His name became a byword for obscene wealth: even today we say "he's richer than Croesus." He reigned over Lydia (now part of Turkey) surrounded by gold, conquests and splendour, dead certain he was the most blessed and fortunate man on the planet. And it was precisely that arrogance for which the gods had reserved one of the most spectacular downfalls in all antiquity. Fasten the seatbelt to Croesus's crown, because this whole thing is about to come crashing down...
Listen up, dear readers, lady-readers and reader-folk of every persuasion, because today we're talking about a fellow whose name has reached us 2,500 years after his death, turned into a phrase that many of us (or most of us) still use: "to be richer than Croesus." And I can assure you the man earned that title fair and square. Croesus, king of Lydia — a region in what is now western Turkey, with its capital in the opulent city of Sardis — was, during the sixth century before Christ, the richest, most powerful and most envied monarch in the known world. A sort of antique multi-billionaire, wildly capricious, the kind of man who'd blow a fortune throwing himself a birthday bash, or drop twenty or thirty mill doing up his humble little shack (an immense palace where you needed GPS to find your way around) once a year. The bloke had gold coming out of his eyebrows — and I mean that literally! See, the sands of the river Pactolus, which ran through his kingdom, dragged along a very tidy annual haul of gold nuggets, and Croesus was, by tradition, the first king in history to mint coins of gold and silver.
But this story, like nearly every one worth telling, isn't about how stinking rich he was or how high he climbed — it's about how low he fell. Because Croesus is the star of one of Herodotus's greatest moral parables: the man who had it all and thought himself untouchable, until the wheel of fortune turned and left him, in the space of fourteen days, defeated, humiliated, and lashed to a bonfire about to be burned alive. Let's get to it.
Sardis, the New York of 550 BC
To understand Croesus you have to understand his city, Sardis. After decades of military conquest, the Lydian capital had become the centre of the world: the richest, most opulent, most dazzling city of its day. It was, as I say in my book, the New York, the London, the Paris and the Rome of the age, all rolled into one. The obligatory destination for any sage, traveller, merchant or Greek adventurer (or anyone from the other corners of the then-known world) who could afford the trip and wanted to see up close what absolute luxury looked like.
And Croesus, seated on his gold-encrusted throne, knew himself the master of it all. He had inherited a prosperous kingdom from his father Alyattes and carried it to its peak. He subdued the Greek cities and colonies along the coast of Asia Minor, west of present-day Turkey, amassed a legendary treasure, and surrounded himself with a court that wanted for absolutely nothing. The man had everything. And that, my friends, in the logic of the ancient Greeks, was precisely the problem. Because there is nothing the gods of Olympus — notoriously envious and vindictive — loathe more, nothing that gets right up their divine noses, than a mortal who reckons himself untouchable and half-divine.
The warning of the Greek sage Solon (which Croesus ignored)
Among the many illustrious visitors who passed through Sardis, the most celebrated was the Athenian lawgiver Solon, one of the famous Seven Sages of Greece, the man who had drafted Athens's first great constitution of laws. Croesus, well aware of the man's importance, put him up in the grandest style, and after parading him past his treasures to dazzle him, finally asked the great question burning a hole in his chest: "Tell me, wise Solon, of all the men you have met on your travels, who would you say is the happiest?" He expected, naturally, that Solon would answer: "Why, you, Your Majesty — it's plain for all to see, of course."
But Solon, not one to butter up the powerful, replied that the happiest man he had ever known was a humble, anonymous Athenian farmer, now deceased, named Tellus — an utter nobody barely known to his own mother. Croesus, finding himself compared to a ragged peasant, very nearly had an ischaemic stroke on the spot. And yet he tries twice more, asking the sage who, in his view, ranked second and third happiest (still hoping he might sneak onto the list), and that ball-busting son-of-a-bitch of a Greek tells him no — that in his opinion second and third place went, beyond doubt, to the Greek brothers Cleobis and Biton, also dead, and that if he really must know, fourth place went to a Greek swineherd who was, you guessed it, also dead…
— But "wattafak," thought Croesus to himself, "has this bloody Greek come all the way to Sardis just to humiliate me, or what? On top of which he eats like three men — he's already devoured half the palace pantry and knocked back three-quarters of the finest wine in my cellars, for crying out loud!"
The upshot of that miserable conversation is that Solon told Croesus that, in his view, no man can be called happy until you've seen how his life ends — because fortune, as we all know, is a fickle and capricious goddess who can snatch away everything she's granted you in a single instant.
Croesus, mortally offended, sent Solon packing as an ungrateful troublemaker and got on with his life as a happy king. Grave mistake. Because, as we shall see, the words of that "damned know-it-all Greek" would end up chasing him all the way to the top of a pyre.
