Alyattes' Median WarAuthor(s): H. M. T. CobbeReviewed work(s):Source: Hermathena, No. 105 (Autumn 1967), pp. 21-33Published by: Trinity College DublinStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23039968 .Accessed: 01/09/2012 18:09

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Alyattes' Median War

by H. M. T. Cobbe*

I

The war between Alyattes and Media has recently been discussed in the light of a fragment from Oxyrhynchus published in 1963.1 The problem presented by the fragment is that it seems to mention a war between Alyattes and, not Cyaxares, as in Herodotus, but

Astyages, implying that either there was a separate war between

Lydia and Media not mentioned in Herodotus or else Astyages took

over command, either as king or as general in place of Cyaxares, before the war was finished. I propose to show (1) that there was

stronger evidence for such a tradition extant before the papyrus was

discovered than has so far been pointed out; (2) to construct a

coherent outline of events, independent of Herodotus, that may well

have been known to the author of the fragment; (3) to examine the

implications of this account. There are two interesting passages in Roman literature concerned

with an eclipse, which is said to have been foretold by Thales, in

May 585 B.C.:2

(1) Cicero, De divinatione 1.49/112: ' Et quidem idem (sc.

Thales) defectionem solis, quae Astyage regnante facta est, praedixisse

fertur.'

(2) Pliny, Naturalis historia 2.53: ' Apud Graecos autem invest

igavit primus omnium Thales Milesius Olympiadis XLVIII anno

quarto, praedicto solis defectu qui Alyatte regnante factus est Urbis

conditae anno CLXX.'

One striking similarity between the two passages is that in both

cases the eclipse is associated with a reigning king despite the fact

that Thales, the central figure in both passages, is not known to be

associated with either of the two kings mentioned. In the accounts

that Cicero and Pliny knew, the eclipse was associated with both

Astyages and Alyattes—this is clear if one puts the two passages

* The notes begin on p. 31.

21

H. M. T. Cobbe

together—but neither author says why these two kings in particular should have been associated with it. However a passage of Solinus relates the two rulers:

(3) Solinus, 15.16: ' Scythae . . . haustu mutui sanguinis foedus

sanciunt non suo tantum more sed Medorum quoque usurpata

disciplina. Bello denique quod gestum est Olympiade nona et quadra gesima, anno post Ilium captum sexcentesimo quarto, inter Alyatten Lydum et Astyagen Mediae regem, hoc pacto firmata sunt iura pads.'

So here we have a connexion between Alyattes and Astyages, with no mention of the eclipse at all. The three passages, when taken

together, form a coherent tradition thus: There was a war between

Alyattes and Astyages, and an eclipse occurred which had been foretold by Thales; somehow this eclipse was connected with the war. We can go further than this by examining the dates given by Pliny and Solinus. Pliny dates the eclipse to OI.48.4, i.e. to 585/4 B.C.

(He is slightly out, however, since May 585 B.C. falls in the Olympic year 586/5 B.C.—OI.48.3—but this does not affect the argument at this stage.) Solinus dates what is presumably the end of the war and the peace to OI.49 (584/3-581/0), fixing the actual year within the Olympiad by stating that it was the 604th year after the fall of

Troy. Now it so happens that one of the dates for the fall of Troy that has come down to us fits in here very well—the Apollodoran

1184/3 B.C. gives 582/1 B.C.3 Thus we are given a minimum of three years' duration for the war, this being the interval between the

eclipse—at which time the war must have been in progress, for otherwise there would have been no reason for associating the eclipse with the two kings—and the peace.4

This is about as far as we can go in reconstruction, using these three passages alone; however Eusebius' Chronicle also mentions this

war, and can be related to what has been discussed. The entries in this work that deal with the war, and the Olympic dates under which

they appear, are as follows in the two extant versions (St Jerome's and the Armenian version—hereafter St J. and AV):

AV5

01.49.2:'Die Sonne ward verfinstert nach Thales des Weisen

Vorauskiindigung. Aliates und Azhadak lieferten eine Schlacht.'

OI.51.2: 'Azhadak lieferte gegen die Lyder einen heftigen Kampf.'

