Buyers and sellers and hangers-on belonged to the most diverse races. Lydians sold everything, and notably eunuchs. Pterians brought wool and grain; Phrygians, cattle; Greeks spread out pottery, jewels, objects of art conceived after Asiatic types, but fashioned with much more elegance and finish; Carians brought arms, plumed helmets, and graven bucklers, while the Chaldeans offered amulets with a mysterious air.
In a town so cosmopolitan, where industry and commerce brought together so much wealth, morals were naturally very dissolute. Luxury, show, and pleasure were sought after. Every one wore clothes of vivid colour, long and floating tunics, like the bassara, which fell to the feet. Princes had caftans of purple with gold embroidery. As to the coiffure, it generally consisted in a simple ribbon of cloth or gold which bound the hair and prevented it falling over the face. This was the ampyx, used above all by the Greek-loving Lydians. Partisans of old Eastern fashions preferred the mitre. Rings swung in the pierced ears. On the garments shone a profusion of jewels, necklaces, bracelets, anklets, and pendeloques. Every one was scented, locks glistened with aromatic oils, faces had that sickly look given by rouge and cosmetics.
All minds were continuously set on pleasure. At Colophon, where Lydian customs were widely copied, flute and zither players received an official salary to play from dawn till dusk. It is probable that the same custom existed at Sardis. To the Lydians are attributed the invention of the majority of games, such as dice and ball. Their banquets were models of careful taste. This was in contrast to Thessalonian banquets, which were orgies of guzzlers, with piles of victuals, whose sole merit was in being able to fill chariots. In his Gastronomy, the poet Archestratus, a connoisseur and good liver, recommends the real lover of delicacies to have a Lydian pastry cook. Herodotus likewise boasts of the confectionery of Callatebus. At Sardis the favourite dishes were karuke and kandaulos, stews so complicated that the recipes, as transmitted to us by the authors, are as unintelligible grammatically as they are amazing in a culinary way. What is most clearly known of these strange compositions is that they were made of aphrodisiac ingredients and had the reputation of inciting to love. Their action on the organism was compared to that of whips.
There was at Sardis a rendezvous for all the debauchées. This was a sort of park, planted with trees of such thick foliage that the stars could not pierce their impenetrable branchings. According to the imitation that Polycrates made of it at Samos, it was not a simple garden ornamented with arbours and shrubberies, flower beds and fountains, rare animals and exotic plants, but a real town, full of buildings and lanes, small hotels and shops.
This place of feasting and orgy was called the Happy Corner or the Woman’s Theatre.
It was above all in times of grand religious ceremony that the Lydian nature gave play to its two favourite passions, parade and exaltation. During the Cybelean orgies a wild bacchanalia was seen on the slopes of Tmolus. At night, to mourn the death of Attys, the people wandered about in the darkness. Mournful wailing mingled with the sound of muffled drums and piercing notes from the flute. Among the mountain peaks moved and howled fantastic shadows, made disproportionally large by the light of flickering torches. Then, the dawn having come, when the divine lover was restored to light, the terror and anguish were followed by delirious joy. An immense cortège paraded through the town in magnificent procession, every one rivalling his neighbour in magnificence and showing his most sumptuous treasures.
Such was Sardis. Like all towns situated at the confluence of several worlds, it offers us contradictory traits. A sensual materialism reigned, united with ardent mysticism. In this centre, full of surprises, the love of realities was allied with a taste for art. The fever of enjoyment did not detract from practical sense. Ease went hand in hand with boldness. When, on the return from an expedition in the interior, a squadron of Lydian cavalry came in to the sound of the syrinx, and double flute, the Greek—Solon or Thales—philosophising in the streets and seeing the forest of lances high above the roofs, could but ask himself whether the merchants, so pale, languid, and painted, whom he saw in a cloud of perfume in the shadowy shops, really belonged to the same race as these men, so proud, robust, weather-beaten by the winds of the Phrygian Mountains and tanned by the heat of the higher plateaus, showing glorious wounds and curvetting on powerful horses. Yet there was not one of those careless-looking merchants who had not, many times in his life, known the hard toil of caravan traffic—rising before dawn, marching in all weathers, sleeping on hard ground with frequent surprises and needing to be always vigilant.
The spirit of enterprise was the mainspring of the Lydian nature. The Greek did not always understand this, and too frequently looked upon the Lydians merely as instructors in vice. Doubtless they showed no aptitude for intellectual research or moral observation or philosophical speculation. But if not metaphysicians they were remarkable economists, excelling in producing and spreading riches. Above all, they were prudent, tolerant, amiable, genial and frank, well fitted for the task of serving as a bond between the East and the West.[c]