Here are presented the results of the enquiry carried out by Herodotus of Halicarnassus. The purpose is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time, and to preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements produced by both Greeks and non-Greeks; among the matters covered is, in particular, the cause of the hostilities between Greeks and non-Greeks.
[1] According to learned Persians, it was the Phoenicians who caused the conflict. Originally, these people came to our sea from the Red Sea, as it is known. No sooner had they settled in the land they still inhabit than they turned to overseas travel. They used to take Egyptian and Assyrian goods to various places, including Argos, which was at that time the most important state, in all respects, in the country which is now called Greece. Once, then, the Phoenicians came to Argos and began to dispose of their cargo. Five or six days after they had arrived, when they had sold almost everything, a number of women came down to the shore, including the king’s daughter, whose name (as the Greeks agree too) was Io, the daughter of Inachus. These women were standing around the stern of the ship, buying any items which particularly caught their fancy, when the Phoenicians gave the word and suddenly charged at them. Most of the women got away, but Io and some others were captured. The Phoenicians took them on to their ship and sailed away for Egypt.
[2] According to the Persians, that is how Io came to Egypt (the Greek version is different), and that was the original crime. Later, some Greeks landed at Tyre in Phoenicia and abducted the king’s daughter, Europa. The Persian sources are not in a position to name these Greeks, but they were presumably Cretans. So far the scores were even, but then, according to the Persians, the Greeks were responsible for a second crime. They sailed in a longship to Aea in Colchis, to the Phasis River, and once they had completed the business that had brought them there, they abducted the king’s daughter Medea. The king of Colchis sent a herald to Greece to ask for compensation for the abduction and to demand his daughter back, but the Greeks replied, ‘You have never compensated us for your abduction of the Argive princess Io, so we will not make amends to you either.’
[3] A generation later, the Persians say, Alexander the son of Priam heard about this and decided to steal himself a wife from Greece. He was absolutely certain that he would get away with it, without incurring any penalty, since the earlier thefts had gone unpunished—and that is how he came to abduct Helen. The Greeks’ initial reaction, it is said, was to send men to demand Helen’s return and to ask for compensation for her abduction. Faced with these demands, however, the others brought up the abduction of Medea and said, ‘Do you really expect compensation from others, when you paid none and did not return Medea when you were asked to?’
[4] Now, so far it had only been a matter of abducting women from one another, but the Greeks were basically responsible for the next step, the Persians say, since they took the initiative and launched a military strike against Asia before the Asians did against Europe. Although the Persians regard the abduction of women as a criminal act, they also claim that it is stupid to get worked up about it and to seek revenge for the women once they have been abducted; the sensible course, they say, is to pay no attention to it, because it is obvious that the women must have been willing participants in their own abduction, or else it could never have happened. The Persians claim that whereas they, on the Asian side, did not count the abduction of their women as at all important, the Greeks raised a mighty army because of a woman from Lacedaemon, and then invaded Asia and destroyed Priam and his forces. Ever since then, the Persians have regarded the Greeks as their enemies. They think of Asia and the non-Greek peoples living there as their own, but regard Europe and the Greeks as separate from themselves.
[5] That is the Persian account; they date the origin of their hostility towards Greece from the fall of Ilium. However, where the Io incident is concerned, the Phoenicians do not agree with the Persians. The Phoenicians say that they did not have to resort to kidnapping to take her to Egypt. According to them, she slept with the ship’s captain in Argos, and when she discovered that she was pregnant, she could not face her parents, and therefore sailed away willingly with the Phoenicians, to avoid being found out.
So this is what the Persians and Phoenicians say. I am not going to come down in favour of this or that account of events, but I will talk about the man who, to my certain knowledge, first undertook criminal acts of aggression against the Greeks. I will show who it was who did this, and then proceed with the rest of the account. I will cover minor and major human settlements equally, because most of those which were important in the past have diminished in significance by now, and those which were great in my own time were small in times past. I will mention both equally because I know that human happiness never remains long in the same place.