22

Alyattes' Median war

St J.6

OI.48.3 : ' Solis facta defectio cum futuram earn Thales ante dixisset.'

01.49.3 : ' Alyattes et Astyages dimicaverunt.'

01.50.4 : ' Astyages contra Lydos pugnat.'

Eusebius' original pattern, so far as the entries, but not the dates, are concerned, is made clear by placing the two series of entries side

by side; and the resultant pattern is this :

(a) eclipse, (1b) battle between Astyages and Alyattes, (c) war waged by Astyages against the Lydians.

However the dates given by the two versions differ considerably, and

they may be expressed in terms of Christian years thus:

AV St J.

Eclipse 582/1 B.C. 586/5 B.C. Battle 582/1 582/1 War 574/3 577/6

The remarkable point is that St Jerome's dates for the first two entries correspond closely with the dates for the eclipse and the peace in Pliny and Solinus respectively,8 and so would appear to come from the same tradition; consequently we may take it that Eusebius' battle between Astyages and Alyattes—the middle entry in the series out lined above—was the final engagement of the war and marks the end of it.9 It is also remarkable that AV agrees with St J. in putting the battle in the year 582/1 B.C., and we may assume that this was the date given in Eusebius' original text. There is no principle underlying the variations in the dates given by the two versions, apart from that outlined in note 7, and so any point of agreement need not be automatically suspect. The fact that AV puts both the eclipse and the battle in the same year would naturally lead one to suppose that Herodotus' eclipse battle is intended.10 However since St J. does not associate the two events, it seems more likely that this later battle in Eusebius has been confused with the eclipse battle in Herodotus by the compiler of AV and that, as a result, the eclipse has been brought down to the year of the battle to make them coincide.

So far then the Eusebian tradition can be reconciled with that of

Cicero, Pliny and Solinus—which I shall hereafter call the CPS

tradition for convenience. However there is one entry in the Chronicle

that has so far been neglected, the last entry in both the A V and the

23

H. M. T. Cobbe

St J. series. This mentions an entirely different war which Astyages waged against the Lydians and is worded in very much the same way in both versions. Couched in more general terms than the preceding entry, it definitely seems to imply a second war, begun by Astyages, taking place after the one already considered. This second war is dated 574/3 by AV and 577/6 by St /., but these divergent dates can be reconciled: we have seen that we need have little hesitation in lowering the St J. date for the eclipse by one year;11 thus the interval between the eclipse year and the year of the second war becomes eight years. Now in AV the interval is also eight years, and so it is likely that in the original text of the Chronicle these two events were placed eight years apart; it has already been suggested that the

eclipse has been lowered by three years to the same year as the battle

(582/1 B.C.) in AV because of confusion with the eclipse battle. As a result of this, the lower limit of the period had to be lowered also in order to preserve the eight year interval; therefore Eusebius' own date for the second war was probably the one that now appears in St J.

The preceding argument has, I hope, shown that we have the outline of a tradition in Eusebius, for the earlier part of which there is evidence in the CPS tradition also; in other words, that the earlier three authors between them indicate a coherent tradition which also

appears to lie behind a series of entries in Eusebius; the Eusebian

series, however, goes further in such a way as to make it probable that it is continuing the same tradition, although this cannot be confirmed from elsewhere. This tradition, then, has a war in progress between Astyages and Alyattes at the time of the '

Thales-eclipse', in OI.48.4. There was a peace three years later, at which the oaths were consecrated ' haustu mutui sanguinis', but five years after that

Astyages declared war on Lydia, and so the two powers fought once

again. The origin of the CPS tradition is by no means enshrouded in

mystery. One of the prominent features of the passages in Pliny and Solinus is that the two authors go out of their way to give a date for the events they mention. Here, unlike the Eusebian passages where the whole point of the entry is the date attached to it, the emphasis lies not on the date but, in the one case, on the eclipse, which is the

topic that Pliny happens to be dealing with at the time, and, in the

other, on the fact that both the Scyths and the Medes consecrate their oaths in the same way; so it would seem that the two dates were included because they happened to be readily available in the source

