latter gave expression by a general revolt to its discontent with the bargain it had made. SECTION 4. FALL OF LYDIA Cyrus must have met with little or no opposition in the western Median provinces, for we find him, within a year or two of his recognition by both Persians and Medes, not only on his extreme frontier, the Halys river, but able to raid across it and affront the power of Lydia. To this action he was provoked by Lydia itself. The fall of the Median dynasty, with which the royal house of Lydia had been in close alliance since the Halys pact, was a disaster which Croesus, now king of Sardes in the room of Alyattes, was rash enough to attempt to repair. He had continued with success his father's policy of extending Lydian dominion to the Aegean at the expense of the Ionian Greeks; and, master of Ephesus, Colophon and Smyrna, as well as predominant partner in the Milesian sphere, he secured to Lydia the control and fruition of Anatolian trade, perhaps the most various and profitable in the world at that time. A byword for wealth and luxury, the Lydians and their king had nowadays become soft, slow-moving folk, as unfit to cope with the mountaineers of the wild border highlands of Persia as, if Herodotus' story is well founded, they were ignorant of their quality. Croesus took his time, sending envoys to consult oracles near and far. Herodotus tells us that he applied to Delphi not less than thrice and even to the oracle of Ammon in the Eastern Sahara. At least a year must have been spent in these inquiries alone, not to speak of an embassy to Sparta and perhaps others to Egypt and Babylon. These preliminaries at length completed, the Lydian gathered the levies of western Asia Minor and set out for the East. He found the Halys in flood--it must have been in late spring--and having made much ado of crossing it, spent the summer in ravaging with his cavalry the old homeland of the Hatti. Thus he gave Cyrus time to send envoys to the Ionian cities to beg them attack Lydia in the rear, and time to come down himself in force to his far western province. Croesus was brought to battle in the first days of the autumn. The engagement was indecisive, but the Lydians, having no mind to stay out the winter on the bleak Cappadocian highlands and little suspicion that the enemy would think of further warfare before spring, went back at their leisure to the Hermus valley, only to hear at Sardes itself that the Persian was hot in pursuit. A final battle was fought under the very walls of the Lydian capital and lost by Croesus; the lower town was taken and sacked; and the king, who had shut himself with his guards into the citadel and summoned his allies to his rescue come five months, was a prisoner of Cyrus within two weeks. It was the end of Lydia and of all buffers between the Orient and Greece. East and West were in direct contact and the omens boded ill to the West. Cyrus refused terms to the