Having sent gifts and messengers to the oracle at Delphi, the king of the Lydians sent this message: "[The king] asks you again now whether he shall march against the Persians, and if so, whether he shall join with himself any army of men as allies." The oracle replied that, "if he should march against the Persians he should destroy a great empire."Little did he know which empire he was to destroy. It was to be his own, of course, as Cyrus the Great was ascendant.Quotations from Herodotus' Histories.