24

Alyattes' Median war

that was being used; and, if so, this is a clear hint that this source was a work of a chronographic nature, presumably hellenistic. The fact that Eusebius has the same dates—and his source cannot have

been anything other than chronographic—lends strong support for this hypothesis. The origin of the CPS tradition is probably to be ascribed to Apollodorus since, firstly, Solinus synchronises the 604th

year after the fall of Troy with the 49th Olympiad, a combination

that only makes sense in terms of the Apollodoran 1184/3 B.C., as

has already been pointed out; secondly, there is another instance of

Solinus using an Apollodoran date in a Lydian context—for the fall of

Sardis;12 and thirdly, Apollodorus dated the eclipse to the same year as Pliny and St J.—585 B.C.—and used it as the on<nr| on which to

base his dates for Thales.13 Such then is the CP.S'-chronographic tradition dealing with

Alyattes' wars with Media, as it stood in Roman times, and, as has

been shown, it can be traced back at least as far as Apollodorus, i.e. as far back as the mid-second century B.C.

II

Herodotus mentions the war in three places—1.16.2, 1.74 and

1.103.2. In the first passage he simply says that Alyattes fought with

Cyaxares and the Medes, giving no more detail than that; the last

passage is equally brief:

ouros (sc. o Kua£apr|s) o xoTcrt Au8oia( ecrri (jaxecr&nsvos ots vu£ f]

f|(Jiepr| gyevETO crqn (iaxopivoicri kccI o tt]V "AAuos ttotcxijoO avco 'Acririv

Traaav avorrio-as iaurw.

This passage is a back reference to the second of the three passages

with which we are concerned, where the main account of the war

appears—1.73.3 f-14 This main account is in fact introduced as a

parenthesis to explain why Croesus felt impelled to avenge Astyages, rather than in its proper chronological place in 1.16. This displace ment may be due to Herodotus' artistic arrangement of his work, or

else to an afterthought, a realisation that the war needed more detailed

treatment than he had supposed, because of its significance in relation

to Croesus' attitude to Cyrus. The passage at 1.73.3 f- gives a cause for the war, a brief outline

of its course and some remarks on its conclusion. The cause of the

war was closely connected with a band of Scyths. Now there is very

likely to be more here than meets the eye, especially if one bears in

mind that (1) the Scythian invasion of the near East was originally

25

H. M. T. Cobbe

in pursuit of the Cimmerians,15 (2) Alyattes fought the Cimmerians and expelled them from Asia Minor,16 and (3) the Scythians dominated the Levant and Mesopotamia for a period until they were

expelled by the Medes." The first two points would imply at least a common cause between Alyattes and the Scyths, and the last gives very solid grounds for enmity between Cyaxares and the Scyths; the three taken together indicate a slightly more plausible basis for the war than that given by Herodotus, i.e. perhaps Alyattes aided the Scyths when they were being expelled from Media, in return for aid against the Cimmerians.

The points in Herodotus' account of the course of the war at

1.73.3 f- are 38 follows:

(1) It lasts for five years with neither side gaining the upper hand in that time; (2) the eclipse battle occurred in the sixth year and this made both sides eager for peace;18 (3) Syennesis the Cilician and

Labynetus the Babylonian acted as arbitrators19 and a marriage was organised between Cyaxares' son, Astyages, and Aryene, the daughter of Alyattes; (4) the oaths were consecrated in a similar manner to that used by the Greeks, except that the participants mixed each other's blood and drank it.

This account agrees with the CPS tradition on the following points:

(1) The eclipse battle : although Cicero and Pliny do not mention it, it is clear, when one compares the passages, that this battle must

lie behind their statements; it provides an excellent means of associ ating Alyattes and the Median king with the eclipse. There is no occasion for them to have mentioned the battle in the contexts of their statements, which are purely concerned with the eclipse. (2) The eclipse itself was said to have been predicted by Thales—this is quite clear from all the accounts we have. (3) The form in which the oaths were consecrated appears also in the Solinus passage,20 and this can mean either of two things : the form of taking the oaths was a feature of the tradition that must eventually lie behind both Herodotus and the chronographers, or else Solinus' source took the dates and the name of the king from the chronographic tradition but such detail as this from Herodotus.

