months' time. But his long course of prosperity was drawing to its close. Cyrus had not been so crippled by the battle but that he could march straight to Sardis and so "bring the news of his own arrival." Crœsus, though surprised, led out the Lydians to meet him. They were at this time as good men of war as any in Asia. They fought, like the knights of chivalry, on horseback, with long lances; and the plain before Sardis was the battle-field of their predilection. But Cyrus invented a device to paralyse this cavalry. Taking advantage of a horse's natural fear of camels, he organised a camel brigade and placed it in his front, with infantry behind it, and his own cavalry in the rear. Though the Lydian knights, like the Austrians at Sempach, dismounted and fought on foot, the battle went against them, and Crœsus soon found himself besieged in his capital. Then he sent messengers to his allies urging them to help him with all speed.
The Spartans, even had they been able to reach Sardis in time, could not set out at once, as they happened just then to have their hands full. They were fighting with the men of Argos about a tract of borderland called Thyrea. Argos had been in the old Homeric times the head of the Peloponnesus, and was always very jealous of Spartan supremacy. The plausible plan had been adopted of fighting out this particular quarrel by three hundred chosen men on each side; though three on each side, as in the affair of the Horatii and Curiatii between Rome and Alba, might have answered the purpose quite as well. The combat proved as deadly as that between the rival Highland clans recorded by Scott in his 'Fair Maid of Perth.' Two only of the Argives were left,