[6] Croesus was Lydian by birth. He was the son of Alyattes and ruled over all the various peoples who live west of the River Halys, which flows from the south (between where the Syrians and the Paphlagonians live) and in the north issues into the sea which is known as the Euxine Sea. Croesus was the first non-Greek we know of to have subjected Greeks to the payment of tribute, though he made alliances with some of them. The ones he made his tributaries were the Ionians, Aeolians, and Asian Dorians, while he allied himself with the Lacedaemonians. Before Croesus’ reign, all Greeks were free; the Cimmerian expedition which reached Ionia before Croesus’ time was a raiding party, intent on pillage, and not a conquest of the communities there.
[7] Here is how the kingdom passed from the Heraclidae, who had been the Lydian royal family, to Croesus’ family, who were called the Mermnadae. There was a man, Candaules by name (although the Greeks call him Myrsilus), who was the ruler of Sardis and a descendant of Alcaeus the son of Heracles; the Heraclid dynasty in Sardis started with Agron (who was the son of Ninus, grandson of Belus and great-grandson of Alcaeus) and ended with Candaules (who was the son of Myrsus). Before Agron, this region had been ruled by descendants of Lydus the son of Atys—the one who is the reason for the whole population being called ‘Lydian’, when they had previously been known as Maeans. The Heraclidae, whose ancestors were Heracles and a slave girl belonging to lardanus, gained the kingdom of Lydia, which they had been entrusted by Lydus’ descendants, thanks to an oracle. The kingship passed down from Heraclid father to son for twenty-two generations, or 505 years, until the time of Candaules the son of Myrsus.
[8] Now, this Candaules became enamoured of his own wife and therefore thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. One of the members of his personal guard, Gyges the son of Dascylus, was an especial favourite of his, and Candaules used to discuss his most important concerns with him; in particular, he used to keep praising his wife’s appearance, because he thought she was so beautiful. Candaules was destined to come to a bad end, and so after a while he said to Gyges, ‘Gyges, I don’t think you believe what I tell you about my wife’s looks—and it’s true that people trust their ears less than their eyes—so I want you to find a way to see her naked.’
Gyges cried out and said, ‘Master, what a perverse thing to say! How can you tell me to look at my mistress naked? As soon as a woman sheds her clothes, she sheds her modesty as well. There are long-established truths for us to learn from, and one of them is that everyone should look to his own. I believe you: she is the most beautiful woman in the world. Please don’t ask me to do anything wrong.’
[9] He was afraid of disastrous consequences, but Candaules replied to these protestations of his by saying, ‘Don’t worry, Gyges. You needn’t be afraid that this suggestion of mine is designed to test you, and you needn’t be afraid of my wife either, because no harm will come to you through her. I’ll contrive the whole business from start to finish in such a way that she won’t even know she’s been seen by you. I’ll get you to stand behind the open door of our bedroom, and I’ll be there already, before my wife comes to bed. There’s a chair near the entrance to the room on which she’ll lay her clothes one by one as she undresses, so that will make it very easy for you to watch her. When she leaves the chair and goes over to the bed, you’ll be behind her back, and then you just have to make sure that you get out through the doorway without her spotting you.’
[10] Because he could not get out of it, Gyges agreed. When Candaules thought it was time for bed, he took Gyges to the bedroom, and very shortly afterwards his wife arrived too. Gyges watched her come into the room and put her clothes on the chair. When he was behind her back, as she was going over to the bed, he set about slipping out of the room—but the woman spotted him on his way out. She realized what her husband had done; despite the fact that she had been humiliated, she did not cry out and she did not let him see that she knew, because she intended to make him pay. The point is that, in Lydia—in fact, more or less throughout the non-Greek world—it is a source of great shame even for a man to be seen naked.
