Croesus

Lydia in the sixth century was the dominant power of western Asia Minor, a kingdom grown rich on the gold-bearing sands of the river Pactolus and on its command of the trade routes between the Anatolian interior and the Greek coast. Its ruling house, the Mermnadae, had come to the throne five generations before Croesus with Gyges, whose seizure of power the Greeks wove into their own moralising in the tale of Gyges and the wife of Candaules that opens Herodotus's history; the line ran Gyges, Ardys, Sadyattes, Alyattes, and then Croesus, son of Alyattes. Under Alyattes the kingdom had fought Media to a standstill on the river Halys, a five-year war broken off, in Herodotus, when a solar eclipse turned day to night over the battlefield and both sides took the omen for a command to make peace; the marriage that sealed that treaty made the next Median king, Astyages, Croesus's brother-in-law (see Astyages).^[1]

According to Herodotus, Croesus came to the throne at about thirty-five and at once set about the subjugation of the Greek cities of the coast one by one, beginning with Ephesus, until the mainland Ionians and Aeolians paid him tribute; the islanders he left alone.^[1] He thus made himself, a generation before the Persians did the same to him, overlord of the Asiatic Greeks, and Herodotus fixes the point as the origin of a long servitude: Croesus was the first foreigner known to have reduced Greeks to tribute, where before his time all the Greeks had been free. He also cultivated the Greek sanctuaries, above all Delphi, with dedications of gold so lavish that they fixed his name in the Greek mind as the giver beyond measure. His family and its wealth long outlasted his kingdom: his grandson Pythius, son of Atys, was still, in the reign of Xerxes, reckoned the richest man in the world after the Great King himself.^[2]

Almost everything told of Croesus comes through Greek writers a century or more after him, and most of it is shaped to a moral. Lydia has left no royal annals, no chronicle, no inscription of Croesus recording his own reign; the archive of Sardis, if there was one, is lost, and the excavation of the city, for all it recovers of the Lydian and Persian town, has yet to reach the palace or any document of the king. What survives of Croesus in his own time is small and lies outside Lydia altogether. Its clearest piece is at Ephesus. When Croesus rebuilt the great temple of Artemis, the columnae caelatae (the carved columns) of the Artemision were his gift, and several of the column bases carry, in archaic Greek letters, the dedication basileus Kroisos anetheken, "King Croesus dedicated (this)". Three such inscribed bases are known, and they are the one contemporary epigraphic trace of the man behind the legend: not a Lydian record but a Greek one, honouring the foreign king who paid for the sanctuary.^[3][4] The Mermnad dynasty left one great monument of its own, the burial mound of Croesus's father Alyattes at Bin Tepe above Sardis, which Herodotus reckoned the largest work of men after the monuments of Egypt and Babylon; but it is a mute one, and speaks of Lydian wealth rather than of Croesus.

Everything else must be read back through Herodotus and his successors, which is why the modern study of Croesus is so largely a study of Greek storytelling. The bare frame is secure enough: a Mermnad king of the mid-sixth century, master of Anatolia west of the Halys and of the Ionian coast, of proverbial wealth, defeated and dethroned by Cyrus. The wealth was real, and it was Lydian gold, washed from the Pactolus and refined at Sardis, that stood near the head of the list of materials when Darius built his palace at Susa a generation later. Lydia was also the birthplace of coined money: the electrum of the Pactolus had been struck into the first coins by the Mermnad kings, and Croesus is credited with replacing it with the first true bimetallic coinage of pure gold and pure silver, the lion-and-bull croeseid. That coinage, and the Sardis mint that struck it, passed intact to Persia and lie behind the Achaemenid daric (see the daric).^[2] For the man himself, though, the sources are Greek, late, and didactic, and the first thing to understand about Croesus is how thoroughly Herodotus made him a character.

Herodotus gives Croesus the first extended narrative of his history, the logos of Croesus (1.6 to 1.94), and builds it as a demonstration rather than a record. Before the fall comes the pride, and around the pride the most famous of all Greek meditations on the instability of fortune. The Athenian sage Solon, travelling, comes to Sardis; Croesus shows him the royal treasuries and asks who is the happiest of men, expecting to hear his own name. Solon names instead obscure men who died well, for no man can be called happy while he yet lives, since the god who gives a gleam of prosperity may still plunge him into ruin, and only the end shows the truth:

In every matter it behoves us to mark well the end: for oftentimes God gives men a gleam of happiness, and then plunges them into ruin.