The most rigged oracle in history
Some years later — and after burying his son and heir to the throne, Atys, lost in a tragedy I tell you about separately in my piece on the jinx Adrastus — Croesus fixed his gaze on a new danger growing fast to the east of his kingdom: the Persian Empire of the young king Cyrus II, who had just defeated and dethroned in battle his own grandfather, King Astyages of Media. Croesus, watching these Persians — whom he took for uneducated savages — rising in strength, decided to strike them before they grew too powerful.
But before plunging into war, Croesus did what every prudent ruler of the age did: he consulted the famous Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, flooding that Greek temple with tons of gold in gifts and offerings. And the oracle of Delphi, through the mouth of a young priestess — supposedly a virgin — called the Pythia, who was already in a trance, stoned out of her gourd on the volcanic sulphurous vapours rising from a crack in the earth in the audience chamber, gave him a reply that would go down in history as the textbook case of oracular trickery:
"If Croesus crosses the river Halys — the border between Lydia and Persia — and declares war on the Persians, he will destroy a great empire."
Croesus read and believed exactly what he wanted to read and believe: "that priestess (who was smoking hot, by the way) has clearly told me I'll destroy the Persian empire — so I'm a dead cert to win." And off he charged to war, euphoric. What never crossed his mind — because arrogance so often blinds us — was to ask the obvious: Hey, you, priestess — which great empire am I going to destroy, Cyrus's… or my own? Spoiler: it was his own.
On the way to war, by the by, there was a delicious episode of ancient engineering: arriving at the mighty river Halys and not knowing how to cross it (there were no bridges), tradition has it that the sage Thales of Miletus — the same who predicted a solar eclipse well in advance and worked out the exact height of the pyramids of Giza by measuring their shadows — designed a brilliant piece of waterworks for Croesus: he dug a semicircular channel behind the camp and diverted part of the river, splitting it into two far shallower, perfectly fordable streams. A genuine MacGyver of the sixth century BC.
The fatal blunder: dismissing the army
After a first rather odd, indecisive battle that ended in a draw against Cyrus's army in Cappadocia, Croesus made the great mistake that doomed him: believing the campaign was over for the year and that the two opponents would resume the war the following spring, he went home to Sardis and discharged all his mercenary troops — eighty per cent of his army. He sent the soldiers home and settled in, relaxed and with his guard fully down.
Cyrus, on the other hand, was a military genius, and when his spies told him that Croesus had — incredibly — already sent the bulk of his army home, he could not believe his luck. He swiftly gathered his generals and told them, more or less: "Gentlemen, this peacock, this preening clown decked out in his gaudy feathers, has just packed his entire army off home. Right under our noses we have a one-off, never-to-be-repeated chance to seize his kingdom. Let us march on Sardis at full speed, before this prancing puppet dressed up as a king can so much as react." And so it was that the Persian army covered the 250 kilometres to Sardis in six or seven days at forced march, presenting itself as a solid wall of men beneath the defenceless walls of the city — just as Croesus still thought he was on holiday.
Picture Croesus's face as he leaned out from the ramparts and saw that vast Persian army camped beneath his windows. In my book I put in his mouth a lament that sums the situation up perfectly: "God damn Cyrus, damn the oracle of Delphi, and damn every last one of my ancestors' graves. Just look how many hundreds of thousands of men I've got under my window. I'm done for, I'm screwed — no, 'screwed' doesn't cut it, 'screwed' is putting it mildly: I am royally, monumentally, super-duper screwed! But hang on, this is bizarre… The bloody Oracle of Delphi, through the mouth of that drugged-up floozy, guaranteed me I'd destroy a great empire… Hold on a damn second! Could it be that the great empire I was going to destroy is MINE?" Touché, dear Croesus, you've guessed it — but late. Far too late.
The battle of the camels
Croesus, desperate, mustered the few soldiers still left to him in the city and, donning his finest ceremonial armour embroidered in gold and silver, marched out to give battle to the Persians on the great plain before Sardis. His star weapon was a fearsome cavalry of javelin-throwers, famous and feared across all Asia.
But Cyrus had an ace up his sleeve, a trick suggested by his adviser Harpagus (a fascinating character I'll tell you about in another article, because his story — in which he was made to eat his own son thanks to a king's revenge — is one of the most brutal in all Herodotus). The trick was inspired: Cyrus rounded up every baggage camel in the army, stripped off their loads, and put them in the front line, ridden by soldiers. Why? Because horses, it seems, can't stand the smell or the sight of camels: the first time they meet them, they panic, rear up and bolt. And so it went — the moment the Lydian cavalry ran into that wall of camels, the horses lost their minds, threw their riders and scattered. Croesus's famous cavalry was knocked out of action in minutes. And Sardis fell after a siege of just fourteen days.
