Croesus
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Croesum Proper-name noun: masculine genitive plural, Proper-name noun: masculine accusative singular of Croesus
- a king of Lydia, celebrated for his riches, Cic. Div. 1, 19, 37; id. Fin. 2, 27, 87; Hor. Ep. 1, 11, 2; Just. 1, 7, 2 sqq.; Prop. 2 (3), 26, 23 al.— Appel. for a rich man, in contrast with Irus, Ov. Tr. 3, 7, 42; and in plur., Mart. 11, 6, 4.—Hence,
- II Croesĭus, a, um, adj., of Croesus: opes, Mart. Cap. 6, § 578.
(Κροῖσος), the last king of Lydia, of the family of the Mermnadae, was the soi of Alvattes; his mother was a Carian. At the age of thirty-five, he succeeded his father in the kingdom of Lydia. (B. C. 560.) Difficulties have been raised about this date, and there are very strong reasons for believing that Croesus was associated in the kingdom during his father's life, and that the earlier events of his reign, as recorded by Herodotus, belong to this period of joint government. (Clinton F. H. ii. pp. 297, 298.) We are expressly told that he was made satrap of Adramyttium and the plain of Thebe about B. C. 574 or 572. (Nicol. Damasc. p. 243, ed. Cor., supposed to be taken from the Lydian history of Xanthus; Fischer, Griechische Zeittafeln, s. a. 572 B. C.) He made war first on the Ephesians, and afterwards on the other Ionian and Aeolian cities of Asia Minor, all of which he reduced to the payment of tribute. He was meditating an attempt to subdue the insular Greeks also, when either Bias or Pittacus turned him from his purpose by a clever fable (Hdt. 1.27); and instead of attacking the islanders he made an alliance with them. Croesus next turned his arms against the peoples of Asia Minor west of the river Halys, all of whom he subdued except the Lycians and Cilicians. His dominions now extended from the northern and western coasts of Asia Minor, to the Halys on the east and the Taurus on the south, and included the Lydians, Phrygians, Mysians, Mariandynians, Chalybes, Paphlagonians, the Thynian and Bithynian Thracians, the Carians, Ionians, Dorians, Aeolians, and Pamphylians. The fame of his power and wealth drew to his court at Sardis all the wise men (σοφισταί) of Greece, and among them Solon. To him the king exhibited all his treasures, and then asked him who was the happiest man he had ever seen. The reply of Solon, teaching that no man should be deemed happy till he had finished his life in a happy way, may be read in the beautiful narrative of Herodotus. After the departure of Solon, Croesus was visited with a divine retribution for his pride. He had two sons, of whom one was dumb, but the other excelled all his comrades in manly accomplishments. His name was Atys. Croesus had a dream that Atys should perish by an iron-pointed weapon, and in spite of all his precautions, an accident fulfilled the dream. His other son lived to save his father's life by suddenly regaining the power of speech when he saw Croesus in danger at the taking of Sardis. Adrastus, the unfortunate slayer of Atys, killed himself on his tomb, and Croesus gave himself up to grief for two years. At the end of that time the growing power of Cyrus, who had recently subdued the Median kingdom, excited the apprehension of Croesus, and he conceived the idea of putting down the Persians before their empire became firm. Before, however, venturing to attack Cyrus, he looked to the Greeks for aid, and to their oracles for counsel; and in both points he was deceived. In addition to the oracles among the Greeks, he consulted that of Ammon in Lybia; but first he put their truth to the test by sending messengers to inquire of them at a certain time what he was then doing. The replies of the oracle of Amphiaraüs and that of the Delphi at Pytho were correct; that of the latter is preserved by Herodotus. To these oracles, and especially to that at Pytho, Croesus sent rich presents. and charged the bearers of them to inquire whether he should march against the Persians, and whether there was any people whom he ought to make his allies. The reply of both oracles was, that, if he marched against the Persians, he would overthrow a great empire, and both advised him to make allies of the most powerful among the Greeks. He of course understood the response to refer to the Persian empire, and not, as the priests explained it after the event, to his own; and he sent presents to each of the Delphians, who in return granted to him and his people the privileges of priority in consulting the oracle, exemption from charges, and the chief seat at festivals (προμαντηΐην καὶ ἀτελείην καί προεδρίην), and that any one of them might at any time obtain certain rights of citizenship (γενέσθαι Δελφόν). Croesus, having now the most unbounded confidence in the oracle, consulted it for the third time, asking whether his monarchy would last long. The Pythia replied that he should flee along the Hermus, when a mule became king over the