Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/235

LTDIAXS. MEDES, CIMMERIANS, SCYTHIANS. 219 CHAPTER XVII. LYDIANS. -MEDES. - CIMMERIANS. - SCYTHIANS. THE early relations between the Lydians and the Asiatic Greeks, anterior to the reign of Gyges, are not better known to us than those of the Phrygians. Their native music became partly incorporated with -the Greek, as the Phrygian music was ; to which it was very analogous, both in instruments and in char- acter, though the Lydian mode was considered by the ancients as more effeminate and enervating. The flute was used alike by Phrygians and Lydians, passing 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 ban- quets. 1 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 already mentioned that Homer knows nothing of Lydia or Lydians. He names Mteonians in juxtaposition with Karians, and we are told by Herodotus that the people once called Mxonian received the new appellation of Lydian from Lydus son of Atys. Sardis, whose almost inexpugnable citadel was situated on a precipitous rock on the northern side of the ridge of Tmolus, overhanging the plain of the river Herrnus, was the capital of the Lydian kings : it is not named by Homer, though he mentions both Tmolus and the neighboring Gygaean lake : the fortification of it was ascribed to an old Lydian king named Meles, and strange legends were told concerning it. 3 Its posses- sors were enriched by the neighborhood of the river Paktolus, 1 Pindar, ap. Athence. xiv, p. 635 : compare Tclestts ap. Athena, xiv. n 626 ; Pausan. ix, 5. 4. ? llcrodot. i, 84.