Croesus

Croesus (Greek Kroisos, reigned c. 560–547/546 BCE) was the fifth and last king of the Mermnad dynasty of Lydia, and to the Greeks who wrote his story he was the very type of the great king at the height of fortune, the richest man they could name, and the standing proof that no height of wealth or power secures a man against the turn of the wheel. He ruled from Sardis, the capital in the valley of the Hermus below Mount Tmolus in western Anatolia; he was the master of the Ionian Greek cities of the coast; and his overthrow by Cyrus the Great brought the Persian empire, in a single campaign, from the Iranian plateau to the edge of the Greek world. He is one of the hinge figures of this compendium's period, the man whose fall opened the West to Persia, and he is also its clearest instance of a historical king almost wholly overlaid by a Greek moral fiction, so that reading him means holding the two apart.

The kingdom of Lydia and the house of the Mermnadae

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 (the tale of Gyges and the wife of Candaules in Herodotus 1.8–13); the line ran Gyges, Ardys, Sadyattes, Alyattes, and then Croesus, son of Alyattes. According to Herodotus (1.26) Croesus came to the throne at the age of thirty-five and at once set about the subjugation of the Greek cities of the Anatolian coast one by one, beginning with Ephesus, until the mainland Ionians and Aeolians paid him tribute; the islanders he left alone. He thus made himself, a generation before the Persians did the same to him, the overlord of the Asiatic Greeks; and he cultivated the Greek sanctuaries, above all Delphi, with lavish dedications of gold that fixed his name in the Greek mind as the giver beyond measure. The Iranica article notes that 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 (Herodotus 7.27).

The rich king and the Greek moral tale

Before Herodotus tells of Croesus's fall he tells of his pride, and the frame he builds around it is 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, and Solon names instead obscure men who died well, for (this is the pivot of the whole Herodotean history) 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 1858)

The lesson is driven home a second time in the starkest terms Herodotus gives it, the reduction of even the greatest king to the plaything of chance:

"Thus then, O Croesus, man is altogether a creature of accident." (Herodotus 1.32, Solon to Croesus, trans. Macaulay 1890)

This is didactic literature, not a court record: Solon and Croesus cannot in fact have met at the dramatic date the story requires, and modern scholarship treats the encounter as a moral fiction, the philosophical prologue Herodotus needs so that Croesus's coming fall will read as the demonstration of a law. What follows in the narrative, the death of Croesus's son Atys in a hunting accident he had striven to prevent, the misread oracle, the pyre, is the working-out of Solon's warning upon the man who would not heed it. Croesus is, in this sense, less a person in Herodotus than a figure in an argument: the great king whom the reader watches learn, too late, that happiness cannot be counted before the end.

The war with Cyrus: the oracle, the Halys, and Pteria

The occasion of the war was the rise of Persia. When Cyrus the Great overthrew the Median king Astyages, Croesus's own brother-in-law, around 550 BCE, the fall of the Median kingdom on Lydia's eastern border gave Croesus, in the Iranica article's phrase, a casus belli against the Persians (Herodotus 1.74–75): a pretext to avenge his kinsman, and an opportunity, as he read it, to enlarge his kingdom at the expense of a new and untried power. He made alliances with Babylonia, Egypt, and Sparta, and, most famously, he consulted the oracle at Delphi on whether he should march. The oracle's answer became the proverb of the deceiving prophecy: that if Croesus made war on the Persians he would destroy a great empire. He took it for a promise of victory and did not see that the great empire he would destroy might be his own.

Before he crossed, Herodotus gives him 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 the 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." (Herodotus 1.71, Sandanis counsels Croesus, trans. Macaulay 1890)

"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 1890)

Croesus crossed the river Halys, the traditional boundary between Lydian and Median (now Persian) power, and occupied Cappadocia, enslaving its people. Cyrus countered swiftly. The armies met at Pteria in Cappadocia, where, the Iranica article follows Herodotus (1.75–77), a fierce but indecisive battle was fought; other traditions, Polyaenus (7.8) and Justin (1.7.3), gave the victory outright to Cyrus. Croesus, his army the smaller and the season turning, withdrew to Sardis and disbanded his mercenaries, not expecting Cyrus to campaign in the Anatolian highlands in winter, and confident that by spring his allies, the Spartans, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, would have come to his aid.

