Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/273

 CRCESUS, SON OF AI.YATTKS. 257 sensible privations, abandoned his hostile designs, and concluded with them a treaty of amity and alliance. It was his first pro- ceeding to build two temples to Athene, in place of the one which had been destroyed, and he then, forthwith, recovered from his protracted malady. His gratitude for the cure was testified by the transmission of a large silver bowl, with an iron footstand welded together by the Chian artist Glaukus, the inventor of the art of thus joining together pieces of iron. 1 Alyattes is said to have carried on other operations against some of the Ionic Greeks : he took Smyrna, but was defeated in an inroad on the territory of KlazomenaV 2 But on the whole, his long reign of fifty-seven years was one of tranquillity to the Grecian cities on the coast, though we hear of an expedition which he undertook against Karia. 3 He is reported to have been during youth of overweening insolence, but to have acquired afterwards a just and improved character. By an Ionian wife he became father of Croesus, whom, even during his lifetime, he appointed satrap of the town of Adramyttiurn, and the neighboring plain of Thebe. But he had also other wives and other sons, and one of the latter, Adramytus, is reported as the founder of Adramyt- tium. 4 How far his dominion in the interior of Asia Minor ex- tended, we do not know, but very probably his long and compar- atively inactive reign may have favored the accumulation of those treasures which afterwards rendered the wealth of Croesus so proverbial. His monument, an enormous pyramidal mound upon a stone base, erected near Sardis, by the joint efforts of the Avhole Sardian population, was the most memorable curiosity in Lydia during the time of Herodotus ; it was inferior only to the gigantic edifices of Egypt and Babylon. 5 1 Herodot. i, 20-23. gainst the Kolophonians. 3 Nikolaus Damasken. p. 54. cd. Orelli; Xanthi Fragment, p. 243. Creuzer. Mr Clinton states Alyattes to have conquered Karia. and al.-o JEoi$ for neither of which do I find sufficient authority (Fasti Hcllen. ch. xvii, p 298). 6 Herodot. i, 92-93. VOL. III.
 * Herodot i, 18. Polyamus (vii. 2. 2) mentions a proceeding of Alyattes
 * Aristotcles ap Stephan. Byz. v, ' pa/arTflov.