How far the Lydian kingdom of Sardis extended during the reign of Gygês, we have no means of ascertaining. Strabo alleges that the whole Troad[430] belonged to him, and that the Greek settlement of Abydus on the Hellespont was established by the Milesians only under his auspices. On what authority this statement is made, we are not told, and it appears doubtful, especially as so many legendary anecdotes are connected with the name of Gygês. This prince reigned (according to Herodotus) thirty-eight years, and was succeeded by his son Ardys, who reigned forty-nine years (about B. C. 678-629). We learn that he attacked the Milesians, and took the Ionic city of Priênê, but this possession cannot have been maintained, for the city appears afterwards as autonomous.[431] His long reign, however, was signalized by two events, both of considerable moment to the Asiatic Greeks; the invasion of the Cimmerians,—and the first approach to collision, at least the first of which we have any historical knowledge, between the inhabitants of Lydia and those of Upper Asia under the Median kings.
It is affirmed by all authors that the Medes were originally numbered among the subjects of the great Assyrian empire, of which Nineveh—or Ninos, as the Greeks call it—was the chief town, and Babylon one of the principal portions. That the population and power of these two great cities, as well as of several others which the Ten Thousand Greeks in their march found ruined and deserted in those same regions, is of high antiquity,[432] there is no room for doubting; but it is noway incumbent upon a historian of Greece to entangle himself in the mazes of Assyrian chronology, or to weigh the degree of credit to which the conflicting statements of Herodotus, Ktêsias, Berosus, Abydênus, etc. are entitled. With the Assyrian empire,[433]—which lasted, according to Herodotus, five hundred and twenty years, according to Ktêsias, thirteen hundred and sixty years,—the Greeks have no ascertainable connection: the city of Nineveh appears to have been taken by the Medes a little before the year 600 B. C. (in so far as the chronology can be made out), and exercised no influence upon Grecian affairs. Those inhabitants of Upper Asia, with whom the early Greeks had relation, were the Medes, and the Assyrians or Chaldæans of Babylon,—both originally subject to the Assyrians of Nineveh,—both afterwards acquiring independence,—and both ultimately embodied in the Persian empire. At what time either of them became first independent, we do not know:[434] the astronomical canon which gives a list of kings of Babylon, beginning with what is called the era of Nabonassar, or 747 B. C., does not prove at what epoch these Babylonian chiefs became independent of Nineveh: and the catalogue of Median kings, which Herodotus begins with Dêïokês, about 709-711 B. C., is commenced by Ktêsias more than a century earlier,—moreover, the names in the two lists are different almost from first to last.
For the historian of Greece, the Medes first begin to acquire importance about 656 B. C., under a king whom Herodotus calls Phraortês, son of Dêïokês. Respecting Dêïokês himself, Herodotus recounts to us how he came to be first chosen king.[435] The seven tribes of Medes dwelt dispersed in separate villages, without any common authority, and the mischiefs of anarchy were painfully felt among them: Dêïokês having acquired great reputation in his own village as a just man, was invoked gradually by all the adjoining villages to settle their disputes. As soon as his efficiency in this vocation, and the improvement which he brought about, had become felt throughout all the tribes, he artfully threw up his post and retired again into privacy,—upon which the evils of anarchy revived in a manner more intolerable than before. The Medes had now no choice except to elect a king,—the friends of Dêïokês expatiated warmly upon his virtues, and he was the person chosen.[436] The first step of the new king was to exact from the people a body of guards selected by himself; next, he commanded them to build the city of Ekbatana, upon a hill surrounded with seven concentric circles of walls, his own palace being at the top and in the innermost. He farther organized the scheme of Median despotism; the king, though his person was constantly secluded in his fortified palace, inviting written communications from all aggrieved persons, and administering to each the decision or the redress which it required,—informing himself, moreover, of passing events by means of ubiquitous spies and officials, who seized all wrong-doers and brought them to the palace for condign punishment. Dêïokês farther constrained the Medes to abandon their separate abodes and concentrate themselves in Ekbatana, from whence all the powers of government branched out; and the seven distinct fortified circles in the town, coinciding as they do with the number of the Median tribes, were probably conceived by Herodotus as intended each for one distinct tribe,—the tribe of Dêïokês occupying the innermost along with himself.[437]