[11] Anyway, she kept quiet at the time and gave nothing away. As early as possible the next morning, however, she had those of her house-slaves who she could see were the most loyal to her stand by, and then she summoned Gyges. He had no idea that she knew anything about what had happened and so he responded to her summons by going to her, just as he had always gone in the past, whenever the queen summoned him. When he arrived she said to him: ‘Gyges, there are now two paths before you: I leave it up to you which one you choose to take. Either you can kill Candaules and have me and the kingdom of Lydia for your own, or you must die yourself right now, so that you will never again do exactly what Candaules wants you to do and see what you should not see. Yes, either he or you must die—either the one whose idea this was or the one who saw me naked when he had no right to do so.’
At first, Gyges was too astonished to reply, but then he begged her not to force him to make such a choice. She could not be moved, however. He saw that he really was faced with choosing between killing his master or being killed himself by others—and he chose to survive. So he had a question for her. ‘It’s not as if I want to kill my own master,’ he said, ‘but since you’re forcing me to do so, please tell me how we’re going to attack him.’
‘The place from where he showed me to you naked’, she replied, ‘will be the place from which to launch the attack against him. The attack will happen when he’s asleep.’
[12] So they made their plans. There was no way out for Gyges, no escape: either he or Candaules had to die. When night came, he followed the woman to the bedroom, where she gave him a dagger and hid him behind the same door. And after this, while Candaules was sleeping, he slipped out and, by killing him, gained both Candaules’ wife and his kingdom. Archilochus of Paros (who lived at the same time) commemorated Gyges in a poem of iambic trimeters.†
[13] So he gained control of the kingdom—and he retained power thanks to the Delphic oracle. What happened was that the Lydians armed themselves in anger at what had happened to Candaules, but Gyges’ supporters made a deal with the rest of the Lydians; the agreement was that if the oracle pronounced Gyges king of Lydia, he would rule, but if not, power would be restored to the Heraclidae. In fact, the oracular pronouncement was favourable and so Gyges became king of Lydia. However, the Pythia qualified her declaration by saying that for the Heraclidae vengeance would come on the fourth in descent from Gyges. But neither the Lydians nor their kings took any notice of this prediction until it was fulfilled.
[14] That is how the Mermnadae deprived the Heraclidae of the rulership of Lydia and gained it for themselves. Once Gyges was king, he sent a fair number of votive offerings to Delphi. In fact, no one has dedicated more silver offerings at Delphi than him, and apart from the silver, he dedicated a huge amount of gold there. The six golden bowls dedicated by him are particularly worth mentioning. They weigh thirty talents and stand in the Corinthian treasury—although strictly speaking it is not the treasury of the Corinthian people as a whole, but of Cypselus the son of Eëtion. As far as we know, Gyges was the first non-Greek to dedicate offerings at Delphi since the Phrygian king Midas the son of Gordias had done so. For Midas made an offering too, of the throne on which he had used to sit to deliver verdicts on legal matters, and it is worth seeing. It can be found in the same place as Gyges’ bowls. The Delphians call the gold and silver which Gyges dedicated ‘Gygian’, after its dedicator.
It is true that, during his reign, Gyges too attacked Miletus and Smyrna, and took the city of Colophon, but he achieved nothing else of significance during the thirty-eight years of his kingship, so I will say no more about him, beyond what I have already said.
[15] I move on now to Ardys, who was Gyges’ son and succeeded him to the kingdom. Ardys captured Priene and attacked Miletus, and it was during his rule in Sardis that the Cimmerians (who had been driven out of their homeland by the nomadic Scythians) reached Asia and captured all of Sardis except the acropolis.
[16] Ardys’ reign lasted forty-nine years, and then his son Sadyattes succeeded him and reigned for twelve years. Sadyattes was succeeded by Alyattes, who fought a war against the Medes under Cyaxares, the descendant of Deioces. He also drove the Cimmerians out of Asia, took Smyrna (the colony of Colophon), and attacked Clazomenae, although matters did not turn out there as he wished; in fact, he suffered a major defeat. Otherwise, the most notable achievements of his reign are as follows.