Herodotus 1.32, Solon to Croesus, trans. Rawlinson^[1]

The lesson is driven home in the starkest terms Herodotus gives it, the reduction of even the greatest king to the plaything of chance: for Solon, "man is altogether a creature of accident".^[1]

This is didactic literature, not a court record. Solon and Croesus cannot in fact have met at the dramatic date the story requires, the Athenian's travels and the Lydian's reign not overlapping as Herodotus needs, and the encounter is treated as a moral fiction, the philosophical prologue that lets Croesus's coming fall read as the demonstration of a law.^[5] What follows works Solon's warning out upon the man who would not heed it. Croesus loses the son he loves, Atys, killed in a boar-hunt by the very guest-friend, Adrastus, whom he had charged to protect him, and killed with the iron point that a dream had warned the king against: the disaster he had foreseen and tried to avert arrives through his own precautions. Then comes the misread oracle, and then the pyre. On the reading of Herodotus's commentators the architecture is deliberate and almost tragic in shape, and Croesus and Cyrus are set up as the first pair of what will be a recurring figure, the great man raised high and cast down: they become "two great paradigmatic figures", each foreshadowing the other and both foreshadowing the later kings whose falls the history will trace.^[5] Croesus is, in this sense, less a person in Herodotus than a figure in an argument, the king who learns too late that happiness cannot be counted before the end. The Atys episode shows the machinery at close range. Warned in a dream that his son would die by an iron point, Croesus keeps the young man from war, strips the weapons from the men's quarters, and marries him safely off, only to yield to a plea to let him hunt a boar that is ravaging the country, and to send with him, as protector, the one guest at his court fated to be the killer; the boar-spear finds Atys, and every precaution the king took has served to bring the thing about. Herodotus makes the point that human foresight cannot outrun what is destined, and that the wise are those, like Solon, who know it. The testing of the oracles works the same seam from the other side: Croesus, the rational calculator, subjects the shrines to a controlled experiment before he trusts them, and the god he thereby certifies then answers him in a form his calculation cannot crack. The logos is, throughout, a study in the limits of a clever man's command of his own fate. The Lydian material that Greeks found most memorable, Gyges and Candaules, Solon, the testing of the oracles, the doomed hunt, is exactly the material a historian can least use, and the sharpest modern accounts say so plainly: Herodotus's Lydian logos is rich for the student of Greek literature and thin for the historian of Lydia.^[6]

The occasion of the war was the rise of Persia. When Cyrus overthrew the Median kingdom of Astyages, Croesus's own kinsman by marriage, around 550 BCE, the fall of the power on Lydia's eastern border gave Croesus both a pretext, to avenge his brother-in-law, and, as he read it, an opportunity to enlarge his kingdom at the expense of an untried enemy. He made alliances with Babylonia, Egypt and Sparta, and consulted the oracle at Delphi, which he had first satisfied of its accuracy by an elaborate test, on whether he should march. The answer became the proverb of the deceiving prophecy: that "if he should send an army against the Persians he would destroy a great empire".^[1] He took it for a promise of victory and did not see that the great empire he would bring down might be his own. Herodotus gives him, too, a wise counsellor he did not heed, the Lydian Sandanis, who warned that the Persians of Cyrus's day were a hard, poor people with nothing worth taking, so that a war against them could win Croesus nothing and, if it were lost, would teach a rugged nation the taste of Lydian wealth:

O king, thou art preparing to march against men who wear breeches of leather, and the rest of their clothing is of leather also; and they eat food not such as they desire but such as they can obtain, dwelling in a land which is rugged; and moreover they make no use of wine but drink water; and no figs have they for dessert, nor any other good thing. … If thou shalt be overcome, consider how many good things thou wilt lose; for once having tasted our good things, they will cling to them fast and it will not be possible to drive them away.