Except the successive steps of this well-laid political plan, we hear of no other acts ascribed to Dêïokês: he is said to have held the government for fifty-three years, and then dying, was succeeded by his son Phraortês. Of the real history of Dêïokês, we cannot be said to know anything. For the interesting narrative of Herodotus, of which the above is an abridgment, presents to us in all its points Grecian society and ideas, not Oriental: it is like the discussion which the historian ascribes to the seven Persian conspirators, previous to the accession of Darius,—whether they shall adopt an oligarchical, a democratical, or a monarchical form of government;[438] or it may be compared, perhaps more aptly still, to the Cyropædia of Xenophon, who beautifully and elaborately works out an ideal which Herodotus exhibits in brief outline. The story of Dêïokês describes what may be called the despot’s progress, first as candidate, and afterwards as fully established. Amidst the active political discussion carried on by intelligent Greeks in the days of Herodotus, there were doubtless many stories of the successful arts of ambitious despots, and much remark as to the probable means conducive to their success, of a nature similar to those in the Politics of Aristotle: one of these tales Herodotus has employed to decorate the birth and infancy of the Median monarchy. His Dêïokês begins like a clever Greek among other Greeks, equal, free, and disorderly. He is athirst for despotism from the beginning, and is forward in manifesting his rectitude and justice, “as beseems a candidate for command;”[439] he passes into a despot by the public vote, and receives what to the Greeks was the great symbol and instrument of such transition, a personal body-guard; he ends by organizing both the machinery and the etiquette of a despotism in the Oriental fashion, like the Cyrus of Xenophon,[440] only that both these authors maintain the superiority of their Grecian ideal over Oriental reality by ascribing both to Dêïokês and Cyrus a just, systematic, and laborious administration, such as their own experience did not present to them in Asia. Probably Herodotus had visited Ekbatana (which he describes and measures like an eye-witness, comparing its circuit to that of Athens), and there heard that Dêïokês was the builder of the city, the earliest known Median king, and the first author of those public customs which struck him as peculiar, after the revolt from Assyria: the interval might then be easily filled up, between Median autonomy and Median despotism, by intermediate incidents, such as would have accompanied that transition in the longitude of Greece. The features of these inhabitants of Upper Asia, for a thousand years forward from the time at which we are now arrived,—under the descendants of Dêïokês, of Cyrus, of Arsakês, and of Ardshir,—are so unvarying,[441] that we are much assisted in detecting those occasions in which Herodotus or others infuse into their history indigenous Grecian ideas.
Phraortês (658-636 B. C.), having extended the dominion of the Medes over a large portion of Upper Asia, and conquered both the Persians and several other nations, was ultimately defeated and slain in a war against the Assyrians of Nineveh: who, though deprived of their external dependencies, were yet brave and powerful by themselves. His son Kyaxarês (636-595 B. C.) followed up with still greater energy the same plans of conquest, and is said to have been the first who introduced any organization into the military force;—before his time, archers, spearmen, and cavalry had been confounded together indiscriminately, until this monarch established separate divisions for each. He extended the Median dominion to the eastern bank of the Halys, which river afterwards, by the conquests of the Lydian king Crœsus, became the boundary between the Lydian and Median empires; and he carried on war for six years with Alyattês king of Lydia, in consequence of the refusal of the latter to give up a band of Scythian nomads, who, having quitted the territory of Kyaxarês in order to escape severities with which they were menaced, had sought refuge as suppliants in Lydia.[442] The war, indecisive as respects success, was brought to its close by a remarkable incident: in the midst of a battle between the Median and Lydian armies, there happened a total eclipse of the sun, which occasioned equal alarm to both parties, and induced them immediately to cease hostilities.[443] The Kilikian prince Syennesis, and the Babylonian prince Labynêtus, interposed their mediation, and effected a reconciliation between Kyaxarês and Alyattês, one of the conditions of which was, that Alyattês gave his daughter Aryênis in marriage to Astyagês son of Kyaxarês. In this manner began the connection between the Lydian and Median kings which afterwards proved so ruinous to Crœsus. It is affirmed that the Greek philosopher Thalês foretold this eclipse; but we may reasonably consider the supposed prediction as not less apocryphal than some others ascribed to him, and doubt whether at that time any living Greek possessed either knowledge or scientific capacity sufficient for such a calculation.[444] The eclipse itself, and its terrific working upon the minds of the combatants, are facts not to be called in question; though the diversity of opinion among chronologists, respecting the date of it, is astonishing.[445]
It was after this peace with Alyattês, as far as we can make out the series of events in Herodotus, that Kyaxarês collected all his forces and laid siege to Nineveh, but was obliged to desist by the unexpected inroad of the Scythians. Nearly at the same time that Upper Asia was desolated by these formidable nomads, Asia Minor too was overrun by other nomads,—the Cimmerians,—Ardys being then king of Lydia; and the two invasions, both spreading extreme disaster, are presented to us as indirectly connected together in the way of cause and effect.
