CYRUS THE GREAT 9 from a battle. Croesus, believing in his fortune, and trusting to the excellence of his cavalry, boldly took the field ; but Cyrus, using stratagem where perhaps cour- age would not have availed, put his camels in front of his line, and massed his own horsemen behind them. The horses of Crcesus, maddened by the unaccus- tomed smell of the camels, refused to advance ; but the Lydians, dismounting, fought so bravely on foot with their spears, that it was not until after a long and fierce combat that they were forced to retreat and seek safety within the walls of Sardis. The army of Cyrus invested the city, but it was so strongly fortified on all sides but one as to be impregnable by assault, and the side left unprotected by art was supposed to be amply protected by nature, since it abutted on the very edge of a steep precipice. But, after the siege had lasted fourteen days, a Per- sian sentinel saw one of the garrison descend the precipice to recover' his helmet that had rolled down ; and no sooner had he thus unwittingly showed the way, than the sentinel followed with a number of his fellow-soldiers and, reaching the top of the cliff in safety, attacked the guards, all' unsuspicious, and gained an en- trance to the city. The gates were opened to the Persians, and Crcesus with all his vast store of treasure became the prey of the conqueror. The fall of Sardis and the Lydian monarchy was followed by the subjection of the Greek cities of Asia Minor, a task which Cyrus left to the hands of Harpagus, while he him- self turned eastward to pursue his conquests in Upper Asia and in Assyria. His greatest achievement in this quarter was the taking of Babylon. This he accom- plished in the reign of Belshazzar, one of the successors of Nebuchadnezzar, per- haps his son, by turning the Euphrates, which ran through the middle of the city, out of its course ; and when its bed was dry he entered the city by this road and captured it with little resistance. Cyrus was now the sole master of the vast Assyrian Kingdom, once more in his hands brought back to something like the unity it had before the great Me- dian revolt. But he was not content, nor was it perhaps possible for him to rest in the enjoyment of power and possessions extorted by force, and dependent on force to hold. The new empire, like the old one, was destined to break in pieces by its own weight. Cyrus was kept in constant activity by the necessity of resist- ing the inroads on his empire of the tribes in the north and farther east ; and it was in endeavoring to repel invasion and to maintain order in the regions he had already conquered, that he met his death. After a reign of thirty years he was slain, in 529 B.C., in battle with the Massagetae, a tribe of Central Asia. He left his kingdom to his son Cambyses.
