Phrygia Katake-kaumene. The Maeonians still claimed
primacy over the entire race, and the family was chosen from among their
nobles. The king, who was supposed to be descended from the gods, bore,
as the insignia of his rank, a double-headed axe, the emblem of his
divine ancestors. The Greeks of later times said that the axe was that
of their Heracles, which was wrested by him from the Amazon Hippolyta,
and given to Omphale.**

* Gelzer was the first, to my knowledge, to state that Lydia
was a feudal state, and he defined its constitution. Radet
refuses to recognise it as feudal in the true sense of the
term, and he prefers to see in it a confederation of states
under the authority of a single prince.

** Gelzer sees in the legend about the axe related by
Plutarch, a reminiscence of a primitive gynocracy. The axe
is the emblem of the god of war, and, as such, belongs to
the king: the coins of Mylasa exhibit it held by Zeus
Labraundos.

[Illustration: 106.jpg THE AXE BORNE BY ZEUS LABRAUNDOS]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a coin in the Cabinet des
Medailles.

The king was the supreme head of the priesthood, as also of the vassal
chiefs and of the army, but he had as a subordinate a "companion" who
could replace him when occasion demanded, and he was assisted in the
exercise of his functions by the counsel of "Friends," and further still
in extraordinary circumstances by the citizens of the capital assembled
in the public square. This intervention of the voice of the populace
was a thing unknown in the East, and had probably been introduced in
imitation of customs observed among the Greeks of AEolia or Ionia; it was
an important political factor, and might possibly lead to an outbreak or
a revolution. Outside the pale of Sardes and the province of Maeonia, the
bulk of Lydian territory was distributed among a very numerous body of
landowners, who were particularly proud of their noble descent. Many of
these country magnates held extensive fiefs, and had in their pay small
armies, which rendered them almost independent, and the only way for
the sovereign to succeed in ruling them was to conciliate them at all
hazards, and to keep them in perpetual enmity with their fellows. Two of
these rival families vied with each other in their efforts to secure
the royal favour; that of the Tylonidae and that of the Mermnadae, the
principal domain of which latter lay at T