Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

“Croesus was Lydian by descent, the son of Alyattes, and lord of the peoples on this side of the river Halys.” So begins the main narrative of the Histories of Herodotus, native of Halikarnassos on the Aegean coast. Looking east across the vast expanse of Achaemenid Asia, Herodotus saw the river Halys, the ancient limit of Croesus's kingdom, as the geographical marker which divided the lands to the east into “Upper” and “Lower” Asia. “The Halys,” he writes, “was once the boundary between the empires of the Medes and the Lydians … this river cuts off almost all of Lower Asia, from the sea facing Cyprus to the Euxine ocean, and forms a kind of isthmus for the whole peninsula” (1.72).Herodotus's conception of Asia Minor (“Lower Asia”), as a peninsula connected to the main Asiatic land-mass by a narrow isthmus, is geographically questionable to say the least. But the idea of a “Halys frontier,” an imaginary line running from the gulf of Issos in the south to Sinope in the north, was a durable one. The lands west of this line, roughly corresponding to the western half of modern Turkey, were regularly conceived by both Greeks and Romans as a separate (and separable) part of the greater Asiatic land-mass. In the 340s bc, Isocrates urged Philip II of Macedon, if he could not conquer the whole of Asia, at least “to tear off a vast stretch of land and occupy Asia, to use the current phrase, ... log in or subscribe to read full text