"O Solon!": the pyre and the miraculous rain
With Croesus captured, Cyrus decided to make an example of him: he had a great pyre raised in the central square of Sardis, ordered the Lydian king bound on top of it — along with fourteen young Lydian nobles — and prepared to burn the lot of them alive. And here comes the climax of the whole story.
Up on the pyre, seeing himself about to roast like a chicken in the oven, Croesus suddenly remembered the words of that "arrogant damned Greek" who years before had warned him that no man can call himself happy until he has seen the end of his life. And, looking up at the sky with a deep sigh, he cried out three times:
"O Solon! Solon! Solon! How right you were, you damned ball-busting Greek…"
Cyrus, intrigued, sent to ask who this "Solon" was that he invoked at the moment of death. And when the interpreters translated the story for him — the sage's warning about the fleeting nature of human fortune — Cyrus fell to brooding. He reflected that he too was a mortal man, that the wheel of fortune turns for everyone, and that it was not right to burn alive a man who only hours before had been as great and powerful as himself. Moved, and fearful of the gods' revenge, Cyrus ordered the fire put out at once.
But the flames, fanned by a strong wind, were already blazing fiercely and there was no way to smother them. And then — so the tradition goes — came the miracle: from a clear sky a tremendous torrential downpour suddenly broke loose, doused the pyre and saved Croesus from the flames. The god Apollo, they said, had finally repaid the tons of gold the Lydian had offered him at Delphi (for all the good it had done him).
The inherited guilt: the sin of the great-great-grandfather
Saved from the bonfire, Croesus became Cyrus's political adviser and close friend. But he was still deeply sore at the Oracle of Delphi, which he blamed for deceiving him. So, unable to leave Sardis himself — Cyrus had forbidden it — he sent envoys to Delphi to lodge a complaint, laying his chains at the temple doors and asking whether the Greek gods "were in the habit of being so ungrateful to those who honoured them with tons of gold."
The Pythia's reply this time was devastating and illuminating. She told him, in essence: first, that not even the gods themselves can escape destiny; second, that Croesus was paying for a crime committed five generations earlier by his great-great-grandfather Gyges, who had murdered his king to steal the throne (another juicy story you'll find on this blog); third, that Apollo had managed to delay the fall of Sardis by three years and had sent the rain that saved him from the flames; and fourth — and this is the masterstroke — that the oracle had been perfectly clear: it predicted he would destroy a great empire, and any sensible person would have asked which of the two empires was meant. The blame for the misreading lay with Croesus alone.
Touché. There's nothing left to argue here. All you can do is zip it and meekly accept whatever that viper of a Pythia says. Why bother arguing, when in the end the woman is always high as a kite up to her eyebrows — and always right.
The moral of the richest king
The story of Croesus is, at heart, Herodotus's great lesson on the human condition: fortune is a wheel that turns and turns without cease, and no one — however powerful and rich — is safe from the fall. The richest man in the ancient world ended up lashed to a pyre, saved by the skin of his teeth, turned into adviser to his own conqueror. "Rich as Croesus," yes. But also "fallen like Croesus."
And the loveliest part is that this parable still holds today, exactly as it did 2,500 years ago. How many fabulously rich and powerful men have we watched come crashing down from the very top? The wheel hasn't stopped turning. And Solon — even if at times you wanted to throttle him — was dead right.
If you've enjoyed the fall of the richest king of antiquity, you'll find his full story — and that of his court, his wars, the rigged oracle and the rise of the great Cyrus of Persia — in my book The Book of the Muse Clio, first volume of the saga Herodotus: Histories Reloaded 2.0. There too you'll find Solon, Adrastus, Tomyris, Arion and the whole cast of this fascinating age.
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Sources and references
- Herodotus of Halicarnassus, Histories, Book I, chapters 26 to 92 (reign of Croesus, Solon's visit, the war against Cyrus, the fall of Sardis, the pyre, and the final consultation of Delphi).
- A. D. Godley (Loeb Classical Library), standard reference translation from the Greek.
There is NO fiction in this article
The account — Croesus's wealth, the visit of Solon the Athenian, the deceitful oracle of Delphi, Thales's diversion of the river Halys, Cyrus's camel trick, the fall of Sardis, Croesus's capture, the pyre, the invocation of Solon, the rain, and the oracle's final answer about the guilt of the ancestor Gyges — is all true and documented by Herodotus in Book I. The dialogue in this article, however, comes from the literary recreation of the author David S. Matrecano. The modern comparisons, the anachronisms, the odd word more at home in a tavern full of drunken sailors than in a university lecture hall, and the comments adorning this article are part of the author's personal literary voice and are clearly identifiable as such.
