The Lydians never dreamed anyone would be able to make their way up the cliff. So Sardis fell to Hyeroedes and his men with hardly a struggle. The tortoise had beaten the hare. One would think that the city would have learned its lesson. The same thing happened to Sardis in the campaigns of Antiochus 200 years later.
Overconfidence apparently dies hard.
There was a Christian congregation in the city - First Church, Sardis. Not too bad a place to have your membership, actually. It would not have been perfect, of course. Some of the furniture in the church parlor would have been a little old fashioned, but nobody would suggest getting rid of it because it had been given years before by one of the congregation's most prominent families and no one would want to offend them. There would have been regular complaints about damage done to the building by the patrons of the church-sponsored soup kitchen and day care center.