[17] He inherited from his father a war between Lydia and Miletus. This is how he used to conduct the invasion of Milesian territory and the siege of the city. He would invade at the time when the crops were ripe, with his troops marching to the sound of windpipes, harps, and treble and bass reed-pipes. When they reached Milesian land, they left all the houses in the countryside standing, throughout the territory, without razing them or burning them or breaking into them; instead, they would destroy the fruit-trees and the crops, and then return home. The point is that the Milesians controlled the sea, and so the Lydian army could achieve nothing by a siege. The reason the Lydian king did not raze their houses was to ensure that the Milesians would have a base from which they could set out to sow seed and work the land, so that he—as a result of their work—would have some way to hurt them during his invasions.
[18] This is the way the Lydian king conducted the war for eleven years. During this time the Milesians suffered two major defeats, once in a battle in their own territory, at Limeneium, and the other time on the plain of the Meander River. For six of the eleven years Sadyattes the son of Ardys was still the Lydian ruler and it was he who invaded Milesian territory each year; in fact, he had been the one who had started the war with Miletus, but for the next five years, it was Alyattes the son of Sadyattes who carried on the war. As I have already explained, he inherited the war from his father, and he put a lot of energy into it. Out of all the Ionian Greeks, none except the Chians helped the Milesians with the burdens of this war. In doing so, they were repaying them for similar aid, because some time earlier the Milesians had supported the Chians in their war against the Erythraeans.
[19] Here is an account of an event which happened to take place in the twelfth year of the war, while the crops were being burnt by the army. As soon as the crops were alight, the wind drove the flames on to a temple of Athena (called the temple of Athena of Assesus), which caught fire and burnt to the ground. At first, no account was taken of it, but later, when the army was back in Sardis, Alyattes became ill. The illness went on for rather a long time, and so—perhaps because he had been recommended to do so, or perhaps because he himself thought it was a good idea—he sent emissaries to Delphi, to consult the god about his illness. When the men reached Delphi, however, the Pythia refused to let them consult her until they had rebuilt the temple of Athena which they had burnt down at Assesus in Miletus.
[20] I know that this is what happened, because I heard it from the Delphians; but the Milesians add certain details. They say that Periander the son of Cypselus, who was a very close guest-friend of Thrasybulus (the tyrant of Miletus at the time), heard about the response the oracle had given Alyattes and sent a messenger to tell Thrasybulus about it, to enable him to plan for forthcoming events with foreknowledge.
[21] That, then, is the Milesian account. As soon as Alyattes received the report from his emissaries, he sent a herald to Miletus because he wanted to arrange a truce with Thrasybulus and the Milesians for however long it would take to build the temple. So the man set off for Miletus. Meanwhile, armed with reliable advance information about the whole business and with foreknowledge of what Alyattes was going to do, Thrasybulus devised the following plan. He had all the food there was in the city, whether it was his own or belonged to ordinary citizens, brought into the city square; then he told the Milesians to wait for his signal, which would let them know when to start drinking and making merry with one another.
[22] Thrasybulus did this and gave these instructions in order to ensure that the herald from Sardis would report back to Alyattes about the huge stockpile of food he had seen and about how people were living a life of luxury. And this is in fact exactly what happened. When the herald had seen all this (and once he had given Thrasybulus the message the Lydian king had told him to deliver), he returned to Sardis; and, as I heard it, the end of the war occurred for this reason and no other. The point is that Alyattes expected there to be a severe shortage of food in Miletus, and he thought that the people would have been ground down to a life of utter hardship—and then the report the herald gave on his return from Miletus contradicted these expectations of his! After that, they entered into a peace treaty with each other, according to which they were to be friends and allies; also, Alyattes built not one but two temples to Athena in Assesus, and recovered from his illness. This is what happened during the war Alyattes fought with the Milesians and Thrasybulus.
