There can be little doubt that the departure of these peoples was a disaster of the first magnitude to the Greek towns of Asia. It is hardly possible to realize at the present day the strength of resolution which prompted the Phokæans to undertake their long and perilous journey. They are the New Englanders of the sixth century before Christ. Their presence fifty years later, at the time of the revolt, might have given the Ionian resistance that “stiffening” which it seems to have lacked; indeed, a member of the remnant they left behind them, that dare-devil old pirate Dionysius, is the one prominent person on the Greek side in that distressful time whom later historians consented to praise. One by one the other Ionian and Æolian cities fell into Persian power. There does not appear to have been any real combined resistance. Nature had made them units without unity. The islanders of Samos alone escaped subjection. Caria was next attacked. It yielded practically without a blow, and the Dorian colonies fell with it into Persian hands—a fate in their case not wholly undeserved. Lycia fought for its liberty, but in vain; and with its subjection the establishment of Persian rule on the continent of West Asia was complete. The rest of the career of Cyrus, important though it is, has little influence on Greek history. His campaign in the East was a prolonged one. He seems to have extended the borders of his empire to the Thian-Shan and Suleiman ranges, if not into the plains of India itself. His aim can hardly have been the mere acquisition of these enormous areas of comparatively unproductive territory. The reason lying behind his policy was, in all probability, the fact that the races of this region were near akin to his own, and that he wished to advance against the Semitic peoples at the head of a forced coalition of the Iranian races. The turn of Babylon for attack was soon to come. Nabonidus’ antiquarian researches absorbed more and more of his time, and the real conduct of the government seems to have passed into the hands of his son Bel-sharuzar, the Belshazzar of the Book of Daniel. In the final struggle, indeed, Nabonidus seems to have come to the front again. By 538 Cyrus was ready. He made great preparations for the invasion, probably in anticipation of a much harder task than it actually proved. The collapse seems to have been rapid, so that within a short time Babylon was taken, Nabonidus a prisoner, and the brief revival of the Chaldæan empire at an end. The whole of the Babylonian dominions submitted to the conqueror, and the empire of Cyrus now stretched unbroken from the Ægean and Mediterranean on the west to the borders of India on the east.