Many of the other points in Herodotus' account can be reconciled with the CPS tradition—i.e. as being detail that may or may not have been in the CPS tradition also. Examples of this are the vuKTOiictxfa (if it is not the same as the eclipse battle), the mediation by Syennesis of Cilicia and Labynetus of Babylon, the marriage of

26

Alyattes' Median war

Aryene to Astyages and finally, arguably I think, the length of the war itself. The impression given by Herodotus is that the war lasted five years, and in the sixth came the eclipse battle which led very

quickly to the establishment of peace. Now it is quite possible that here Herodotus is using the period of five years as an approximate rather than as an exact period of time. There are two places where he

uses iretxTTTTi f| fieri] f|n£pfl to indicate 'a few days later';21 further,

there is one passage which is an exact analogy of the present one; and this strongly suggests that here also Herodotus is only indicating a rough period of time,22 so that the figure given here need not be

taken too seriously. In fact there need not be any basic discrepancy between the Herodotus and the CPS tradition on this point.

There are however some points of disagreement between these

two traditions, (i) The war appears uniformly elsewhere as being between Alyattes and Astyages; yet in Herodotus it would appear to have been entirely between Alyattes and Cyaxares.23 (2) We have

seen that Herodotus implies, without actually saying so, that the

peace followed fairly shortly after the eclipse battle. The CPS

tradition, however, gives a period of three years between the eclipse and the peace (585/4-582/1 B.C.); it may be that Herodotus (like

AV) is confusing the battle which appears in Eusebius under the same

year as the peace in Solinus—and is therefore presumably directly connected with the peace—with the eclipse battle, and attaches the

peace to the wrong one; the fact that his remarks on the connexion

between the eclipse battle and the peace are rather vague may be

due to this confusion. (3) The final point of difference between the

two traditions is that Herodotus makes no mention whatsoever of a

second war between Media and Lydia, but yet such a war seems to

be clearly recorded in Eusebius.24 Perhaps Herodotus has confused

two wars, which took place in quick succession, and rolled them into

one; but on the other hand Eusebius is by no means a thoroughly reliable source, and one hesitates at this stage to build up too elaborate

a theory on such a basis. One can do little more than bear in mind

the possibility of a second war.

Of these three points of disagreement, the real problem, as Huxley

points out, is posed by the first: who was on the throne of Media

at the time of the earlier war? It is possible to reconcile Herodotus

and the CPS tradition to a certain degree. When Solinus talks of the

peace, he says quite definitely that the war was waged between

Alyattes and Astyages; and there is nothing in the text of

Herodotus that is incompatible with Astyages being on the throne

27

H. M. T. Cobbe

of Media by the end of the war, although one might have expected Herodotus to say that Cyaxares died during the war, if he knew this to have been so—but the argumentum e silentio is fraught with

danger.25 The Lydians would have felt themselves under all the

greater an obligation to avenge Astyages if the peace had been made with him rather than with his father; also the marriage of Astyages and Aryene would not have been so significant if Astyages was not

actually on the throne at the time that it took place—the succession of a polygamous monarchy was never secure until the successor was

safely established in power. If Astyages was not so established, the

marriage would not have been the avayKcuri icrxupri that Herodotus

says it was.26 We can then accept that Astyages had succeeded his father at least by the time that the war came to an end.

III

The most recent evidence on the matter is Oxyrhynchus Papyrus No. 2506 fr. 98. This fragment comes from a commentary on the

lyric poets and appears to discuss whether or not Alcaeus died in a certain action, together with other things; the part of this fragment germane to the present issue are lines 14 ff.:27

. . .] 5icc to cruv(cttaa6[ai 14

rr6]Aenov ev [.]lcrr[ 'A

<tt] uayr)i tu [. .]. £<p[ 'A

AuccJtttiv oo[

KT£

As Huxley says,28 the supplements producing 'Acrruayr)i and

'AAucrrrriv are very cogent, particularly in the light of the evidence

already discussed. Page assigns the papyrus to the first century or the early part of the second century A.D.29 and this would make it

belong to roughly the same context as Cicero and Pliny, which fits in nicely as it seems to be drawing on the same tradition.80 In view of the bad condition of the text, it is difficult to go any further than to link up 61a to cruviaracjOca ttoAbijov with 'Acrru&yr|i and 'AAvcmriv,

and to take the general sense of the passage to be something like

'. . . because of war being joined (or ' being in progress') [between]

