Kitabı oku: «The History of Antiquity, Vol. 3 (of 6)», sayfa 23

He exhibited a proper reverence for the worship of Egypt. In the twelfth year of the reign of Hophrah an Apis had died, and had been buried in the customary manner at the expense of the king. In the fifth year of the reign of Amasis (566 B.C.) an Apis was again born, to which Amasis appears to have paid especial honour. To this bull while yet alive, he presented a large coffin of red granite. The inscription on the cover runs thus: "The king Amasis. He has caused this to be made for his memorial of the living Apis, this huge sarcophagus of red granite, for his majesty approved the custom that all the kings in all ages had had such made of costly stones. This did he, the bestower of life for ever."⁷⁵⁹ When this Apis died in the year 548 B.C., he was buried with extraordinary pomp, and a memorial stone from the new sepulchres of the Apis (p. 312) informs us what part Psammetichus, the son of Amasis and heir to the throne, took in this burial, and in all the ceremonials observed during the days of lamentation.⁷⁶⁰

In the effort in which the rulers of Egypt resembled each other almost without exception – in the desire to erect great buildings – Amasis emulated his predecessors. His buildings began with his accession and ended with his life. Sais was adorned by him with the largest and most magnificent works, for which the stones were mostly brought from the quarries at Memphis, and the largest from the quarries at Elephantine. To the temple of Neith at Sais he added marvellous propylæa, which, as Herodotus says, surpassed all others by their height and size, as well as by the size and beauty of the stones of which they were constructed. Here Amasis also set up great colossi and sphinxes, and caused to be brought from Elephantine a chapel hewn out of a single stone 21 cubits in length, 14 cubits in breadth, and 8 cubits in height, which was set up at Sais before the temple of Neith. Two thousand seamen were occupied for three years in bringing this chapel from Elephantine to Sais. A similar memorial of Amasis lies on the site of the ancient Thmuis in the Delta. At Memphis Amasis built a temple to Isis; "a work large and worthy to be seen beyond all others," says Herodotus, and before the temple of Ptah he placed a colossus of 75 feet in height, and on either side of it two statues of Ethiopian stone of 20 feet in height. When Herodotus visited Egypt this mighty colossus lay at Memphis thrown down on its back, and one of equal dimensions (no doubt they were portraits of Amasis) lay in a similar position at Sais. The other temples were not forgotten; Amasis caused restorations to be undertaken at Thebes, especially at the great temple of Karnak: other temples were also restored and adorned with new buildings and statues. His sepulchre Amasis built at Sais beside the tombs of the race of Psammetichus, whose dynasty he wished to continue, just as he continued and completed their system of government. It lies, says Herodotus, somewhat farther from the temple than the tomb of Hophrah and his forefathers, at the side of the colonnade before the temple. It was a separate colonnade, of which the portico was supported by pillars with capitals carved like palm-branches. In this portico lay the sepulchral chamber, a room of stone closed by double doors.⁷⁶¹ Of the eagerness with which Amasis built we have still evidence in the inscriptions found with his name in all the quarries of Egypt; in the limestone quarries of Memphis, in the granite quarries at Hamamat, and in the sandstone quarries at Selsilis, and in the quarries of red granite in the south of Egypt. The quarries of Hamamat also give us the name of the chief architect of Amasis, "the chief of all the buildings in Upper and Lower Egypt," and his forefathers to the twenty-fourth generation.⁷⁶²

Amid the cares of the throne Amasis did not forget the easy and cheerful enjoyment of life, which he loved. When he had finished his business in the morning he sat down to table with his friends, drank deeply, and made merry with them without any regard for the ancient ceremonial of the Egyptian court, or the remonstrances of his friends, who would recall him to more dignified behaviour. Nevertheless, in spite of the favour shown to the Greeks, he knew how to win the good-will of the Egyptians, by a just, moderate, and mild government, and by regard for the well-being of the land. The tradition of the Egyptians counts him among the lawgivers of the land. He is said to have regulated the economical relations and the duties of the nomarchs as well as their power.⁷⁶³ With the Greeks too he passed as a ruler of extraordinary wisdom. In any case, under his long reign – he sat on the throne for 44 years – Egypt attained a high degree of prosperity. The freedom of trade brought in products: agriculture, manufactures, and trade were active. "Under Amasis," says Herodotus, "Egypt is said to have been most prosperous, both in regard to that which the river did for the land, and the soil gave to the inhabitants, and at that time there are said to have been 20,000 inhabited places in the land."⁷⁶⁴