Medes. By this mule was signified Cyrus, who was descended of two different nations, his father being a Persian, but his mother a Mede. Croesus, however, thought that a mule would never be king over the Medes, and proceeded confidently to follow the advice of the oracle about making allies of the Greeks. Upon inquiry, he found that the Lacedaemonians and Athenians were the most powerful of the Greeks; but that the Athenians were distracted by the civil dissensions between Peisistratus and the Alcmaeonidae, while the Lacedaemonians had just come off victorious from a long and dangerous war with the people of Tegea. Croesus therefore sent presents to the Lacedaemonians, with a request for their alliance, and his request was granted by the Lacedaemonians, on whom he had previously conferred a favour. All that they did for him, however, was to send a present, which never reached him. Croesus, having now fully determined on the war, in spite of the good advice of a Lydian named Sandanis (Hdt. 1.71), and having some time before made a league with Amasis, king of Egypt, and Labynetus, king of the Babylonians, marched across the Halys, which was the boundary betweeen the Medo-Persian empire and his own. The pretext for his aggression was to avenge the wrongs of his brother-in-law Astyages, whom Cyrus had deposed from the throne of Media. He wasted the country of the Cappadocians (whom the Greeks called also Syrians) and took their strongest town, that of the Pterii, near Sinope, in the neighbourhood of which he was met by Cyrus, and they fought an indecisive battle, which was broken off by night. (B. C. 546.) The following day, as Cyrus did not offer battle, and as his own army was much inferior to the Persian in numbers, Croesus marched back to Sardis, with the intention of summoning his allies and recruiting his own forces, and then renewing the war on the return of spring. Accordingly, he sent heralds to the Aegyptians, Babylonians, and Lacedaemonians, requesting their aid at Sardis in five months, and in the meantime he disbanded all his mercenary troops. Cyrus, however, pursued him with a rapidity which he had not expected, and appeared before Sardis before his approach could be announced. Croesus led out his Lydian cavalry to battle, and was totally defeated. In this battle Cyrus is said to have employed the stratagem of opposing his camels to the enemy's horses, which could not endure the noise or odour of the camels. Croesus, being now shut up in Sardis, sent again to hasten his allies. One of his emissaries, named Eurybatus, betrayed his counsels to Cyrus [Eurybatus], and before any help could arrive, Sardis was taken by the boldness of a Mardian, who found an unprotected point in its defences, after Croesus had reigned 14 years, and had been besieged 14 days. (Near the end of 546, B. C.) Croesus was taken alive, and devoted to the flames by Cyrus, together with 14 Lydian youths, probably as a thanksgiving sacrifice to the god whom the Persians worship in the symbol of fire. But as Croesus stood in fetters upon the pyre, the warning of Solon came to his mind. and having broken a long silence with a groan, he thrice uttered the name of Solon. Cyrus inquired who it was that he called on, and, upon hearing the story, repented of his purpose, and ordered the fire to be quenched. When this could not be done, Croesus prayed aloud with tears to Apollo, by all the presents he had given him, to save him now, and immediately the fire was quenched by a storm of rain. Believing that Croesus was under a special divine protection, and no doubt also struck by the warning of Solon, Cyrus took Croesus for his friend and counsellor, and gave him for an abode the city of Barene, near Ecbatana. In his expedition against the Massagetae, Cyrus had Croesus with him, and followed his advice about the passage of the Araxes. Before passing the river, however, he sent him back to Persia, with his own son Cambyses, whom he charged to honour Croesus, and Croesus to advise his son. When Cambyses came to the throne, and invaded Egypt, Croesus accompanied him. In the affair of Prexaspes and his son, Croesus at first acted the part of a flattering courtier, though not, as it seems, without a touch of irony (Hdt. 3.34); but, after Cambyses had murdered the youth, Croesus boldly admonished him, and was obliged to fly for his life from the presence of the king. The servants of Cambyses concealed him, thinking that their master would repent of having wished to kill him. And so it happened; but when Cambyses heard that Croesus was alive, he said that he was glad, but he ordered those who had saved him to be put to death for their disobedience. Of the time and circumstances of Croesus's death we know nothing. A few additional, but unimportant incidents in his life, are mentioned by Herodotus. Ctesias's account of the taking of Sardis is somewhat different from that of Herodotus. (Hdt. 1.6, 7, 26-94, 130, 155, 207, 208, 3.14, 34_36, 5.36, 6.37, 125, 8.35; Ctesias, Persica, 4, ed. Lion, ap. Phot. Bibl. 72, p. 36, Bekker; Ptol. Hephaest. ap. Phot. Bibl. 190, p. 146b. 21, 148, b. 31; Plut. Sol. 27; Diod. 9.2, 25_27, 29, 31_34, 16.56; Justin 1.7.) Xenophon, in his historical romance, gives some further particulars about Croesus which are unsupported by any other testimony and opposed to that of Herodotus, with whom, however, he for the most part agrees. (Cyrop 1.5, 2.1, 4.1, 2, 6.2, 7.1-4, 8.2.) [P.S]