Alyattes [and] Astyages . . .'. Because of the lacunae the exact

significance of the cases of 'Aoru&yr)iand'AAuarrrivis lost; one inter

esting speculation, however, is this: if we take crwiaTacrOai to have a sense of initiation, the text would imply that a war was begun

28

Alyattes' Median war

between Astyages and Alyattes; now whatever the obscurity in

Herodotus enshrouding the end of the war there is no doubt that

Cyaxares began it and it would be foolish to mistrust Herodotus on the point without strong reasons; it is equally clear that the papyrus

fragment should be taken seriously, since the author presumably had

a text of Alcaeus before him. This possible discrepancy—which admittedly only arises if ovvicrraaQai is taken to have a sense of

initiation31—can be resolved if one takes the author of the papyrus to be referring to the second war between Media and Lydia which

has already been shown to be a possibility (see above p. 24); Eusebius

says quite clearly that this was begun by Astyages against the Lydians. The other way to deal with this discrepancy is to eliminate it by

taking cruvfcrracrQoci to have the sense of ' continue ', making the phrase as a whole mean ' since there was a war in progress between Alyattes and Astyages' or something like that; the text would then refer to

any part of the war after the death of Cyaxares.32 Be the detail what

it may, this papyrus fragment supports the other non-Herodotean

evidence on this war by linking Alyattes and Astyages, and its

authority in all likelihood ultimately goes back to Alcaeus himself.83

IV

We have seen that it is probable that Astyages had succeeded

Cyaxares before the end of the war; however the problem remains

as to who was on the throne at the time of the eclipse battle. Cicero

says that the eclipse took place Astyage regnante while Herodotus

says that it was Cyaxares who fought in the battle when day became

night. The problem is essentially one of chronology. The Herodotean

dates for Cyaxares are 633-594 B.C., and for Astyages 593-559 B.C., and as they stand these would involve giving the eclipse a Herodotean

date at least nine years earlier than either the chronographic one or

the real one;34 however since Herodotus does not notice that there

was a considerable overlap between Astyages and Cyrus, whose

accession to the Persian throne took place some time before his over

throw of Astyages, his whole Median chronology may be brought down eight or nine years; if we do this, we get 586/5 B.C. for

Cyaxares' death35 which suits very well. In the light of this there is

a simple and possible solution to the problem of exactly when Astyages succeeded. When dealing with the non-Herodotean evidence on this

question, we are for the most part dealing with a chronographic tradition which, by hellenistic times, would have been aware of eastern

29

H. M. T. Cobbe

habits in chronography; now one of these habits used at Babylon but applied to Persian chronography, at least in later times, was to

reckon the year in which a king died as the accession year of his

successor36 so that it is quite possible for the eclipse to have appeared in chronographic records as having taken place in the reign of

Astyages,—although the king of the time may well have been Cyaxares

—provided that Cyaxares died in the same year, which was very

probably the case. This would then account for both traditions.

The general picture, then, is this: There was a war between Lydia and Media that had been going on for some time before 585 B.C., when a battle was halted by the occurrence of a solar eclipse; the war continued to go on for a further three years, according to a

chronographic tradition going back at least as far as Apollodorus, and then there appears to have been a final battle; whether or not one side or the other won a decisive victory in the event we do not

know, but at any rate a peace followed this battle, and the oaths of this peace were consecrated by the mixing and drinking of the blood of the two contracting parties. Some time later (five years in

Eusebius) there was a second war between the two powers started by Astyages for some reason with unknown result. If this second war did in fact take place, it seems much more probable that the

marriage between Astyages and Aryene was arranged after it rather than after the earlier war.

Much of the theory just summarised had already been concluded

by Huxley in the article referred to; the aim of this paper has been to clarify the traditions involved in the extant evidence, and to attempt to reconcile them. It is important to remember that the reconstruction of the chronographic tradition, as it stood in Roman times, does not

necessarily bring us any nearer to the actual historical facts of the

episode.87

30

Alyattes' Median war

Notes

1. For the Herodotean account see Hdt. 1.16.2, 1.74 and 1.103.2. Recent

discussion: D. L. Page in his commentary on Oxyrhynchus Papyrus no. 2506,

frag. 98 (Oxyrhynchus Papyri, 29.44-5); G. L. Huxley, ' A war between Alyattes

and AstyagesGr. Rom. Byz. Stud, vi (1965), 3.201 f.