But these were the last days of Egyptian splendour. If Babylon had hitherto been a dangerous neighbour, the position of affairs in the East changed in the reign of Amasis for the most decided disadvantage to Egypt. When Cyrus had brought the kingdom of the Medes into his power, he reduced the nations on the east and west of Persia. At length Babylon herself succumbed to the arms of Cyrus in the thirty-second year of the reign of Amasis. With the fall of Babylon Syria became subject to him, so that the youthful and mighty kingdom of the Persians already bordered on Egypt. Amasis avoided giving any support to the resistance offered by Babylon and Lydia to this new power. If he succeeded, after the fall of Babylon, in possessing himself of the island of Cyprus, and so obtaining a position opposite the Syrian coast, which might paralyse the possession of the Phenician cities, this success, as opposed to the supremacy of Persia, was only of importance in so far as it rendered the use of the Phenician fleet difficult for the Persians. The close connection also into which Amasis entered with Polycrates, who in the year 536 B.C. made himself master of the island of Samos, and got together a splendid fleet of 80 heavy and 100 light ships of war – for Polycrates was threatened more heavily by the neighbourhood of Persia than Egypt was – could only be of use to Egypt in defending her against an attack from the sea; it was useless against the attack of a far superior power by land. If in his last years Amasis could take breath for a moment owing to the death of the great conqueror, the anxiety for the future soon returned with double weight. When Amasis died (526 B.C.) Cambyses, the son of Cyrus, was already preparing a great armament against Egypt. To his son Psammetichus III. (Psammenitus) he bequeathed the difficult task of meeting the attack of the Persians.

CHAPTER XVII.
THE OVERTHROW OF THE HERACLEIDS IN LYDIA

On the western coast of Asia Minor the nation of the Lydians, which possessed the vallies of the Hermus and Mæander, had early arrived at a monarchy and a point of civilization far in advance of the stages of primitive life. The ancient royal house of the Lydians claimed to be sprung from the gods, from Attys, the son of the god Manes. The city of Sardis is said to have been built under the dominion of this dynasty, to have been dedicated to the sun-god and fortified.⁷⁶⁵ This house of the Attyadæ was said to have been followed about the year 1200 B.C. by a second dynasty which carried back its genealogy to Sandon, the sun-god himself, a deity whom the Greeks, according to the various aspects of the nature ascribed to him by the Lydians, sometimes identified with their Apollo, and at other times with their Heracles. As the founder of the new dynasty the Greeks call him Heracles. Agron, the fourth descendant of this Sandon-Heracles, is said to have ascended the throne of Lydia in the year 1194 B.C. After him twenty-two kings, the descendants of Agron, bore the crown of Lydia for a space of 505 years, down to the year 689 B.C.⁷⁶⁶

The power possessed by Lydia under this family of rulers cannot have been very considerable. When the Greeks forced the Phenicians from the islands of the Ægean Sea, and then, about the end of the eleventh and beginning of the tenth century B.C., landed on the western coast of Asia Minor, the Lydians were not able any more than the Teucrians and Mysians in the North, or the Carians in the South, to prevent the establishment of the Greeks on their coasts, the loss of the ancient native sanctuaries at Smyrna, Colophon, Ephesus, and the founding of Greek cities in their land on the mouths of the Lydian rivers, the Hermus and the Cayster, though the Greek emigrants came in isolated expeditions over the sea. It was on the Lydian coasts that the most important Greek cities rose; Cyme, Phocæa, Smyrna, Colophon, Ephesus. Priene, Myus, and Miletus were on the land of the Carians. The Homeric poems would hardly have omitted to place a strong body of auxiliaries from Mæonia, which is their name for Lydia, by the side of the oppressed Ilium, if the fame of a powerful Lydian kingdom had then existed among the Greeks of the coast. The land of the Lydians is well-known to the Homeric poems; they give a distinct prominence to the trade, wealth, and horse-breeding of the Mæonians; but they make no mention of any prominent race of rulers;⁷⁶⁷ and yet the Sandonids were on the throne at Sardis when the poems were sung, and when they came to an end. The loss of her coasts and the mouths of her rivers must have been heavily felt by Lydia. The trade with the sea and beyond it was henceforth only possible by the intervention of the Greek cities which had grown up there.