Herodotus 1.71, Sandanis counsels Croesus, trans. Macaulay^[1]

Croesus crossed the Halys, the traditional boundary between Lydian and Median (now Persian) power, and occupied Cappadocia. The armies met at Pteria, somewhere in north-central Anatolia, and fought a fierce but indecisive battle; some later traditions gave the victory outright to Cyrus.^[2] Croesus, his army the smaller and the season turning, withdrew to Sardis and disbanded his mercenaries, not expecting a winter campaign, and confident that by spring his allies would come. Cyrus did not wait. He pursued the retreating Lydians at once and took Croesus by surprise before Sardis, where, Herodotus says, the Lydian cavalry, the finest in Asia, was neutralised by a stratagem: Cyrus set his baggage-camels before his line, and the horses would not face them, for "horses fear camels and can endure neither the sight nor the smell of them".^[1] The Lydians were driven within the walls, and after a short siege the citadel of Sardis, reckoned impregnable, was stormed at an unwatched point. The siege and the fall of the city, and the archaeology of the destruction it left, are a subject of their own (see Sardis); what concerns Croesus is that he was taken, and the Mermnad kingdom ended.^[7]

For Herodotus the war is finally a lesson about the reading of signs, and he lets the oracle answer for itself. When Croesus, a captive, sends his chains to Delphi to reproach the god, the priestess replies that the fault was his own, for he had not asked whose empire he would destroy:

For Loxias declared to him that if he should lead an army against the Persians he would destroy a great empire. Therefore it behoved him, if he would take right counsel, to send and ask whether the god spoke of Croesus' or of Cyrus' empire. But he understood not that which was spoken, nor made further inquiry: wherefore now let him blame himself.

Herodotus 1.91, the oracle's defence, trans. Godley^[1]

The oracle is never wrong in Herodotus, only misread; Croesus's tragedy is a failure of interpretation, and the whole logos turns on it.

When Sardis fell has come undone in modern scholarship, where much can hang on a single broken sign. The received tradition, resting on Herodotus's chain of synchronisms, placed the fall in 547 or 546 BCE. That date seemed anchored in a contemporary document, the Nabonidus Chronicle, which records a western campaign of Cyrus in the ninth year of Nabonidus (547 to 546). At the crucial point the tablet is damaged, the place-name broken and the verb ambiguous:

In the month Nisanu (April) Cyrus, king of Parsu, mustered his army and crossed the Tigris below Arbail. In the month Ayaru (May) [he marched] to [...] He defeated its king, took its possessions, (and) stationed his own garrison (there) [...] Afterwards the king and his garrison was in it [...]

The Nabonidus Chronicle, ABC 7 ii.15–18, trans. Kuhrt^[8]

The tablet's first editor, Sidney Smith, restored the broken name as Lu[-ud-du], Lydia, and read the damaged verb as "killed"; on that reading the Chronicle recorded Cyrus defeating and killing Croesus in 547, and the date became canonical, repeated in handbooks for most of a century. The reading was never secure. A collation reported in Grayson's edition of the chronicles read the surviving traces as excluding Lydia, and Grayson himself conceded that the restoration rested on historical probability rather than on anything legible in the signs.^[9] John Cargill's review of the whole edifice in 1977 pulled the props from under it, and the held critical editions now stand on the sceptical side: Kuhrt prints the place-name as a break and states that the traces do not support the Lydia restoration.^[8]

The positive alternative that has since gained ground is that the broken name is not Lydia at all but Urartu, so that the 547 campaign was fought in south-eastern Anatolia and had nothing to do with Croesus. Depending on whether one takes the crack across the tablet to hide part of a sign or to be merely a crack, the name reads Lydia or Urartu, and many Achaemenid historians now prefer the second; on that view the once-fixed date for the fall of Croesus simply dissolves.^[6] Scholars who accept the Urartu reading still place the conquest of Lydia in the 540s, on the strength of Herodotus's sequence of Cyrus's conquests, but no longer precisely in 547, and some, following Robert Rollinger, lower it as far as about 541.^[7] The Iranica article, written before the Urartu reading took hold, had already declined to give a firm date, judging only that 546 fitted the chronological data and the other historical considerations; the current position is more open still.^[2] What would settle it is a better-preserved copy of the Chronicle, and until one is found neither the date nor, as the next section shows, the manner of Croesus's death can be fixed.

