Sardis, the New York of the year 550 BC
Pay attention, dear readers, because today we are talking about a fellow whose name has reached us 2,500 years after his death, turned into an expression that many of us still use: «to be richer than Croesus». And I assure you that title, the man had earned it the hard way. Croesus, king of Lydia, a region in what is now western Turkey, with its capital in the opulent city of Sardis, was during the 6th century before Christ the richest, most powerful and most envied monarch of the known world. A sort of ancient multi-billionaire, very capricious, capable of spending a fortune to celebrate his birthday, or twenty or thirty million to remodel his humble abode (an immense palace where you needed a GPS to find your way around) once a year. The fellow had gold even in his eyebrows, literally! It turns out that the sands of the river Pactolus, which crossed his kingdom, dragged along a very consistent annual quantity of gold nuggets, and Croesus was, according to tradition, the first king in history to mint coins of gold and silver.
But this story, like nearly all the ones worth telling, is not about how fabulously rich he was nor how high he rose, but about how low he fell. Because Croesus is the protagonist of one of Herodotus's greatest moral parables: that of the man who had everything and believed himself untouchable, until the wheel of fortune turned and left him, in the space of fourteen days, defeated, humiliated and bound atop a bonfire, about to be burned alive. Let's get to it.
The warning of the wise Greek 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 drawn up the first great constitution of laws for Athens. Croesus, knowing the man's great importance, lodged him in grand style and, after parading him through his treasures to impress him, finally asked him the great question that was burning inside him: «Tell me, wise Solon, of all the men you have met on your travels, who is in your opinion the happiest?» He expected, naturally, that Solon would answer: «Why, you, Your Majesty, it is plain for all to see, of course.»
But Solon, who was not the sort to flatter the powerful, replied that the happiest man he had ever known was a humble and anonymous Athenian peasant, now deceased, named Tellus, a complete nobody whom hardly even his mother knew. Croesus, at being compared to a ragged peasant, almost had a stroke, and yet he tried twice more, asking the sage who in his opinion was the second and the third happiest (believing he might be one of them), and the tiresome, pain-in-the-neck Greek replied that no, in his view second and third place went without doubt to the Greek brothers, also deceased, Cleobis and Biton, and that, if it came to it, fourth place went to a Greek swineherd who was also dead…
But, «whatafff», Croesus thought to himself, «has this Greek pest come to Sardis to humiliate me, or what? On top of eating for three, he's already devoured half the palace pantry and drunk three quarters of the best wine in my cellars, damn it!»
The summary of that wretched conversation is that Solon told Croesus that, in his opinion, no man can be called happy until one has seen how his life ends, because fortune, as we all know, is a most capricious and fickle goddess who can snatch away in a single instant everything she has granted you.
Croesus, deeply offended, dismissed Solon as an ungrateful provocateur and went on with his life as a happy king. Grave mistake. Because, as we shall see, the words of that «cursed know-it-all Greek» would end up pursuing him all the way to the top of a pyre.
The most treacherous oracle in history
After some years had passed —and after burying his son and heir to the throne, Atys, perished in a tragedy that I also tell you about separately in my article on the jinx Adrastus—, Croesus set his eyes on a new danger growing in strength to the east of his kingdom: the Persian Empire of the young king Cyrus II, who had just defeated and overthrown in battle his own grandfather, King Astyages of Media. Croesus, seeing those Persians whom he considered uneducated savages growing stronger, decided to attack them before they became too powerful.
But before throwing himself into war, Croesus did what every prudent ruler of the age did: consult 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, drugged out of her mind by some sulphurous volcanic vapours rising from a hole in the ground in the audience chamber, gave him an answer that would go down in history as the perfect example of an oracular trap:
«If Croesus tomorrow 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 everything he wanted to read and believe: «that priestess (who was a stunner, by the way) has clearly told me that I will destroy the Persian empire; so I'm going to win for sure.» And he threw himself into war, euphoric. What did not cross his mind —because arrogance very 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 way, a delightful episode of ancient engineering occurred: on reaching 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 one who predicted a solar eclipse well in advance and knew how to measure, by means of shadows, the exact height of the pyramids of Giza— designed for Croesus a brilliant hydraulic work: he dug a semicircular canal behind the camp and diverted part of the river, splitting it into two much shallower and perfectly fordable streams. A veritable MacGyver of the 6th century BC.
The fatal mistake: dismissing the army
After a first rather strange, 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 that year and that the two opponents would resume the war the following spring, he returned to Sardis and discharged all his mercenary troops, eighty per cent of his army. He sent the soldiers home and so remained, calm and with his guard down.
