his own proud consciousness of having stood forward as champion of the mass of the people.  Of his early poems hardly anything is preserved.  The few lines remaining seem to manifest a jovial temperament which we may well conceive to have been overlaid by such political difficulties as he had to encounter—­difficulties arising successively out of the Megarian war, the Cylonian sacrilege, the public despondency healed by Epimenides, and the task of arbiter between a rapacious oligarchy and a suffering people.  In one of his elegies addressed to Mimnermus, he marked out the sixtieth year as the longest desirable period of life, in preference to the eightieth year, which that poet had expressed a wish to attain.  But his own life, as far as we can judge, seems to have reached the longer of the two periods; and not the least honorable part of it (the resistance to Pisistratus) occurs immediately before his death.

There prevailed a story that his ashes were collected and scattered around the island of Salamis, which Plutarch treats as absurd—­though he tells us at the same time that it was believed both by Aristotle and by many other considerable men.  It is at least as ancient as the poet Cratinus, who alluded to it in one of his comedies, and I do not feel inclined to reject it.  The inscription on the statue of Solon at Athens described him as a Salaminian; he had been the great means of acquiring the island for his country, and it seems highly probable that among the new Athenian citizens, who went to settle there, he may have received a lot of land and become enrolled among the Salaminian demots.  The dispersion of his ashes connecting him with the island as its oecist, may be construed, if not as the expression of a public vote, at least as a piece of affectionate vanity on the part of his surviving friends.

CONQUESTS OF CYRUS THE GREAT

B.C. 538

GEORGE GROTE

On the destruction of Nineveh three great Powers still stood on the stage of history, being bound together by the strong ties of a mutually supporting alliance.  These were Media, Lydia, and Babylon.  The capital of Lydia was Sardis.  According to Herodotus, the first king of Lydia was Manes.  In the semi-mythic period of Lydian history rose the great dynasty of the [Greek:  Heraclidae], which reigned for 505 years, numbering twenty-two kings—­B.C. 1229 to B.C. 745.  The Lydians are said by Herodotus to have colonized Tyrrhenia, in the Italic peninsula, and to have extended their conquests into Syria, where they founded Ascalon in the territory later known as Palestine.

In the reign of Gyges, B.C. 724, they began to attack the Greek cities of Asia Minor:  Miletus, Smyrna, and Priene.  The glory of the Lydian Empire culminated in the reign of [Greek:  Croesus], the fifth and last historic king, B.C.