(Κροῖσος). The son of Alyattes, king of Lydia, and born about B.C. 590. He was the fifth and last of the Mermnadae, a family which began to reign with Gyges, who dethroned Candaules (q.v.). According to the account of Herodotus, Croesus was the son of Alyattes by a Carian mother, and had a half-brother, named Pantaleon, the offspring of an Ionian woman. An attempt was made by a private foe of Croesus to hinder his accession to the throne and to place the kingdom in the hands of Pantaleon; but the plot failed (Herod.i. 92), although Stobaeus informs us that Croesus, on coming to the throne, divided the kingdom with his brother. Plutarch states that the second wife of Alyattes, wishing to remove Croesus, gave one of the cooks in the royal household a dose of poison to put into the bread she made for Croesus. The woman informed Croesus, and gave the poisoned bread to the queen's children; and the prince, out of gratitude, consecrated at Delphi a golden image of this cook three cubits high. Croesus ascended the throne on the death of his father, B.C. 560, and immediately undertook the subjugation of the Greek communities of Asia Minor (the Aeolians, Ionians, and Dorians), whose disunited state and almost continual wars with one another rendered his task an easy one. He contented himself, however, after reducing them beneath his sway, with merely imposing an annual tribute, and left their forms of government unaltered. When this conquest was effected, he turned his thoughts to the construction of a fleet, intending to attack the islands, but was dissuaded from his purpose by Bias of Priené (Herod.i. 27). Turning his arms, upon this, against the nations of Asia Minor, he subjected all the country lying west of the river Halys, except Cilicia and Lycia; and then applied himself to the arts of peace, and to the patronage of the sciences and of literature. He became famed for his riches and munificence. Poets and philosophers were invited to his court, and, among others, Solon, the Athenian, is said to have visited his capital, Sardis. Herodotus relates the conversation which took place between the latter and Croesus on the subject of human felicity, in which the Athenian offended the Lydian monarch by the little value which he attached to riches as a means of happiness (Herod.i. 30), and by his saying that no man should be called happy until his death.
Not long after this, Croesus had the misfortune to lose his son Atys, who was accidentally killed by Adrastus (q.v.), leaving him with only a dumb child as his heir; but the deep affliction into which this loss plunged him was dispelled in some degree, after two years of mourning, by a feeling of disquiet relative to the movements of Cyrus and the increasing power of the Persians. Wishing to form an alliance with the Greeks of Europe against the danger which threatened him, a step which had been recommended by the oracle at Delphi (Herod.i. 53), he addressed himself, for this purpose, to the Lacedaemonians, at that time the most powerful of the Grecian communities; and having succeeded in his object, and made magnificent presents to the Delphic shrine, he resolved on open hostilities with the Persians. The art of the crafty priesthood who managed the machinery of the oracle at Delphi is nowhere more clearly shown than in the history of their royal dupe, the monarch of Lydia. He had lavished upon their temple the most splendid gifts—so splendid, in fact, that we should be tempted to suspect Herodotus of exaggeration if his account were not confirmed by other writers—and the recipients of this bounty, in their turn, put him off with an answer of the most studied ambiguity when he consulted their far-famed oracle on the subject of a war with the Persians. The response of Apollo was, that if Croesus made war upon this people “he would destroy a great Empire”; and the answer of Amphiaraüs (for his oracle, too, was consulted by the Lydian king) tended to the same effect (Herod.i. 53). The verse itself, containing the response of the oracle, is given by Diodorus (Excerpt. vii. 28), and is as follows: Κροῖσος, Ἅλυν διαβὰς, μεγάλην ἀρχὴν καταλύσει, “Croesus, on having crossed the Halys, will destroy a great empire”—the river Halys being, as already remarked, the boundary of his dominions to the east. Croesus thought that the empire thus referred to was that of Cyrus; the issue, however, proved it to be his own.