What became of Croesus after the fall is the point on which the sources part most sharply, and where the modern verdict has moved furthest from the one the older reference works gave. The Greek tradition, and the vase-painting that runs beside it, fixed on the pyre, and the earliest witness is the earliest surviving treatment of Croesus's end altogether. In his third ode, written about 468 BCE to celebrate an Olympic victory of Hieron of Syracuse, the poet Bacchylides has the conquered king mount a pyre of his own building and attempt self-immolation to escape slavery; Zeus sends rain to quench the flames, and Apollo carries the pious king off to the land of the Hyperboreans, the far-northern paradise, a rescue by the very god Croesus had so richly endowed.^[10] The removal to the Hyperboreans reads, in Bacchylides, as a poetic figure for death: the king does not return to the world of men, and later traditions understood him to have perished at Sardis.^[3] The same scene appears in Attic red-figure of about the same years, most memorably on the Myson amphora in the Louvre, where Croesus sits enthroned upon a blazing pyre, garlanded, holding sceptre and libation-bowl while a servant kindles the fire.^[2]

Herodotus tells it differently and more famously. Cyrus sets Croesus on the pyre to burn him, whether as a thank-offering or to test whether some god would save so pious a man; and Croesus, upon the pyre, calls out the name of Solon, remembering the Athenian who had said no living man could be counted happy. Asked what he means, he tells the story, and Cyrus, moved to see his own case in the fallen king's, relents:

Cyrus, hearing from the interpreters what Croesus had said, changed his purpose and considered that he himself also was but a man, and that he was delivering another man, who had been not inferior to himself in felicity, alive to the fire; and moreover he feared the requital, and reflected that there was nothing of that which men possessed which was secure.

Herodotus 1.86, Cyrus spares Croesus on the pyre, trans. Macaulay^[1]

In Herodotus, then, Croesus is spared and kept as a royal counsellor, and lives on into the next reign. Herodotus gives him the war's own epitaph, the verdict of the man who lost everything on the difference between peace and war:

No one is so senseless as to choose of his own will war rather than peace, since in peace the sons bury their fathers, but in war the fathers bury their sons.

Herodotus 1.87, Croesus to Cyrus after the pyre, trans. Macaulay^[1]

A third branch drops the pyre entirely. Ctesias, whose Persian history survives in Photius's summary, had Croesus take sanctuary in a temple of Apollo, be bound and miraculously loosed twice, and finally be spared and granted a fief, Barene (Barnene in Mitchell) near Ecbatana, a detail that Pompeius Trogus (in Justin) and later writers repeat.^[11] Xenophon in the Cyropaedia and Nicolaus of Damascus embellished the counsellor version further.

These traditions cannot be harmonised, and the modern discussion turns on which to believe. The older reference synthesis, represented by Shahbazi's Iranica article, held firmly to the spared king. It set aside the lone claim, in the Armenian text of Eusebius's Chronicle, that Cyrus killed Croesus, as contradicting the Greek version of the same work; it argued that a fiery execution offended Persian custom, which the Iranian sources present as forbidding both the pollution of fire and the killing of captured princes except for rebellion; and it pointed out that the Greek sources agree Croesus outlived Cyrus and that his family demonstrably flourished afterward, the very Pythius who was the richest man of Xerxes's day being his grandson.^[2] Recent scholarship has swung the other way. The primacy of Bacchylides tells against Herodotus: the earliest version implies death, and the merciful Cyrus who spares the weeping king looks like a later, softening invention, the moral of transience given a happy coda.^[3] Several strands point the same way, the burning intended by Cyrus, the execution of Croesus's son in Ctesias, the very existence of a self-immolation tradition, and a number of scholars now accept that Croesus most likely died at the sack, whether on the pyre or in the fall of the city; on Rollinger's reading he was killed as the Persians pillaged Sardis.^[7] The honest verdict is that the question is open. As one recent biographer puts it, many are inclined to accept the version that Croesus died, but the truth of the matter is uncertain, and the surviving reports of his fate cannot be fully reconciled.^[11]

The tradition of the spared king did not stop at the sparing; it gave Croesus a long afterlife as the wise counsellor at the court of his conqueror, and this is the form in which later antiquity best remembered him. In Herodotus he advises Cyrus on the eve of the fatal Massagetan campaign and travels east in the keeping of the young Cambyses; a generation on he is still at court, the aged sage who begs the unstable Cambyses to master his own temper and is nearly killed for the advice:

Do not thou indulge the heat of thy youth and passion in all things, but retain and hold thyself back: it is a good thing to be prudent, and forethought is wise.