[23] This man Periander, the one who told Thrasybulus about the oracle’s response, was the son of Cypselus and the tyrant of Corinth. Now, the Corinthians say (and the Lesbians agree) that a really remarkable thing happened during his lifetime—that Arion of Methymna was carried to Taenarum on a dolphin. Arion was the leading cithara-player of his day, and was the first person we know of who not only composed a dithyramb and named it as such, but also produced one, in Corinth.
[24] They say that Arion, who was based for most of the time at Periander’s court, wanted to visit Italy and Sicily and, while he was there, he earned a great deal of money and then decided to sail back to Corinth. He set out from Tarentum, and since he trusted no one more than Corinthians, he hired a crew of Corinthian sailors. But they hatched a plan to throw him overboard when they were out in the open sea and take his money for themselves. When he found out what they were up to, he bargained with them by offering them his money but begging them to spare his life. The sailors were unmoved by his pleas and they told him either to take his own life, if he wanted to be buried on land, or to stop wasting time and jump overboard into the sea. In this desperate situation, since that was their decision, Arion asked their permission to stand on the thwarts in his full ceremonial costume and sing; when he had finished singing, he said, he would do away with himself. They liked the idea of having the opportunity to hear the best singer in the world, so they pulled back from the stern into the middle of the ship. Arion put on his full ceremonial costume and took hold of his cithara. He stood on the thwarts and sang the high-pitched tune all the way through; and at the end of the song he threw himself into the sea as he was, in his full ceremonial costume. The sailors then continued their voyage to Corinth, but they say that a dolphin picked Arion up and carried him to Taenarum. When he disembarked from the dolphin he went to Corinth, still in his costume, and once he was there he gave a full report of what had happened. Periander did not believe him, and kept him confined and under guard, while keeping a sharp eye out for the sailors. When they arrived (the story continues), they were summoned to his presence and interrogated about what they could tell him of Arion; they told him that Arion was safe and sound somewhere in Italy and that they had left him doing well in Tarentum. At that point Arion appeared, just as he had been when he had jumped into the sea. The sailors were so astonished that, when examined further, they could no longer hide the truth. So that is the story the Corinthians and Lesbians tell, and there is in fact in Taenarum a small bronze statuette dedicated by Arion, of a man riding a dolphin.
[25] Some time after the end of the war he had waged against Miletus Alyattes of Lydia died, after a reign of fifty-seven years. On recovering from his illness, he had made a dedicatory offering at Delphi—he was the second of his line to do so—consisting of a large silver bowl and a stand of welded iron. Delphi is full of offerings, but this one is still worth seeing; it was made by Glaucus of Chios, who was the man who single-handedly invented iron-welding.
[26] After Alyattes’ death, his son Croesus succeeded to the kingdom; he was 35 years old at the time. The first Greeks he attacked were the Ephesians. It was during his siege that the Ephesians dedicated the city to Artemis by running a rope to the outside wall from the temple; the distance between the old town (which was the part under siege on that occasion) and the temple is seven stades. So the Ephesians were the first Greeks Croesus attacked, but afterwards he attacked all the Ionian and Aeolian cities one by one. He always gave différent reasons for doing so; against some he was able to come up with more serious charges by accusing them of more serious matters, but in other cases he even brought trivial charges.
[27] Once the Greeks in Asia had been subdued and made to pay tribute, his next project was to build ships and attack the Aegean islands. But just when the shipbuilding programme was poised to begin, Bias of Priene came to Sardis (at least, that is what some say, but others say it was Pittacus of Mytilene), and when Croesus asked what news there was of Greece, the reply caused him to cancel his shipbuilding programme. The reply was: ‘My lord, the islanders are jointly buying ten thousand horses, since they plan to make a strike against you at Sardis.’
Croesus, supposing he was telling the truth, said, ‘If only the gods would put it into the islanders’ minds to come against the sons of Lydia with horses!’