The fall of Sardis (547/546 BCE)

Cyrus did not wait for the spring. He pursued the retreating Lydians, and took Croesus by surprise in the plain before Sardis. Herodotus tells that the Lydian cavalry, the finest in Asia, was neutralised by a stratagem: Cyrus set his baggage-camels before his line, and the horses, unused to the smell, would not face them (1.80). The Lydians were driven within the walls, and after a siege of fourteen days the citadel of Sardis, reckoned impregnable, was stormed at a point left unwatched because the cliff there was thought unclimbable (1.84). Croesus was taken. The Iranica article dates the fall to about mid-December, following Maspero, and the kingdom of Lydia, the last great independent power west of the Zagros, passed to Persia. With it the Achaemenid frontier reached the Aegean: the Ionian Greek cities that had paid tribute to Croesus now passed, city by city, under Persian rule, and Sardis became the seat of a Persian satrap and the western terminus of the empire's road-system. The problem of the Ionians thus created (Greek cities held by the Great King on the edge of the free Greek world) would run through the burning of Sardis in the Ionian Revolt (498) to the Persian Wars, and is the long consequence of Croesus's defeat.

The date is a genuine crux. The received tradition, resting on Herodotus's synchronisms, placed the fall in 547 or 546 BCE; the Nabonidus Chronicle records a western campaign by Cyrus in the ninth year of Nabonidus (547–546), and it long anchored the higher date. But the reading is contested (see below), and the Iranica article concludes that the fall 'cannot be dated with certainty,' while judging that 546 BCE 'fits both the chronological data and other historical considerations.'

The pyre, and the divergent fates

What became of Croesus after the fall is the point on which the sources part most sharply, and where legend and record are hardest to separate. The Greek tradition, and the vase-painting that runs alongside it, fixed on the pyre. In one version, the Iranica article records, Croesus followed the custom of many a fallen king and chose self-immolation; on the Myson amphora in the Louvre, painted about 500 BCE, he is shown enthroned upon a blazing pyre, garlanded, holding the sceptre and a libation-bowl while a servant named Euthymos kindles the fire. The poet Bacchylides, in his third ode (written about 468 BCE, and thus our earliest surviving literary treatment of Croesus's end), described the attempt at self-immolation and had Apollo snatch the pious king away to the land of the Hyperboreans, a rescue by the god Croesus had so richly endowed at Delphi.

Herodotus (1.86–90) tells it differently and more famously: Cyrus set Croesus upon 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, called out the name of Solon, and being asked what he meant, told the story of the Athenian who had said no living man could be called happy. Cyrus, hearing it, was moved to see his own case in the fallen king's, and relented:

"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, of Cyrus sparing Croesus on the pyre, trans. Macaulay 1890)

In Herodotus, then, Croesus is spared and kept by Cyrus as a royal counsellor, and lives on into the reign of Cambyses. Herodotus gives him the war's own epitaph, spoken by the fallen king to his conqueror, 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 1890)

This afterlife as counsellor is the tradition's dominant form. Ctesias (as summarised in the epitome, and followed by Pompeius Trogus in Justin) added that Croesus was given a fief near Ecbatana; Xenophon in the Cyropaedia (7.2.5ff.) and Nicolaus of Damascus embellished the version with more elaborate detail: in Xenophon it is Croesus who warns Cyrus that his open-handed giving will beggar him, and Cyrus who answers, in one of the Cyropaedia'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 answering Croesus on hoarding, trans. Dakyns)

And Herodotus keeps him at the Persian court a generation on, into the reign of the mad Cambyses, as the aged counsellor who begs the young king to master his own temper and is nearly killed for the advice, the wise word urged on a ruler who cannot hear it (see Cambyses II):

"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 counselling Cambyses, trans. Macaulay 1890)

Against this whole tradition of the spared counsellor stands a single dissenting line. The Armenian translation of Eusebius's Chronicle alleged that Cyrus killed Croesus; but, as the Iranica article stresses, this directly contradicts the Greek version of the same Chronicle and the texts that depend on Eusebius's source, and it is generally set aside.