Herodotus 3.36, Croesus counsels Cambyses, trans. Macaulay^[1]

In Xenophon's idealising Cyropaedia it is Croesus who warns Cyrus that his open-handed giving will beggar him, and Cyrus who answers, in one of the work's set-piece maxims on kingship, that friends enriched are the surest treasure:

If I make my friends rich they will be my treasures themselves, and far better guards too, for me and all we have, than if I set hired watchmen over my wealth.

Xenophon, Cyropaedia 8.2, Cyrus to Croesus, trans. Dakyns^[12]

The counsellor Croesus is a literary device before he is a historical figure. Herodotus keeps him on hand to speak the wisdom the narrative needs at each turn, the fallen king who has learned the lesson the reigning king has yet to learn; the pattern is transparent, and the same Croesus who warns Cyrus not to cross a river to his ruin had himself crossed the Halys to his own.^[11] If the recent case for Croesus's death at Sardis is right, the entire court-counsellor tradition is a construction, and its function, to carry the moral of the whole logos forward into the reigns that follow, is the reason it was built. Whether or not the man survived, the wise adviser at the Persian court is Greek storytelling doing its work.

Croesus became, and remained, the standing example of the transience of human fortune, and the phrase "rich as Croesus" still carries the memory. The Solon dialogue was already, for Herodotus and his readers, the moral kernel of the history, and it passed into the wider Greek moral tradition as the classic warning against counting oneself happy before the end. Aristotle takes up the very question in the Nicomachean Ethics, asking whether Solon was right to deny any living man the name of happy, and answering, against the letter of the maxim, that a settled life is not to be judged by its last turn of luck alone; the philosophers thus argued with the tale even as they preserved it.^[5] Plutarch, writing his Life of Solon, retells the meeting for its lesson and defends its truth against the chronographers who had already noticed that the two men could not have met, holding that a story so fitting and so illustrative of Solon's character was not to be given up for the sake of a few chronological tables.^[5] The historical impossibility, in other words, was seen in antiquity and set aside, because the value of the Croesus of the story never lay in its being true. The visual tradition is gentler to the king than the moralists. On the Myson amphora Croesus wears a laurel wreath and pours a libation, composed and pious on his pyre, a sympathetic figure that speaks to the ambivalence of his Greek reception: the barbarian who first took the Greeks' freedom, and the generous benefactor of their greatest sanctuaries, held in the same image.^[3] That doubleness is Herodotus's own. His Croesus is both the aggressor who first reduced free Greeks to tribute and the pitiable king on the pyre, and the tension between the two is never resolved, which is part of why the figure kept its hold. The exemplum outlasted antiquity, and the misread oracle, the promise that a great empire would fall, became a proverb of ambiguous prophecy in its own right, detached from the Lydian king who first heard it.

The conquest of Lydia is one of the three great acquisitions that made the empire under Cyrus, Media about 550, Lydia in the mid-540s, and Babylon in 539, and it is the one that opened the Greek world to Persia. With Sardis fell the last independent kingdom of Anatolia and the Greek cities of the Ionian coast, which passed, city by city, under Persian rule; the western march of the empire now ran along the Aegean, and Persians and Greeks became neighbours. Almost everything in the later western history of the empire flows from that meeting: the satrapy governed from Sardis and its over-mighty holders, the Ionian Revolt and the burning of Sardis in 498, the punitive expeditions that became Marathon, and the great invasions of Xerxes. Croesus is thus doubly pivotal, the last king of an old Anatolian order and, in his defeat, the unwitting author of the long Persian and Greek entanglement.

And he is a lesson in how such a figure must be read. His fall is dated, within a few years, by the Babylonian chronicle and by the destruction the sack left in the ground at Sardis, and his historical existence is guaranteed by his own dedications at Ephesus. But the Croesus who has come down to posterity, the questioner of Solon, the misreader of oracles, the king upon the pyre, is very largely a Greek construction, shaped to carry a Greek argument about the reach of fortune. To hold the historical king apart from the moral figure, to weigh a damaged chronicle against a didactic narrative, and to admit that neither the date of his fall nor the manner of his death can now be fixed, is what reading any king known chiefly through Greek eyes demands.