The name Cimmerians appears in the Odyssey,—the fable describes them as dwelling beyond the ocean-stream, immersed in darkness and unblessed by the rays of Helios. Of this people as existent we can render no account, for they had passed away, or lost their identity and become subject, previous to the commencement of trustworthy authorities: but they seem to have been the chief occupants of the Tauric Chersonesus (Crimea) and of the territory between that peninsula and the river Tyras (Dniester), at the time when the Greeks first commenced their permanent settlements on those coasts in the seventh century B. C. The numerous localities which bore their name, even in the time of Herodotus,[446] after they had ceased to exist as a nation,—as well as the tombs of the Cimmerian kings then shown near the Tyras,—sufficiently attest this fact; and there is reason to believe that they were—like their conquerors and successors the Scythians—a nomadic people, mare-milkers, moving about with their tents and herds, suitably to the nature of those unbroken steppes which their territory presented, and which offered little except herbage in profusion. Strabo tells us[447]—on what authority we do not know—that they, as well as the Trêres and other Thracians, had desolated Asia Minor more than once before the time of Ardys, and even earlier than Homer.
The Cimmerians thus belong partly to legend partly to history; but the Scythians formed for several centuries an important section of the Grecian contemporary world. Their name, unnoticed by Homer, occurs for the first time in the Hesiodic poems. When the Homeric Zeus in the Iliad turns his eye away from Troy towards Thrace, he sees, besides the Thracians and Mysians, other tribes, whose names cannot be made out, but whom the poet knows as milk-eaters and mare-milkers;[448] and the same characteristic attributes, coupled with that of “having wagons for their dwelling-houses,” appear in Hesiod connected with the name of the Scythians.[449] The navigation of the Greeks into the Euxine, gradually became more and more frequent, and during the last half of the seventh century B. C. their first settlements on its coasts were established. The foundation of Byzantium, as well as of the Pontic Herakleia, at a short distance to the east of the Thracian Bosphorus, by the Megarians, is assigned to the 30th Olympiad, or 658 B. C.;[450] and the succession of colonies founded by the enterprise of Milesian citizens on the western coast of the Euxine, seem to fall not very long after this date,—at least within the following century. Istria, Tyras, and Olbia, or Borysthenes, were planted respectively near the mouths of the three great rivers Danube, Dniester, and Bog: Kruni, Odêssus, Tomi, Kallatis, and Apollonia, were also planted on the south-western or Thracian coast, northward of the dangerous land of Salmydessus, so frequent in wrecks, but south of the Danube.[451] According to the turn of Grecian religious faith, the colonists took out with them the worship of the hero Achilles (from whom, perhaps, the œkist and some of the expatriating chiefs professed to be descended), which they established with great solemnity both in the various towns and on the small adjoining islands: and the earliest proof which we find of Scythia, as a territory familiar to Grecian ideas and feeling, is found in a fragment of the poet Alkæus (about B. C. 600), wherein he addresses Achilles[452] as “sovereign of Scythia.” There were, besides, several other Milesian foundations on or near the Tauric Chersonese (Crimea) which brought the Greeks into conjunction with the Scythians,—Herakleia, Chersonêsus, and Theodosia, on the southern coast and south-western corner of the peninsula,—Pantikapæum and the Teian colony of Phanagoria (these two on the European and Asiatic sides of the Cimmerian Bosphorus respectively), and Kêpi, Hermônassa, etc. not far from Phanagoria, on the Asiatic coast of the Euxine: last of all, there was, even at the extremity of the Palus Mæotis (Sea of Azof), the Grecian settlement of Tanais.[453] All or most of these seem to have been founded during the course of the sixth century B. C., though the precise dates of most of them cannot be named; probably several of them anterior to the time of the mystic poet Aristeas of Prokonnêsus, about 540 B. C. His long voyage from the Palus Mæotis (Sea of Azof) into the interior of Asia as far as the country of the Issêdones (described in a poem, now lost, called the Arimaspian verses), implies an habitual intercourse between Scythians and Greeks which could not well have existed without Grecian establishments on the Cimmerian Bosphorus.