The Nabonidus Chronicle and the killing question

The sharpest modern debate turns on the contemporary Babylonian evidence, and on whether it says Cyrus killed Croesus. The Nabonidus Chronicle, recording Cyrus's campaign in Nabonidus's ninth year (547–546 BCE), reads at the crucial point, with the key place-name broken and the key verb ambiguous:

"In the month of Nisannu (March–April), Kur, King of Parsua, collected his army, and crossed the Tigris below Arbela. In the month of Aiaru (April–May) he [marched] to Lu… He… -ku its king, took its booty… put a garrison of his own there. Afterward his garrison and the king remained there." (the Nabonidus Chronicle, col. II ll. 15–18, as quoted in the Iranica article, after Grayson / Oppenheim / Smith)

Many scholars restored the broken place-name as Lu[-ud-du], Lydia, and read the damaged verb as 'killed,' concluding that the Chronicle records Cyrus defeating and killing Croesus in 547 BCE; and it has even been asserted, on this basis, that the Babylonian sources say Croesus was sentenced to death. The Iranica article (Shahbazi) rejects this reading on several grounds. The restoration 'Lydia' is doubtful: others have proposed Armenia, or Su-, or Suhi, for the missing name, and the identification with Lydia 'seems untenable,' because Sardis (on Herodotus's synchronism) fell in December, not in the month of Aiaru (April–May) named in the Chronicle. The verb, too, may mean 'defeated' or 'crushed' rather than 'killed.' And a killing on the pyre is in any case improbable on Persian terms: Persian custom, Shahbazi notes, forbade both the pollution of fire and the slaying of captured princes (compare Herodotus 3.15–16) except in cases of rebellion. Above all, the Greek sources explicitly state that Croesus survived Cyrus, and his family demonstrably flourished in Asia Minor afterward: the very Pythius who was the richest man of Xerxes's day was his grandson. On this reasoning the Iranica article treats the report of a killing as untenable and holds to the tradition of the spared king. The matter remains genuinely open: the Chronicle's broken line will not settle it, and the reader should hold both the higher chronology it is used to anchor and the fact of Croesus's death lightly.

Croesus and the invention of coinage

One durable legacy of Lydia passed intact to Persia. The Iranica article credits Croesus with pioneering the coining of gold and silver money, the croeseid, struck with the image of a lion attacking a bull. Lydia was among the earliest states to strike coin, and the refinement of gold-and-silver coinage under Croesus gave the Greek world its enduring image of Lydian wealth (the phrase 'rich as Croesus' descends directly from it). When Persia took Sardis it took the Lydian mint and the Lydian coining technology with it: Sardis remained the empire's principal western mint, and the Achaemenid gold daric and silver siglos are the heirs of Croesus's coinage (see the compendium's treatment of the daric). The lion-and-bull device, too, outlived its inventor: the Iranica article observes that the motif remained a favourite subject in the art of Persepolis. In coin as in the city itself, Croesus's fall was less an ending than a transfer: the wealth and the techniques of Lydia absorbed whole into the empire that had conquered it.

Significance: Persia reaches the Aegean

The conquest of Lydia is one of the three great acquisitions that made the Achaemenid empire under Cyrus, Media (c. 550), Lydia (547/546), and Babylon (539), and it is the one that carried Persia to the shore of the Greek world. With Sardis fell the last independent kingdom of Anatolia and the Greek cities of the Ionian coast; the western march of the empire now ran along the Aegean, and the Persians and the Greeks became neighbours. Everything in this compendium's later western history flows from that meeting: the satrapy of Sardis and its over-mighty governors (Oroetes, who crucified Polycrates and defied Darius; Artaphernes, in whose day the Ionians burned the city), the Ionian Revolt, the punitive expeditions that became Marathon, and the great invasions of Xerxes. Croesus is thus a doubly pivotal figure: the last king of an old order in Anatolia, and, in his defeat, the unwitting author of the long Persian–Greek entanglement. And he is, for this compendium, a lesson in reading. His fall is attested in the Babylonian record and in the burnt destruction-layer that archaeology has found at Sardis; but the Croesus who has come down to us, the questioner of Solon, the misreader of oracles, the king upon the pyre, is very largely a Greek literary creation, shaped to carry a Greek argument about the reach of fortune. To hold the historical king and the moral figure apart, and to weigh the contemporary Chronicle against the didactic narrative, is the same discipline this compendium brings to every king known chiefly through Greek eyes.