Of the exploits and fortunes of the kings of the race of Sandon we have almost no information. It is only of the five or six last rulers that we have the names and a few traces; and to these we may add two or three very doubtful stories of the fall of the last king of the house. According to Eusebius, Ardys, Sadyattes, Meles, and Candaules, brought the series of this dynasty to an end: Ardys reigned from 768 to 732 B.C.; Sadyattes down to 718; Meles down to the year 706 B.C., and he was then succeeded by Candaules.⁷⁶⁸ The fragments of Nicolaus of Damascus, which must have been derived from the lost history of the Lydian Xanthus, give us the following account: Alyattes, the predecessor of Ardys, had left his kingdom jointly to his sons Cadys and Ardys. Cadys soon died, and Ardys was driven from the throne by Spermus, a relation of Cadys, who during the life of Cadys had had an intrigue with his wife. Ardys with his wife and daughter fled to Cyme, and there he lived in such poverty that he worked as a wheelwright. Two years after the flight of Ardys the usurper was struck down by an assassin whom he had hired against Ardys, and the Lydians sent messengers to Cyme to invite Ardys to ascend again the throne of his fathers. When restored to the throne, Ardys exercised a mild and just rule, and the Lydians had never known such prosperity since the days of the ancient king Alkimus (I. 561), as they enjoyed under Ardys. The army of the Lydians also was strong under the rule of this king: it numbered 30,000 horsemen.⁷⁶⁹ A fragment of Heracleides Ponticus also gives us information about the fortunes of Ardys at Cyme. "Severely oppressed by their ruler the Lydians sent to Cyme, when they found that one of their countrymen was there, to summon him to the throne. The man was the slave of a wheelwright. The Lydians paid his price and took him with them. But a Cymæan who had ordered a wagon kept him back, and told those who remonstrated with him, to put no hindrances in his way, for he considered it a great thing to possess a wagon which the king of the Lydians had made."⁷⁷⁰

Herodotus tells us that Candaules, whom the Greeks call Myrsilus, placed the greatest confidence in Gyges the son of Dascylus, one of his lance-bearers. He went so far in this that he determined to convince Gyges by the evidence of his own eyes that the queen, his consort, was the most beautiful of all women. For this purpose he brought Gyges one evening into his bed-chamber, and bade him place himself behind the open door, so that when the queen undressed herself he might see her naked. This was done. But the queen saw Gyges when he passed out. Enraged at the insult offered to her by Candaules she sent for Gyges on the following morning, and gave him the choice whether he would die on the spot, or slay Candaules on the following night. He chose the latter. She gave him a dagger and concealed him behind the door, and Gyges stabbed Candaules as soon as he was asleep. But the Lydians rose in arms to avenge the death of their king. The adherents of Gyges and the rest of the Lydians came to a compromise, that, if the oracle of the god should declare for Gyges as the king of the Lydians, he should rule, but if not, Gyges was to restore the kingdom to the race of Sandon.

