civilization of the country was a comparatively late growth, dating mainly from the rise of the Mermnads, and that its products will show an influence of the Hellenic cities which began not much earlier than 600 B.C., and was most potent in the century succeeding that date. We know nothing of the extent of Lydian power towards the east, unless the suggestions already based on the passage of Herodotus concerning the meeting of Alyattes of Lydia with Kyaxares the Mede on the Halys, some years later than the date of our present survey, are well founded. If they are, then Lydia's sphere of influence may be assumed to have included Cilicia on the south-east, and its interests must have been involved in Cappadocia on the north-east. It is not unlikely that the Mermnad dynasty inherited most of what the Phrygian kings had held before the Cimmerian attack; and perhaps it was due to an oppressive Lydian occupation of the plateau as far east as the Halys and the foot of Anti-Taurus, that the Mushki came to be represented in later times only by Moschi in western Armenia, and the men of Tabal by the equally remote and insignificant Tibareni. SECTION 10. THE GREEK CITIES Of the Greek cities on the Anatolian coast something has been said already. The great period of the elder ones as free and independent communities falls between the opening of the eighth century and the close of the sixth. Thus they were in their full bloom about the year 600. By the foundation of secondary colonies (Miletus alone is said to have founded sixty!) and the establishment of trading posts, they had pushed Hellenic culture eastwards round the shores of the peninsula, to Pontus on the north and to Cilicia on the south. In the eyes of Herodotus this was the happy age when "all Hellenes were free" as compared with his own experience of Persian overlordship. Miletus, he tells us, was then the greatest of the cities, mistress of the sea; and certainly some of the most famous among her citizens, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Hecataeus and Thales, belong approximately to this epoch, as do equally famous names from other Asiatic Greek communities, such as Alcaeus and Sappho of Lesbos, Mimnermus of Smyrna or Colophon, Anacreon of Teos, and many more. The fact is significant, because studies and literary activities like theirs could hardly have been pursued except in highly civilized, free and leisured societies where life and wealth were secure.