Greeks, except the powerful Milesians, and departing for the East again, left Lydia to be pacified and all the cities of the western coasts, Ionian, Carian, Lycian and what not, excepting only Miletus, to be reduced by his viceroys. SECTION 5. PERSIAN EMPIRE Cyrus himself had still to deal with a part of the East which, not having been occupied by the Medes, though in a measure allied and subservient to them, saw no reason now to acknowledge the new dynasty. This is the part which had been included in the New Babylonian Empire. The Persian armies invaded Babylonia. Nabonidus was defeated finally at Opis in June 538; Sippara fell, and Cyrus' general appearing before Babylon itself received it without a struggle at the hands of the disaffected priests of Bel-Marduk. The famous Herodotean tale of Cyrus' secret penetration down the dried bed of Euphrates seems to be a mistaken memory of a later recapture of the city after a revolt from Darius, of which more hereafter. Thus once more it was given to Cyrus to close a long chapter of Eastern history--the history of imperial Babylon. Neither did he make it his capital, nor would any other lord of the East so favour it. If Alexander perhaps intended to revive its imperial position, his successor, Seleucus, so soon as he was assured of his inheritance, abandoned the Euphratean city for the banks of the Tigris and Orontes, leaving it to crumble to the heap which it is to-day. The Syrian fiefs of the Babylonian kings passed _de jure_ to the conqueror; but probably Cyrus himself never had leisure or opportunity to secure them _de facto_. The last decade of his life seems to have been spent in Persia and the north-east, largely in attempts to reduce the Scythian element, which threatened the peace of Media; and at the last, having brought the enemy to bay beyond the Araxes, he met there defeat and death. But Cambyses not only completed his father's work in Syria, but fulfilled what is said to have been his further project by capturing Egypt and establishing there a foreign domination which was to last, with some intervals, nearly two hundred years. By the end of the sixth century one territorial empire was spread over the whole East for the first time in history; and it was with a colossus, bestriding the lands from the Araxes to the Upper Nile and from the Oxus to the Aegean Sea, that the Greeks stood face to face in the gate of the West.