According to the fragments of Nicolaus it was the good king Ardys who laid the foundation for the overthrow of the house of the Sandonids. In his old age, so we are told, Ardys took great delight in a man of the race of the Mermnadæ. This was Dascylus, the son of Gyges. At length Ardys handed over to him the entire government. Sadyattes, the son and heir of Ardys, became apprehensive that, at the death of Ardys, Dascylus would misuse the great power entrusted to him, in order to establish himself on the throne. He caused Dascylus to be secretly put out of the way. Filled with grief, the old king caused the Lydians to be assembled, had himself carried into the assembly in a litter, bade the Lydians discover the murderers, on whose heads he imprecated bitter curses, and ended by saying that any one who discovered them might slay them. But the murderers were not discovered. After the death of Ardys, Sadyattes ascended the throne, and he was succeeded by Meles. In this reign Lydia was visited by a severe famine, and an oracle demanded that the death of Dascylus should be expiated. The wife of Dascylus had fled to Phrygia, her home, and had there brought forth a son, with whom she was pregnant at the time of his father's death. She had given him the name of his father. Dascylus, who had now grown up, was requested by Meles to return to Sardis, in order to receive there the atonement for the murder of his father. But Dascylus feared to return, and retired to the Syrians who dwell in Sinope, on the Pontus, where he married a Syrian woman, who bore him Gyges. After the reigns of Meles and Myrsus, Candaules ascended the throne of Lydia. Then the aged brother of the murdered Dascylus, who had remained in Sardis and was childless, besought the king that his nephew Dascylus might be allowed to return to Sardis, that he might adopt him as his son before his death. This prayer the king granted, but Dascylus refused to leave his abode; he sent his son Gyges, then eighteen years old, to his great-uncle at Sardis. Gyges was a handsome youth. In riding and in all martial exercises he surpassed his comrades; and he had also proved his bravery in war. Owing to his stature and his beauty the king took him into his body-guard, made him his favourite, honoured him before all others, and gave him large presents of land. When Candaules would marry Tudo, the daughter of Arnossus, the king of the Mysians, he sent Gyges to bring home the bride. While Gyges was bringing the princess to Sardis in his chariot, he fell violently in love with her, and, no longer master of himself, attempted to embrace her, in spite of her struggles and threats. On her arrival in Sardis she did not conceal what Gyges had done, and the king swore that the offender should be put to death on the next day. A maid who was devoted to Gyges overheard the words of the king and repeated them to Gyges on the same night. Determined to slay the king rather than allow himself to be slain, Gyges collected his nearest friends, besought their assistance, and reminded them of the curse which Ardys had laid on the murderers of his grandfather. In arms they hastened into the royal citadel. The maid opened the door of the bed-chamber for Gyges, who stabbed the sleeping king with his sword. In the morning a message went forth from the citadel to the chief men in the kingdom; they were to appear before the face of the king. They obeyed without any suspicion, in the belief that they had been summoned by Candaules. Gyges caused those to be slain who, as he thought, would be his enemies, and gave handsome presents to those whom he hoped to win. He armed all whom he gained to his side: the body-guard also took his part, so that the Lydians, when they discovered what had taken place, though they rose against the murderer of the king, did not venture to attack him. But they sent to Delphi to inquire whether they should take Gyges to be their king; and the god bade them do so, and Gyges took Tudo to wife.⁷⁷¹

In the narrative of Nicolaus it is the curse which Ardys uttered upon the murderers of the first Dascylus, and the late vengeance for this murder which comes upon the descendants of Sadyattes, and causes the overthrow of the kingdom. But the guilt of Sadyattes is not the only cause: Ardys himself sinned by the excessive confidence which he reposed in Dascylus; and Candaules goes further still in his blind confidence in the grandson of Dascylus; he gives him land; he sets him above all others; he commissions the youth of twenty years to bring home the royal bride to her marriage. The same fault of excessive and misplaced confidence, though in another direction, is in Herodotus the cause of the overthrow of Candaules and his house. In a third version, given by Plutarch, we still find the same motive. When Heracles had slain Hippolyte (the queen of the Amazons), he gave her battle-axe to Omphale. The kings who ruled over Lydia after Omphale, had carried this battle-axe, each handing it to his successor, down to Candaules, who disregarded it and gave it to his favourite to carry; but this favourite in Plutarch is not Gyges.⁷⁷²

The relation into which Herodotus represents the wife of Candaules as entering, after her dishonour, with Gyges, the guard of her husband, appears to be founded on a similar story, which a legend ascribes to an ancestor of Gyges. Gyges, the forefather of Lydus, so we are told in Plato, was one of the shepherds of the king of the Lydians. After a severe storm of rain and an earthquake, the earth opened where he was keeping his cattle. Out of curiosity he descended into the gulf, and saw marvellous things: among others a brazen horse with windows, through which he saw a dead man of superhuman size, who had nothing on beyond a golden ring on his finger. This ring Gyges took, and climbed out. When he sat among the rest of the shepherds in order to give the king the monthly account of the condition of the flocks, with this ring on his finger, he happened to turn the stone on it towards himself. Then he perceived that the others did not see him, and spoke of him as though absent. When he turned the stone away from himself, he was again seen by them. Having assured himself of this fact, he procured that he should be chosen among the messengers sent to the king. There he won the favour of the queen, united with her for the overthrow of the king, slew him, and seized the throne.⁷⁷³

