But if the virtues of this civilization were great, its vices were equally so. The grossest form of immorality, that pest which the East seems to inherit like a moral leprosy, was prevalent. Certain tales in Herodotus show this to have been the case. The Greek did not escape the disease, and it may be that it was from the Lydian that he first caught it. Wholesale immorality of another kind was not merely prevalent, but received a religious sanction in the guise of that Aphrodite worship which in various forms sapped the vigour of the East. The town populations of Greece, especially those which, like the Corinthians, had closest intercourse with the Asian coast, caught this infection also. It would have been contrary to the very nature of things had the Greeks,—a race peculiarly apt to learn both evil and good,—escaped altogether the influence of this Oriental social system at their doors. It is fortunate for posterity that its influence was short-lived. The very excellence of the general relations between the Lydia of Crœsus and the Greeks as a body made the Lydian influence the more dangerous. It was the bitter hostility which sprang up in after times between the Greeks and the representatives of that new Orientalism which was superimposed upon the Lydian form, which saved the Greek civilization from becoming itself orientalized. The danger which Greece ran in the great war of 480–479 was as nothing compared with the danger Hellenism would have run had the war never taken place. The bitter, lasting hostility which it roused was far less dangerous than friendly intercourse with a great empire, the heir of all the ages of a world-old civilization, which might have made a moral conquest of the Hellene, had it refrained from attempting a physical one. It was the war itself, rather than its issue, which proved the salvation of Greece. Crœsus’ succession to the great dominion which Alyattes had left was not undisputed. But the son had inherited the vigour of his father. He anticipated the plans of his rival. The pretender disappeared,—how or whither is not known; and his supporters, who were largely drawn from the feudal nobility of the land, met death in many grievous forms. Some of the Greek cities had more than sympathized with his antagonist, so to these he now turned his attention. All of them, Æolian, Ionian, and Dorian alike, were reduced to the position of Lydian dependencies, though in matters purely local they remained autonomous, if the name of autonomy can be given to a form of government in which a local tyrant played the part of administrator and political agent. Yet unpromising as was their position from the point of view of theoretical politics, they were in actual fact treated with marked consideration by Crœsus.