‘My lord,’ came the response, ‘your prayer shows that you’re eager to catch the islanders on horseback on the mainland, and there are sound reasons for you to hope that this is what happens. But as soon as the islanders heard that you were planning to build ships for your campaign against them, what else do you think their prayer was for except the chance to catch Lydians out at sea, so that they can repay you for your enslavement of the Greeks living on the mainland?’
Croesus was very pleased with the man’s point and, since he thought he spoke very shrewdly, he was persuaded by him to stop the shipbuilding programme. And that is how Croesus came to make a pact of friendship with the Ionian Greeks living on the islands.
[28] After a while, almost all the people living west of the Halys River had been subdued. Except for the Cilicians and the Lycians, Croesus had overpowered and made all the rest his subjects—the Lydians, Phrygians, Mysians, Mariandynians, Chalybes, Paphlagonians, the Thynian and Bithynian Thracians, the Carians, Ionians, Dorians, Aeolians, and Pamphylians.
[29] When these peoples had been subdued and while Croesus was increasing the Lydian empire, Sardis was at the height of its prosperity and was visited on occasion by every learned Greek who was alive at the time, including Solon of Athens. Solon had drawn up laws for the Athenians, at their request, and then spent ten years abroad. He claimed to be travelling to see the world, but it was really to avoid the possibility of having to repeal any of the laws he had made. The Athenians could not do it by themselves, since they were bound by solemn vows to try out for a period of ten years whatever laws Solon would set for them.
[30] So that—as well as seeing the world—is why Solon was abroad from Athens. In the course of his travels, he visited Amasis in Egypt and, in particular, Croesus in Sardis, where Croesus put him up as his guest in his palace. Two or three days after his arrival, Croesus had some attendants give Solon a thorough tour of his treasuries and show him how magnificent and valuable everything was. Once Solon had seen and examined everything, Croesus found an opportunity to put a question to him. ‘My dear guest from Athens,’ he said, ‘we have often heard about you in Sardis: you are famous for your learning and your travels. We hear that you love knowledge and have journeyed far and wide, to see the world. So I really want to ask you whether you have ever come across anyone who is happier than everyone else?’
In asking the question, he was expecting to be named as the happiest of all men, but Solon preferred truth to flattery and said, ‘Yes, my lord: Tellus of Athens.’
Croesus was surprised at the answer and asked urgently: ‘What makes you think that Tellus is the happiest man?’
‘In the first place,’ Solon replied, ‘while living in a prosperous state, Tellus had sons who were fine, upstanding men and he lived to see them all have children, all of whom survived. In the second place, his death came at a time when he had a good income, by our standards, and it was a glorious death. You see, in a battle at Eleusis between Athens and her neighbours he stepped into the breach and made the enemy turn tail and flee; he died, but his death was splendid, and the Athenians awarded him a public funeral on the spot where he fell, and greatly honoured him.’
[31] Croesus’ attention was engaged by Solon’s ideas about all the ways in which Tellus was well off, so he asked who was the second happiest person Solon knew; he had absolutely no doubt that he would carry off the second prize, at least. But Solon replied, ‘Cleobis and Biton, because these Argives made an adequate living and were also blessed with amazing physical strength. It’s not just that the pair of them were both prize-winning athletes; there’s also the following story about them. During a festival of Hera at Argos, their mother urgently needed to be taken to the sanctuary on her cart, but the oxen failed to turn up from the field in time. There was no time to waste, so the young men harnessed themselves to the yoke and pulled the cart with their mother riding on it. The distance to the temple was forty-five stades, and they took her all the way there. After this achievement of theirs, which was witnessed by the people assembled for the festival, they died in the best possible way; in fact, the god used them to show that it is better for a person to be dead than to be alive. What happened was that while the Argive men were standing around congratulating the young men on their strength, the women were telling their mother how lucky she was in her children. Their mother was overcome with joy at what her sons had done and the fame it would bring, and she went right up to the statue of the goddess, stood there and prayed that in return for the great honour her children Cleobis and Biton had done her, the goddess would give them whatever it is best for a human being to have. After she had finished her prayer, they participated in the rites and the feast, and then the young men lay down inside the actual temple for a rest. They never got to their feet again; they met their end there. The Argives had statues made of them and dedicated them at Delphi, on the grounds that they had been the best of men.’
