34 EARLY PEOPLES AND EMPIRES century a host of barbaric tribes who were called Cimmerians. They threatened the destruction of the Assyrian Empire; but their domination did not last long, as they were overthrown by the Lydian King Alyattes, and were either driven out of the land altogether, or absorbed among the previous inhabitants. This Cimmerian incursion was merely an episode without permanent effect; but the victory of Alyattes greatly aided that prince in consolidating the Lydian dominion, which attained its greatest power under its last monarch Croesus, whose name has become proverbial for his enormous wealth. He succeeded in bringing the Greek states of Asia Minor under his dominion, and when he himself was overthrown by Cyrus, these Greek states with the rest of the Lydian territories were absorbed into the new Persian Empire. Among the states of the Greek peninsula many have attained celebrity. In early days the Doric city of Argos stood in the The Great front rank, and had never resigned its pretensions Cities. to be a leading state. Corinth, another Dorian state, was famous and prosperous, and a great coloniser. Thebes, an Aeolian city in the district of Boeotia, claimed a sort of supremacy in Boeotia itself, was the central point of ancient legends, and was to become for a short period during the fourth century B.C. the leading state of Hellas. But there are two states which stand out prominently above the rest, the Dorian Sparta, or Lacedaemon, and the Ionian Athens. Sparta had at all times been acknowledged as a state which at any rate had no superior. In her wars with other Greek states, however protracted, she had habitually proved victorious in the end. Her organisation aimed at military efficiency, and made everything else subordinate to that. Tradition attributed her peculiar system to a law-giver named Lycurgus. Political power was in the hands of the dominant tribe called Spartiatae or Spartans, who lived under severe discipline, were trained to the highest capacity of physical endurance, and won the reputation of being invincible in battle. All the officers of state were taken from this tribe. The rest of the population consisted of the free Lacedaemonians, and of the Helots, the earlier inhabitants whom the Dorians had enslaved,