2. This is now definitely thought to be the eclipse concerned rather than either

of those in 610 and 557 B.C.; see How and Wells, A commentary on Herodotus,

note on 1.74.2; and, more recently, H. Kaletsch, ' Zur Lydischen Chronologie

Historia vii (1958), 15-17. It is in fact highly improbable that Thales ever pre dicted this eclipse, or any other: see O. Neugebauer, The exact sciences in

antiquity, 142 f.

3. This can be deduced from Diodorus Siculus, 1.5.1, assuming Ol.i.i to be

776/5 B.C.

4. That is, assuming that these two dates come from the same tradition, and

are not two different dates for the same event. This assumption is quite reasonable

in view of Solinus' known dependence on Pliny: see Diehl, ' Julius SolinusRE,

X. 828 f. It is likely that the whole tradition reached Solinus via one or other of

Pliny's works.

5. German translation by Karst, 187.

6. Fotheringham's edition, 178.

7. The dates in A V have been lowered here by one year in each case, since

Ol. 1.1 in this version is a year earlier than in St J. (i.e. it corresponds to the

1240th year of Abraham rather than the 1241st, as in St J.). Both versions put

the birth of Christ in the same year of Abraham (2015), but differ by one in the

Olympic year (194.4 in AV but 194.3 in St /.). This makes it clear that the error

must lie in the Olympic scale rather than in the Abrahamic scale.

8. The fact that St J. puts the eclipse entry a year earlier than Pliny can be

easily explained in terms of the tabular lay-out of the Chronicle. This lay-out

makes it difficult at times to attach entries to their correct year, especially if the

entry is a long one and takes up more space on the page than that opposite one

year. This is a notorious source of corruption in the texts of Eusebius' Chronicle:

see Helm, Eusebius" Werke, VII. xxii (1956 edition).

9. Note St J. says Alyattes et Astyages dimicaverunt, using a word that has the

sense of fighting to a clear conclusion.

10. Hdt. 1.74.1-2. 11. See note 8 above.

12. Solinus, 1.112; he dates the fall of Sardis to OI.58, which can be shown to

be the Apollodoran date for this event from Diogenes Laertius, 1.37, which is

Apollodorus, frag. 28 in Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, II B.

no. 244; for Jacoby's commentary, see F.Gr.H., II D. 726-7.

13. Jacoby, F.Gr.H., II D. 59.

14. See J. E. Powell, The History of Herodotus, 9.

15. Hdt. 1.15 and 1.103.3. See Kretschmer, ' ScythaeRE, II A. 938 f.;

Lehmann-Haupt, ' Kimmerieribid. XI. 404 f.

16. Hdt. 1.16.2; Polyaenus, Stratagemata, 7.2.

17. Hdt. 1.103.3-106.2; cf. St J. under OI.36.2 and AV under OI.36.3.

3i

H. M. T. Cobbe

18. The j'VKTo/j.a\ia in 1.74.1 provides an interesting problem: is it the

eclipse battle or not? . How and Wells (see their note ad loc.) maintain, without

giving a reason, that it is not; however it seems very much more probable that it

is and that Herodotus' text at 1.74.2 f. should be taken as an amplification of

iv Se kou vvKTOfxa^LTjv ttva «7rotTjcavTo. Herodotus saw the eclipse as a sudden

appearance of night in the middle of the day—Trjv r/fxiprjv i^airLvrji vvktu ytvtodai —and consequently a battle fought under such conditions would be a vvKTO/xa^ia. Two such battles in the same war would be highly remarkable, and one would

expect Herodotus to have been much more explicit, if such had taken place.

19. Huxley follows Dougherty (Nabonidus and Belshazzar, 33 f.) in the latter's

solution to the problem posed by the fact that Nabonidus (= Labynetus) did not

succeed to the throne of Babylon until 556 B.C. The problem need not be dis

cussed here except to say that this solution is simple—Dougherty shows that it is

quite possible for Nabonidus to have acted as Nebuchadrezzar's agent in this

matter.

