts of Lydia.

* The date of 676 B.C. has been borrowed from Julius
Africanus by the Christian chronologists of the Byzantine
period; these latter made the fall of the Phrygian kingdom
coincide with the reign of Amon in Judaea, and this date is
accepted by most modern historians.

** One fact alone, probably taken from the Lydiaca of
Xanthus, is known to us concerning their operations in
Phrygia, namely, the taking of Syassos and the capture of
enormous stores of corn which were laid up in the silos in
that city.

Gyges resolutely held his own, and successfully repulsed them; but
the struggle was too unequal between their vast hordes, recruited
incessantly from their reserves in Thrace or the Caucasus, and his
scanty battalions of Lydians, Carians, and Creeks. Unaided, he had
no chance of reopening the great royal highway, which the fall of the
Phrygian monarchy had laid at the mercy of the barbarians along the
whole of its middle course, and yet he was aware that a cessation of the
traffic which passed between the Euphrates and the Hermos was likely
to lead in a short time to the decay of his kingdom. If the numerous
merchants who were wont to follow this ancient traditional route were
once allowed to desert it and turn aside to one of the coast-roads
which might replace it--either that of the Pontus in the north or of the
Mediterranean in the south--they might not be willing to return to it
even when again opened to traffic, and Lydia would lose for ever one of
her richest sources of revenue.*

* Radet deserves credit for being the first to point out the
economic reasons which necessarily led Gyges to make his
attempt at forming an alliance with Assur-bani-pal. He has
thus definitely dismissed the objections which some recent
critics had raised against the authenticity of this episode
in order to defend classic tradition and diminish the
authority of the Assyrian texts.

We may well conceive that Gyges, whose fortune and very existence was
thus in jeopar