Having assembled a numerous army, the Lydian monarch crossed the Halys, invaded the territory of Cyrus, and a battle took place in the district of Pteria, but without any decisive result. Croesus, upon this, thinking his forces not sufficiently numerous, marched back to Sardis, disbanded his army, consisting entirely of mercenaries, and sent for succour to Amasis of Egypt and also to the Lacedaemonians, determining to attack the Persians again in the beginning of the next spring. But Cyrus did not allow him time to effect this. Having discovered that it was the intention of the Lydian king to break up his present army, he marched with all speed into Lydia, before a new mercenary force could be assembled, defeated Croesus (who had no force at his command but his Lydian cavalry) in the battle of Thymbra, shut him up in Sardis, and took the city itself after a siege of fourteen days and in the fourteenth year of the reign of the son of Alyattes.
With Croesus fell the Empire of the Lydians. Herodotus relates two stories connected with this event—one having reference to the dumb son of Croesus, who spoke for the first time when he saw a soldier in the act of killing his father, and, by the exclamation which he uttered, saved his parent's life, the soldier being ignorant of his rank; and the other being as follows: Croesus having been made prisoner, a pile was erected, on which he was placed in order to be burned alive. After keeping silence for a long time, the royal captive heaved a deep sigh, and with a groan thrice pronounced the name of Solon. Cyrus sent to know the reason of this exclamation, and Croesus, after considerable delay, acquainted him with the conversation between himself and Solon. The Persian king, relenting upon this, gave orders for Croesus to be released. But the flames had already begun to ascend on every side of the pile, and all human aid proved ineffectual. In this emergency Croesus prayed earnestly to Apollo, the god on whom he had lavished so many splendid offerings. That deity heard his prayer, and a sudden and heavy fall of rain extinguished the flames (Herod.i. 86 foll.). Croesus, after this, is said to have stood high in the favour of Cyrus, who profited by his advice on several important occasions; and Ctesias declares that the Persian monarch assigned him for his residence a city near Ecbatana, and that in his last moments he recommended Croesus to the care of his son and successor Cambyses; and entreated the Lydian, on the other hand, to be an adviser to his son. Croesus discharged this duty with so much fidelity as to give offence to the new monarch, who ordered him to be put to death. Happily for him, those who were charged with this order hesitated to carry it into execution; and Cambyses, soon after, having regretted his precipitation, Croesus was again brought into his presence and restored to his former favour. The rest of his history is unknown. As he was advanced in years, he could not have long survived Cambyses (Herod.iii. 36 foll.). The wealth of Croesus has passed into a proverb in all languages. See Lydia.
- Paus. 3.10.8, Paus. 8.24.13
- his history told by Herodotus: Paus. 3.2.3
- king of Lydia, son of Alyattes, extent of his rule: Hdt. 1.6, Hdt. 1.26-28
- enslaves Greeks of Asia: Paus. 4.5.3
- family of, descended from Agelaus, son of Herakles: Apollod. 2.7.8
- Solons' visit to him: Hdt. 1.28-33
- story of his son Atys: Hdt. 1.34-45
- gifts to Delphi and preparations for war with Persia: Hdt. 1.46-56, Hdt. 8.35
- sends offering of gold to Pythaean Apollo: Paus. 3.10.8
- dedicates golden shield to Forethought Athena at Delphi: Paus. 10.8.7
- negotiations with Athens and Sparta: Hdt. 1.65, Hdt. 1.69
- makes friends with Lacedaemonians: Paus. 4.5.3
- story of the campaign, and Cyrus' capture of Sardis: Hdt. 1.76-84
- Croesus' escape from death, and his treatment by Cyrus: Hdt. 1.85-92
- advice to Cyrus as to government of Lydia: Hdt. 1.155, Hdt. 1.156
- as to the Massagetae: Hdt. 1.207
- Croesus at Cambyses' court: Hdt. 3.14, Hdt. 3.36
- friendship with the elder Miltiades: Hdt. 6.37
- gift of gold to Alcmeon: Hdt. 6.125