20. See p. 22 above.

21. Hdt. 1.1.3; 3.42.1. 22. Hdt. 3.59.2 : t/neivav S'iv ravrrj xal ciSai/uovrjaav iir' irea ir«cr« . . .

fKTa) Se (Tc'i■ ■ ■ This corresponds almost exactly with the present passage: TroXeyuos . . . iycyovee i-rr' Ire a wivrt . . . tw !kt<o Irct.

23. Were it not for the other evidence (the CPS tradition) no one would

suspect from Herodotus' account that Cyaxares was not the Median ruler right

through the war until the end. The fact that a change of reign in the middle of

the war is not contradictory to the Herodotean account is only apparent in the

light of the other evidence.

24. See p. 24 above.

25. Hdt. 1.73.1-2. Cyaxares is not mentioned at all in connexion with the peace in Herodotus; and he is only firmly associated with the eclipse battle later at

1.103.2. 26. Hdt. 1.74.4.

27. For the full text, see Oxyrhynchus Papyri, 29. The question of Alcaeus'

and Antimenidas' involvement in this war is too vague to be profitably discussed here.

28. Op. cit., 201.

29. Op. cit., 1.

30. Solinus would appear to date to the early third century A.D., cf. Momm sen's edition of S. (Berlin, 1864), v f.; but he probably drew on Pliny, or, at least, on an earlier author of about the same time.

31. This depends on whether (rvvivTanrOai is taken to be middle or passive. If the middle and intransitive sense is taken, iroXt/xov will be the object and the

meaning will be ' since [? Alyattes] contrived [or ' was contriving '] war . . .', cf.

Isocrates, 10.49 and Polybius, 2.1.1 for 7ro\«/xov as object of avvio-Taadai. If the

passive and intransitive sense is taken, noXcfuov will be the subject and the mean

ing will be ' since war was in progress . . cf. Thuc. 1.15; Hdt. 7.144 and 8.142. See Liddell & Scott (Jones-Mackenzie) s.v. <Tvvi<TTH)fii A.III.3 and B.II.i. The former sense seems to be the better attested of the two for later Greek.

32. The problem of the chronology of the Aeginetan Wars is also one where the precise sense ofa-vvla-Trj/xi is important; see N. G. L. Hammond, 'Studies in

early Greek chronology ', Historia iv (1955), 408 f.

32

Alyattes' Median war

33- Huxley, op. cit., 206.

34. H. Strasburger, ' Herodots Zeitrechnungin W. Marg's compilation,

Herodot (Munich, 1962), 689.

35. Cf. Huxley, op. cit., 204; Strasburger, op. cit., 688-9; Kaletsch, op. cit.,

20-23. Cyaxares is established for the years 614 and 612 B.C. from cuneiform

sources (D. Wiseman, Chronicles of the Chaldaean kings in the British Museum,

59, 61), which is well within the limits of the thirty-five years' reign given to

him by Herodotus, i.e. 620-586 B.C. when brought down (see p. 29 above), and leaves time between the fall of Nineveh (612 B.C.) and the Lydian war for

the Scythian domination; see Wiseman, op. cit., 14 f. The Lydian war probably followed closely on this if, as has been suggested (see pp. 25-26 above), the Scyths were the raison d'etre for the war.

36. See R. A. Parker and W. H. Dubberstein, Babylonian chronology 626 B.C.

A.D. 75 (Providence, Rhode Island; 1956). At Babylon the regnal year started on

1 Nisan, and a king's first year did not start until the 1 Nisan following his

accession, the year previous to this being reckoned as his accession year. Whether

the Persians used a similar system before they took Babylon we do not know; it is

doubtful whether the Medes did. The suggestion put forward in the text here

assumes that earlier records were later doctored to conform to Babylonian chrono

graphic conventions.

37. I wish to thank both Mr W. G. Forrest and Mr T. F. R. G. Braun who

read a draft of this paper and made many suggestions of which the greater part

has been incorporated in the text. Professor A. Andrewes very kindly gave me

some information on Babylonian habits in chronography.

33

c