incurred the guilt of murder. The soothsayers accordingly declared that King Meles, though his own hands were clean, must be banished for three years in order that the taint of bloodshed should be purged away. The king obeyed and retired to Babylon, where he lived three years. In his absence the kingdom was administered by a deputy, a certain Sadyattes, son of Cadys, who traced his descent from Tylon.(544) As to this Tylon we shall hear more presently. Again, we read that the Lydians rejoiced greatly at the assassination of Spermus, another of their kings, “for he was very wicked, and the land suffered from drought in his reign.”(545) Apparently, like the ancient Irish and many modern Africans, they laid the drought at the king’s door, and thought that he only got what he deserved under the knife of the assassin. (M136) With regard to the lion, the other emblem of the Cilician Hercules, we are told that the same king Meles, who was banished because of a dearth, sought to make the acropolis of Sardes impregnable by carrying round it a lion which a concubine had borne to him. Unfortunately at a single point, where the precipices were such that it seemed as if no human foot could scale them, he omitted to carry the beast, and sure enough at that very point the Persians afterwards clambered up into the citadel.(546) Now Meles was one of the old Heraclid dynasty(547) who boasted their descent from the lion-hero Hercules; hence the carrying of a lion round the acropolis was probably a form of consecration intended to place the stronghold under the guardianship of the lion-god, the hereditary deity of the royal family. And the story that the king’s concubine gave birth to a lion’s whelp suggests that the Lydian kings not only claimed kinship with the beast, but posed as lions in their own persons and passed off their sons as lion-cubs. Croesus dedicated at Delphi a lion of pure gold, perhaps as a badge of Lydia,(548) and Hercules with his lion’s skin is a common type on coins of Sardes.(549) (M137) Thus the death, or the attempted death, of Croesus on the pyre completes the analogy between the Cilician and the Lydian Hercules. At Tarsus and at Sardes we find the worship of a god whose symbols were the lion and the double-headed axe, and who was burned on a great pyre, either in effigy or in the person of a human representative. The Greeks called him Hercules, but his native name was Sandan or Sandon. At Sardes he seems to have been personated by the kings, who carried the double-axe and perhaps wore, like their ancestor Hercules, the lion’s skin. We may conjecture that at Tarsus also the royal family aped the lion-god. At all events we know that Sandan, the name of the god, entered into the names of Cilician kings, and that in later times the priests of Sandan at Tarsus wore the royal purple.(550) § 5. Hittite Gods at Tarsus and Sardes.