Hekatæus of Milêtus,[454] appears to have given much geographical information respecting the Scythian tribes; but Herodotus, who personally visited the town of Olbia, together with the inland regions adjoining to it, and probably other Grecian settlements in the Euxine (at a time which we may presume to have been about 450-440 B. C.),—and who conversed with both Scythians and Greeks competent to give him information,—has left us far more valuable statements respecting the Scythian people, dominion, and manners, as they stood in his day. His conception of the Scythians, as well as that of Hippokratês, is precise and well-defined,—very different from that of the later authors, who use the word almost indiscriminately to denote all barbarous nomads. His territory, called Scythia, is a square area, twenty days’ journey or four thousand stadia (somewhat less than five hundred English miles) in each direction,—bounded by the Danube (the course of which river he conceives in a direction from N. W. to S. E.), the Euxine, and the Palus Mæotis with the river Tanais, on three sides respectively,—and on the fourth or north side by the nations called Agathyrsi, Neuri, Androphagi, and Melanchlæni.[455] However imperfect his idea of the figure of this territory may be found, if we compare it with a good modern map, the limits which he gives us are beyond dispute: from the lower Danube and the mountains eastward of Transylvania to the lower Tanais, the whole area was either occupied by or subject to the Scythians. And this name comprised tribes differing materially in habits and civilization. The great mass of the people who bore it, strictly nomadic in their habits,—neither sowing nor planting, but living only on food derived from animals, especially mare’s milk and cheese,—moved from place to place, carrying their families in wagons covered with wicker and leather, themselves always on horseback with their flocks and herds, between the Borysthenês and the Palus Mæotis; they hardly even reached so far westward as the Borysthenês, since a river (not easily identified) which Herodotus calls Pantikapês, flowing into the Borysthenês from the eastward, formed their boundary. These nomads were the genuine Scythians, possessing the marked attributes of the race, and including among their number the regal Scythians,[456]—hordes so much more populous and more effective in war than the rest, as to maintain undisputed ascendency, and to account all other Scythians no better than their slaves. It was to these that the Scythian kings belonged, by whom the religious and political unity of the name was maintained,—each horde having its separate chief, and to a certain extent separate worship and customs. But besides these nomads, there were also agricultural Scythians, with fixed abodes, living more or less upon bread, and raising corn for exportation, along the banks of the Borysthenês and the Hypanis.[457] And such had been the influence of the Grecian settlement of Olbia at the mouth of the latter river in creating new tastes and habits, that two tribes on its western banks, the Kallippidæ and the Alazônes, had become completely accustomed both to tillage and to vegetable food, and had in other respects so much departed from their Scythian rudeness as to be called Hellenic-Scythians, many Greeks being seemingly domiciled among them. Northward of the Alazônes, lay those called the agricultural Scythians, who sowed corn, not for food but for sale.[458]
Such stationary cultivators were doubtless regarded by the predominant mass of the Scythians as degenerate brethren; and some historians maintain that they belonged to a foreign race, standing to the Scythians merely in the relation of subjects,[459]—an hypothesis contradicted implicitly, if not directly, by the words of Herodotus, and no way necessary in the present case. It is not from them, however, that Herodotus draws his vivid picture of the people, with their inhuman rites and repulsive personal features. It is the purely nomadic Scythians whom he depicts, the earliest specimens of the Mongolian race (so it seems probable)[460] known to history, and prototypes of the Huns and Bulgarians of later centuries. The sword, in the literal sense of the word, was their chief god,[461]—an iron scymetar solemnly elevated upon a wide and lofty platform, which was supported on masses of fagots piled underneath,—to whom sheep, horses, and a portion of their prisoners taken in war, were offered up in sacrifice: Herodotus treats this sword as the image of the god Arês, thus putting an Hellenic interpretation upon that which he describes literally as a barbaric rite. The scalps and the skins of slain enemies, and sometimes the skull formed into a drinking-cup, constituted the decoration of a Scythian warrior: whoever had not slain an enemy, was excluded from participation in the annual festival and bowl of wine prepared by the chief of each separate horde. The ceremonies which took place during the sickness and funeral obsequies of the Scythian kings (who were buried at Gerrhi, at the extreme point to which navigation extended up the Borysthenês), partook of the same sanguinary disposition. It was the Scythian practice to put out the eyes of all their slaves; and the awkwardness of the Scythian frame, often overloaded with fat, together with extreme dirt of body, and the absence of all discriminating feature between one man and another, complete the brutish portrait.[462] Mare’s milk (with cheese made from it) seems to have been their chief luxury, and probably served the same purpose of procuring the intoxicating drink called kumiss, as at present among the Bashkirs and the Kalmucks.[463]