He had by so doing averted all immediate danger; but as long as the principal horde remained unexterminated, another invasion was always to be feared; besides which, the barbarian inroad, although of short duration, had wrought such havoc in the country that no native power in Asia Minor appeared, nor in reality was, able to make the effort needful to destroy them.  Their king Dugdamis, it will be remembered, met his death in Cilicia at the hands of the Assyrians about the year 640, and Kobos, his successor, was defeated and killed by the Scythians under Madyes about 633.  The repeated repulses they had suffered had the effect of quickly relieving Lydia, Phrygia, and the remaining states of the AEgean and the Black Sea from their inroads; the Milesians wrested Sinope from them about 630, and the few bands left behind when the main body set out for the countries of the Euphrates were so harried and decimated by the people over whom they had terrorised for nearly a century, that they had soon no refuge except round the fortress of Antandros, in the mountains of the Troad.  Most of the kingdoms whose downfall they had caused never recovered from their reverses; but Lydia, which had not laid down its arms since the death of Gyges, became possessed by degrees of the whole of their territory; Phrygia proper came back to her in the general redistribution, and with it most of the countries which had been under the rule of the dynasty of Midas, from the mountains of Lycia to the shores of the Black Sea.  The transfer was effected, apparently, with very slight opposition and with little loss of time, since in the four or five years which followed the death of Kobos, Ardys had risen in the estimation of the Greeks to the position enjoyed by Gyges; and when, in 628, Aristomenes, the hero of the Messenian wars, arrived at Rhodes, it is said that he contemplated proceeding from thence, first to Sardes and then to Ecbatana, for the purpose of gaining the adherence of Lydia and Media to his cause.

[Illustration:  390.jpgA VIEW IN THE MOUNTAINS OF THE MESSOGIS]

     Drawn by Boudier, from the heliogravure of Rayet and Thomas.

Death put an end to his projects, but he would not for a moment have entertained them had not Ardys been at that time at the head of a renowned and flourishing kingdom.  The renewal of international commerce followed closely on the re-establishment of peace, and even if the long period of Scythian invasion, followed by the destruction of Nineveh, rendered the overland route less available for regular traffic than before, at all events relations between the inhabitants of the Euphrates valley and those of the iEgean littoral were resumed to such good purpose that before long several fresh marts were opened in Lydia.

[Illustration:  391.jpg THE SITE OF PRIENE.]

     Drawn by Boudier, from the heliogravure of Rayet and Thomas.