If, on one side, the Phenicians were separated from the productive Babylonia by the Arabian Desert, on the other side, t n e western portion of the same desert divided them from the no less productive valley of the Nile. In those early times which preceded the rise of Greek civilization, their land trade embraced both regions, and they served as the sole agents of international traffic between the two. Conveniently as their towns were situated for maritime commerce with the Nile, Egyptian jealousy had excluded Phenician vessels not less than those of the Greeks from the mouths of that river, until the reign of Psammetichus (672–618 B.C.); and thus even the merchants of Tyre could then reach Memphis only by means of caravans, employing as their instruments (as I have already observed) the Arabian tribes, alternately plunderers and carriers. Respecting Egypt, as respecting Assyria, since the works of Hekataeus are unfortunately lost, our earliest information is derived from Herodotus, who visited Egypt about two centuries after the reign of Psammetichus, when it formed part of one of the twenty Persian satrapies. The Egyptian marvels and peculiarities which he recounts, are more numerous, as well as more diversified, than the Assyrian, and had the vestiges been effaced as completely in the former as in the latter, his narrative would probably have met with an equal degree of suspicion.

Darius had now acquired full authority throughout the Persian empire, having put down the refractory satrap Orœtês, as well as the revolted Medes and Babylonians. He had moreover completed the conquest of Ionia, by the important addition of Samos; and his dominion thus comprised all Asia Minor with its neighbouring islands. But this was not sufficient for the ambition of a Persian king, next but one in succession to the great Cyrus. The conquering impulse was yet unabated among the Persians, who thought it incumbent upon their king, and whose king thought it incumbent upon himself, to extend the limits of the empire. Though not of the lineage of Cyrus, Darius had taken pains to connect himself with it by marriage: he had married Atossa and Artystonê, daughters of Cyrus—and Parmys, daughter of Smerdis the younger son of Cyrus. Atossa had been first the wife of her brother Kambysês; next, of the Magian Smerdis his successor; and thirdly of Darius, to whom she bore four children. Of those children the eldest was Xerxês, respecting whom more will be said hereafter.

Atossa, mother of the only Persian king who ever set foot in Greece—the Sultana Validi of Persia during the reign of Xerxês—was a person of commanding influence in the reign of her last husband, as well as in that of her son, and filled no inconsiderable space even in Grecian imagination, as we may see both by Æschylus and Herodotus.

With Hippias disappeared the mercenary Thracian garrison, upon which he and his father before him had leaned for defence as well as for enforcement of authority; and Kleomenês with his Lacedæmonian forces retired also, after staying only long enough to establish a personal friendship, productive subsequently of important consequences, between the Spartan king and the Athenian Isagoras. The Athenians were thus left to themselves, without any foreign interference to constrain them in their political arrangements.

It has been mentioned in the preceding chapter, that the Peisistratids had for the most part respected the forms of the Solonian constitution: the nine archons, and the probouleutic or preconsidering Senate of Four Hundred (both annually changed), still continued to subsist, together with occasional meetings of the people—or rather of such portion of the people as was comprised in the gentes, phratries, and four Ionic tribes. The timocratic classification of Solon (or quadruple scale of income and admeasurement of political franchises according to it) also continued to subsist—but all within the tether and subservient to the purposes of the ruling family, who always kept one of their number as real master, among the chief administrators, and always retained possession of the acropolis as well as of the mercenary force.

The early relations between the Lydians and the Asiatic Greeks, anterior to the reign of Gygês, are not better known to us than those of the Phrygians. Their native music, like the Phrygian, became partly incorporated with the Greek, and the two seem to have been very analogous, both in instruments and in character, though the Lydian mode was considered by the ancients as more effeminate and enervating. The flute was used alike by Phrygians and Lydians, and passed from both of them to the Greeks; but the magadis or pectis (a harp with sometimes as many as twenty strings, sounded two together in octave) is said to have been borrowed by the Lesbian Terpander from the Lydian banquets1 The flute-players who acquired esteem among the early Asiatic Greeks were often Phrygian or Lydian slaves, and even the poet Alkman, who gained for himself permanent renown among the Greek lyric poets, though not a slave born at Sardis, as is sometimes said, was probably of Lydian extraction.

It has been mentioned that Homer knows nothing of Lydia or Lydians : he names Mæonians in juxtaposition with Karians, and we are told by Herodotus that the people once called Mæonian received the new appellation of Lydian from Lydus son of Atys. Sardis, whose almost inexpugnahle citadel was situated on a precipitous rock on the northern side of the ridge of Tmôlus, overhanging the plain of the river Hermus, was the capital of the Lydian kings: it is not named by Homer, though he mentions both Tmôlus and the neighbouring Gygæan lake: the fortification of it was ascribed to an old Lydian king named Mêlês, and strange legends were told concerning it.