Cyrus, on the other hand, was a great military genius, and when he learned from his spies that Croesus had, incredibly, already dismissed the bulk of his army, he could not believe his luck. He quickly gathered his generals and told them, more or less: «Gentlemen, this peacock, this preening clown dressed in gaudy feathers, has just sent his whole army home. We have before our very noses a unique and unrepeatable chance to seize his kingdom. Let us march on Sardis at full speed before this puppet disguised as a king can react.» And that is how the Persian army covered the 250 kilometres to Sardis in six or seven days by forced marches, presenting itself as a compact wall of men beneath the defenceless walls of the city, just when Croesus still thought he was on holiday.
Imagine Croesus's face when he leaned out from the walls and saw that great Persian army encamped beneath his windows. In my book I put in his mouth a lament that sums up the situation perfectly: «Damn Cyrus, the oracle of Delphi and all my dead. Just look how many hundreds of thousands of men I have under my window. I am lost and screwed —no, what am I saying, screwed is putting it mildly: I am beyond-all-measure screwed! But this is most strange… The bloody Oracle of Delphi, through the mouth of that drugged hussy, guaranteed me I would destroy a great empire… Damn it! Wait a moment! Could it be that the great empire I was going to destroy is MINE?» Touché, dear Croesus, you've guessed it, but too late. Far too late.
The battle of the camels
Croesus, desperate, gathered the few soldiers he had available in the city and, donning his own finest ceremonial armour embroidered in gold and silver, went 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 throughout Asia.
But Cyrus had an ace up his sleeve, a trick suggested to him by his adviser Harpagus (a fascinating character I'll tell you about in another article, because his story —in which he had to eat his own son because of a king's revenge— is among the most brutal in Herodotus). The trick was brilliant: Cyrus gathered all the pack camels of the army, removed their baggage and placed them in the front line, mounted by soldiers. Why? Because apparently horses cannot bear the smell or the sight of camels: if it is the first time they see them, they take fright, rear up and flee. And so it was: as soon as the Lydian cavalry ran into the mass of camels, the horses went mad, threw their riders and scattered. Croesus's famous cavalry was rendered useless in minutes. And Sardis fell after only fourteen days of siege.
«Oh, Solon!»: the pyre and the miraculous rain
Croesus captured, Cyrus decided to give him an exemplary death: he had a great pyre raised in the central square of Sardis, ordered the Lydian king bound on top of it —together with fourteen young Lydian nobles— and prepared to burn them all 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 «cursed arrogant Greek» who years before had warned him that no man can be called happy until the end of his life is seen. And, looking up at the sky with a deep sigh, he cried out three times:
«Oh, Solon! Solon! Solon! How right you were, you cursed Greek pain-in-the-neck…»
Cyrus, intrigued, sent to ask who that «Solon» was whom he invoked at the moment of dying. And when the interpreters translated the story for him —the sage's warning about the fleeting nature of human fortune—, Cyrus grew pensive. 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 fire, fanned by a strong wind, was already blazing fiercely and there was no way to quench it. And then —according to tradition— the miracle occurred: from the clear sky a tremendous torrential rain suddenly broke loose, which put out the pyre and saved Croesus from the flames. The god Apollo, they said, had finally rewarded the tons of gold the Lydian had offered him at Delphi (for nothing).
Inherited guilt: the great-great-grandfather's sin
Saved from the bonfire, Croesus became a political adviser and great friend of Cyrus. But he was still very sore with the Oracle of Delphi, which he blamed for having deceived him. So, being unable to leave Sardis himself, since Cyrus had forbidden it, he sent his envoys to Delphi to complain, placing his chains at the temple doors and asking whether the Greek gods «were in the habit of being so ungrateful to those who venerated them with tons of gold».
The Pythia's answer this time was devastating and revealing. 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 brilliant— 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 it meant. The blame for the misinterpretation lay solely with Croesus.
Touché. There's nothing more to argue here. All one can do is shut one's mouth and meekly accept whatever that viper of a Pythia says. Anyway, why argue, if in the end the woman is always high as a kite and is always the one who's right.
The moral of the richest king
The story of Croesus is, at bottom, Herodotus's great lesson on the human condition: fortune is a wheel that turns and turns without stopping, and no one, however powerful and rich, is safe from falling. The richest man of the ancient world ended up bound to a pyre, saved by a whisker, turned into adviser to his own conqueror. «Rich as Croesus», yes. But also «fallen as Croesus».
And the most beautiful thing is that this parable is still valid today, exactly as it was 2,500 years ago. How many fabulously rich and powerful men have we seen come crashing down from the very top? The wheel has not stopped turning. And Solon, although at times you wanted to throttle him, was quite right.
If you have enjoyed the fall of the richest king of antiquity, you will find his complete story —and that of his court, his wars, the treacherous oracle and the rise of the great Cyrus of Persia— in my book «The Book of the Muse Clio», the first volume of the saga «Herodotus: Histories Reloaded 2.0». There too are Solon, Adrastus, Tomyris, Arion and the whole cast of this fascinating age.