According to Stephen of Byzantium, there was, at the foot of Tmolus, a town called Asia, and Asia took its name either from this town or from Asies, a native hero. The same geographer assures us that the territory of Sardis was called Esio-nia or Asia. Herodotus attests that local traditions, according to Hermus, derived the name of Asia from Asies and that in his time one of the Sardian tribes was called the Asian. As, in referring to the Cimmerian invasion, in the course of which Sardis was taken, Callinus speaks of it as directed against the Esionians, Demetrius of Scepsis conjectures Esionians to be an Ionian form of Asionians, for, according to him, Mæonia was originally called Asia. Finally, the author of the Iliad applies the term Asia to a plain situated in the valley of the Cayster on the route from Ephesus to Sardis. Strabo reports that there was shown by the side of the river a building dedicated to the hero Asies.
Ruins of the Acropolis of Sardis
If one connects these different evidences and reflects on the other hand that the hero Asies is, according to the legend, the grandson of Manes and therefore either the brother or the nephew of Attys, eponymus of the Attyads, which carries us back to the earliest Lydian dynasty, one may reasonably suppose: (1) that Asia was the most ancient name of Sardis; (2) that this name, by a kind of gradual shading off, extended first to the district of which this town was the capital, then to the entire province, then to the greater part of the continent; (3) that it retained the name until the day when a new people, the Mæonians, doubtless, became masters of the country and substituted another; (4) that it did not even then completely disappear, but in accordance with a fixed law, was still preserved in an obscure and restricted form as a designation of insignificant sections of that organism of which it formerly composed the whole.
It is not known when the name Hyde gave place to that of Sardis, a Lydian word which signifies year. But this change could hardly have taken place until towards 687. It is only comprehensible if it coincide with the fall of the Mæonian power and the coming of the Lydian people. The Mæonians, as long as their hegemony lasted, had no reason for changing the name of their town. One can conceive on the contrary, that Gyges, anxious to break all links with the past, would give a new name and one agreeable to his men, to the capital he had conquered. Perhaps this term Sardis, or “year,” which thenceforward designated the residence of the Mermnadæ, was chosen by the first among them to perpetuate that memorable date when the prince of Tyra, who was the conqueror of Candaules and legitimised by Delphi, seated himself as master on the Eastern throne.
EARLY HISTORY OF LYDIA
Besides these traditions of which we have just spoken, the early history of Lydia offers only tales so purely legendary that it would be vain to seek a rational foundation for them. Cambles, in an excess of voracity provoked by philtres, devours his wife. Meles has a lion by his concubine. The soothsayers of Telmessus predict to him that Sardis will be impregnable if the animal be taken along the walls. So Meles causes it to walk round the Acropolis at all those points where it could be surprised or forced. As to that part of the citadel looking towards Tmolus, he neglects it, deeming it inaccessible. Under the reign of Alcimus, Lydia knew the Golden Age, enjoying profound peace and amassing immense riches. Perhaps there is some truth in this last story. There is nothing to hinder the belief that this Alcimus really represents the time when, whether by the exploitation of mines, the opening of the grand route from Sardis to Pteria, or other industrial or commercial impulses, Lydia laid the basis of her immense economic prosperity.
But these are only hypotheses. It is in the eighth century that more solid ground is found. The last Heraclids emerge from the cloud of mystery in which their predecessors are confusedly gathered. We know the dates of their reigns and possess a few details of their lives.
By the Christian chronographers they are very briefly mentioned. To supplement these references, we have a document of the first order, a passage from the Universal History, composed in the time of Augustus and at Herod’s request by the peripatetic Nicolaus of Damascus, secretary to the Jewish king.
The extracts of Nicolaus of Damascus have an exceptional value. Under the embellishments of the story, and although the facts are clothed in concrete, fabulous, and symbolic forms, one can find serious information scarcely affected by the myths, traits of a striking reality, which are not due to popular imagination nor to the romantic verve of historians, but which bear the impress of a far-off origin and an incontestable authenticity. Xanthus and his abbreviators are far from having understood the traditions of which they make themselves the echoes. But the very fidelity with which they record them helps us to recover their true significance.