SARDIS särdĭs (Σάρδεις, G4915). Sardis lay on the junction of the principal highways linking Ephesus, Smyrna, and Pergamum with the high country of inner Asia Minor. Lydia, of which Sardis was the ancient capital and royal seat, straddled the communications route between the Aegean coast and the hinterland and was in consequence an area where the Gr. and native culture met and creatively mingled. Under Croesus, whose name became a legend for wealth, prosperity, and the doom which sometimes falls shockingly upon the rich and fortunate, Sardis was famed for its affluence. Golden and silver minted coinage had its origin there, and the Pactolus River, which flowed nearby, was a proverb for its easily won alluvial gold.

The site itself was marked by geography for greatness. The broad ridge of Mount Tmolus thrusts seaward from the central plateau, and a cluster of sharp-sided promontories of highland dominate the Hermus valley plain, where Tmolus ends. On one of these easily defended ridges stood the stronghold of Sardis, 1500 ft. above the alluvial plain onto which, in days of peace, her population and habitations flowed. Like Troy, Sardis was a citadel and place of refuge, the residence of king and courtier. It must have been inhabited from the first coming of man to the Hermus valley, and a place of importance from the first days of the Lydian kingdom in the 13th cent. b.c.

Under Croesus, in the Golden Age of Sardis, Lydian power extended to the Aegean coast and the cities of the Ionian Greeks: Smyrna, Ephesus, and the rest. It was the doctrine of the historian Herodotus that power and wealth breed arrogance, and arrogance ends in ruin; in Sardis and its greatest king the historian found a somber and striking illustration. Persia was rising to power in the E in the middle of the 6th cent., and Croesus marked the fact with anxious eye. “Croesus,” says Herodotus, “learned that Cyrus had destroyed the empire of Astyages, and that the Persians were becoming daily more powerful. This led him to consider with himself whether it were possible to check the growing power of that people before it came to a head.” One thought haunted Croesus as he weighed the chances of preventive war. Solon the lawgiver had once visited him in Sardis, and warned him to beware of self-satisfaction, and to count no man happy until the end of life had set him free at last from all danger of a sudden change of fortune. Said Solon: “Sire, he who unites the greatest number of advantages, and, retaining them to the day of his death, then dies in peace, that man alone is, in my judgment, entitled to bear the name of ‘happy.’ In every matter it behooves us to mark well the end, for often God gives men a gleam of happiness, and then plunges them into ruin.”

Among his precautions, Croesus consulted the Delphic oracle, who with customary ambiguity answered, “If you cross the Halys you will destroy a great Empire.” This is what the king did. He crossed the river frontier and destroyed a great empire—his own.

Croesus retreated to his stronghold and Cyrus’ armies closed in. How disaster befell is best told in Herodotus’ own words: “On the fourteenth day of the siege, Cyrus made proclamation that he would give a reward to the man who should first mount the wall. After this he made an assault but without success. His troops retired, but one Hyroeades, resolved to approach the citadel and attempt it at a place where no guards were ever set. On this side the rock was so precipitous, and the citadel so impregnable, that no fear was entertained of its being carried in this place....Hyroeades, however, had observed a Lydian soldier descend the rock to retrieve a helmet which had rolled down from the top, and having seen the man pick it up and carry it back, thought over what he had witnessed, and formed his plan. He climbed the rock himself, and other Persians followed in his track, until a large number had mounted to the top. Thus Sardis was taken.” The real reason, of course, was decay of the structure of the conglomerate rock which formed the ridge. Its erosion had undermined the defenses. Little is left today of the substantial plateau on which the royal stronghold had stood and the connecting neck of land which joined it to the major mountain mass. The rest of Croesus’ story may be read in Herodotus, that prince of storytellers (Book I).

Alexander destroyed the Pers. empire, and Sardis passed from hand to hand under the successive regimes. It fell first to Antigonus, then to the Seleucids of Syria, and then to Pergamum when the Attalid dynasty broke free from Seleucid power, which was perennially overstretched in western Asia Minor. It was during an attempt by Antiochus the Great in 214 b.c. to bring Sardis back under Syrian rule that the lone feat of Hyroeades of 549 b.c. was precisely repeated.

Rome succeeded Pergamum in 133 b.c. when Attalus III, aware of emerging history, bequeathed his kingdom to the Republic. Sardis became an administrative center of Rom. Asia, and when in a.d. 26 the cities of the province contended for the honor of building a second temple for the Caesar-cult, the envoys spoke long and eloquently about the past glory of the place. Sardis, as the apocalyptic letter put it “had a name but was dead.” Ramsay writes: “It was a city whose history conspicuously and pre-eminently blazoned forth the uncertainty of human fortunes, the weakness of human strength and the shortness of the step which separates over-confident might from sudden and irreparable disaster. It was a city whose name was almost synonymous with pretentions unjustified, promise unfulfilled, appearance without reality, confidence which heralded ruin.” All the imagery of the letter is vivid in the history of the place, the works undone, the climbing “thief in the night,” the sudden surprise. The Christian community was infected by the complacency of the place.

All but a few had not “defiled their garments”; that is, they had not compromised with the worship of Cybele—the horrible cult of hysteria and mutilation reflected in Catullus’ grim poem Attis—or with the more subtle Caesar-cult that had become strong in Sardis after a.d. 17 when the beneficence of Rome and Tiberius, after the mighty Asian earthquake of that year, put the city heavily in debt.

Some Christian inscrs. have been found in Sardis, but nothing is known of the origins or end of the Christian community, unless Ramsay is right in finding their sad relics in a strange Moslem splinter sect. The universities of Harvard and Cornell are currently working there. The temple of Artemis, whose worship enveloped that of Cybele in the city, has been uncovered together with evidence of its transformation into a church.

Bibliography W. M. Ramsay, The Letters to the Seven Churches (1904); E. M. Blaiklock, The Cities of the New Testament (1965), 112-119.