We saw that the Lydians derived the tribes of their nation from Attys and Cotys; the sons of the god Manes, and from the sons of Lydus, Torrhebus and Asius. If the first Gyges could be called an ancestor of Lydus, he must have held a high position in the legend of the Lydians. This conclusion is confirmed by the Homeric poems in which the lake of Gyges is the centre of the Lydian land and the Lydian life. On this lake of Gyges the descendants of the youngest Gyges, his successors on the throne, which he had won for them, had their tombs; but the graves of the kings before them were also to be sought on the same lake. The race of the Mermnadæ, which carried back its origin to the first Gyges, must, therefore, have been ancient and important among the Lydians. Conscious of such a descent, it may have considered itself little inferior to the house of the kings, whose ancestor was the sun-god himself. We might, perhaps, assume that the Mermnadæ, in the later days of Ardys or after him, attained to prominent importance; that anxiety on account of this prominence brought on them persecution and expulsion on the part of the successors of Ardys. The wife of the murdered Dascylus flies to the Phrygians; her son of the same name takes refuge with the Syrians on the Pontus, at Sinope. Hence the exiles sought not only protection but also support among their neighbours against the kings of the Lydians. Pausanias mentions to us a place belonging to Dascylus on the White Plain in Caria, on the borders of Lydia;⁷⁷⁴ and Plutarch tells us: "Arselis, the Carian of Mylasa, came to the aid of Gyges, the son of Dascylus the younger, when he fought against Candaules, and helped Gyges to victory. Arselis slew both Candaules and the youth to whom Candaules had given the sacred symbol of the royal office of Lydia, and placed the battle-axe as an ornament in the hand of the statue of Zeus at Mylasa." Hence Gyges was in communication with the Carians when he rebelled against Candaules.

We may go a step further. At the time when Candaules reigned over Lydia (706-689 B.C.), the Cimmerians invaded Phrygia from Pontus, the very region to which the younger Dascylus, the father of Gyges, is said to have fled; king Midas took his own life in consequence of this disaster (696 B.C.). The Magnesians, who inhabited the most inland city of the Greeks on the lower Mæander, suffered at the hands of the Cimmerians a defeat much lamented by the Greeks; and the poet Callinus of Ephesus cried to his countrymen, "the army of the Cimmerians, who have done mighty deeds, is approaching," and urged them to brave resistance.⁷⁷⁵ Lydia was not spared. Sardis was taken by the Cimmerians (I. 542). The storm passed over, but it had beyond a doubt deeply shaken the Lydian kingdom and the position of king Candaules. Of this king we only know that he paid the Greek painter, Bularchus, for a picture which represented the battle and defeat of the Magnesians with an equal weight of gold, though the picture was of moderate size only. This was a passion for art little in accordance with the position of his kingdom, and it seems to confirm the account of Plutarch that Candaules reigned with little care, and left the government to a favourite. After the blow which Lydia suffered by the invasion of the Cimmerians, the Mermnadæ must have considered that their time was come. Whether they were really allowed to return, whether Gyges had a place in the body-guard or not, cannot be decided. What is certain is that he did not attain to the throne without an open struggle, whether it was against Candaules himself, or his party, the party of the ancient royal family; it is certain, too, that Carian troops supported him, though the Arselis in Plutarch is not a Carian, but the Carian war-god, or the axe of this war-god of Mylasa.⁷⁷⁶ Moreover, it is certain that Gyges was not able to overcome by force of arms the resistance of the Lydians, who adhered to the ancient royal family. In Herodotus, as in Nicolaus, the Lydians take up arms against Gyges; in both the decision which follows is due to the oracle of the god. The arrangement in Herodotus – if the oracle of the god declared for Gyges he was to reign, and if against him, the kingdom was to go back to the race of Heracles, i. e. of the sun-god – may be regarded as historical, and that the decision should be sought from the deity, from whom the house hitherto on the throne sprang, shows that the Lydians adhered firmly to their ancient royal family.

The decision of the civil war in Lydia was sought in Delphi. The fame of the temple at Delphi, which belonged to the light-god of the Hellenes, had long reached the Lydians and Phrygians through the Greeks of the coast. Before this time Midas of Phrygia had dedicated a pedestal and other presents at Delphi (I. 527). As the Greeks recognised their Apollo and their Heracles in the sun-god of the Lydians (I. 564), so did the Lydians regard the god of light, the archer-god of Delphi, as their own sun-god. The impartial sun-god of the stranger was to decide whether the descendants of the native sun-god were to lose or keep the throne. The oracle of the god of Delphi decided for Gyges. In gratitude he sent rich presents, a great mass of silver and gold, to Delphi. Herodotus mentions especially six golden milk-vessels, thirty talents in weight.⁷⁷⁷