[32] Croesus was angry with Solon for awarding the second prize for happiness to these young men, and he said, ‘My dear guest from Athens, do you hold our happiness in utter contempt? Is that why you are ranking us lower than even ordinary citizens?’
‘Croesus,’ Solon replied, ‘when you asked me about men and their affairs, you were putting your question to someone who is well aware of how utterly jealous the divine is, and how it is likely to confound us. Anyone who lives for a long time is bound to see and endure many things he would rather avoid. I place the limit of a man’s life at seventy years. Seventy years make 25,200 days, not counting the intercalary months; but if you increase the length of every other year by a month, so that the seasons happen when they should, there will be thirty-five such intercalary months in the seventy years, and these extra months will give us 1,050 days. So the sum total of all the days in seventy years is 26,250, but no two days bring events which are exactly the same. It follows, Croesus, that human life is entirely a matter of chance.
‘Now, I can see that you are extremely rich and that you rule over large numbers of people, but I won’t be in a position to say what you’re asking me to say about you until I find out that you died well. You see, someone with vast wealth is no better off than someone who lives from day to day, unless good fortune attends him and sees to it that, when he dies, he dies well and with all his advantages intact. After all, plenty of extremely wealthy people are unfortunate, while plenty of people with moderate means are lucky; and someone with great wealth but bad fortune is better off than a lucky man in only two ways, whereas there are many ways in which a lucky man is better off than someone who is rich and unlucky. An unlucky rich man is more capable of satisfying his desires and of riding out disaster when it strikes, but a lucky man is better off than him in the following respects. Even though he is not as capable of coping with disaster and his desires, his good luck protects him, and he also avoids disfigurement and disease, has no experience of catastrophe, and is blessed with fine children and good looks. If, in addition to all this, he dies a heroic death, then he is the one you are after—he is the one who deserves to be described as happy. But until he is dead, you had better refrain from calling him happy, and just call him fortunate.
‘Now, it is impossible for a mere mortal to have all these blessings at the same time, just as no country is entirely self-sufficient; any given country has some things, but lacks others, and the best country is the one which has the most. By the same token, no one person is self-sufficient: he has some things, but lacks others. The person who has and retains more of these advantages than others, and then dies well, my lord, is the one who, in my opinion, deserves the description in question. It is necessary to consider the end of anything, however, and to see how it will turn out, because the god often offers prosperity to men, but then destroys them utterly and completely.’
[33] These sentiments did not endear Solon to Croesus at all, and Croesus dismissed him as of no account. He was sure that anyone who ignored present benefits and told him to look to the end of everything was an ignoramus.
[34] After Solon’s departure, the weight of divine anger descended on Croesus, in all likelihood for thinking that he was the happiest man in the world. Soon afterwards, while he was asleep, he had a dream which accurately foretold the calamities that were going to happen to his son. Croesus had two sons, one of whom was handicapped by being deaf and dumb, while the other, whose name was Atys, was easily the most outstanding young man of his generation in all respects. The dream was about Atys, and its message was that he would die from a wound caused by an iron spearhead. When Croesus woke up, he reflected on the dream and it made him afraid. First, he found a wife for his son, and second, although Atys had regularly commanded the Lydian army, Croesus stopped sending him anywhere on that kind of business. He also had all javelins, spears, and similar weapons of war removed from the men’s quarters and piled up in the bedrooms, in case any of them fell from where it hung on to his son.
[35] While he was busy with his son’s wedding, a man arrived in Sardis who was oppressed by misfortune and had blood on his hands; he was a Phrygian by birth, from the royal family. He came to Croesus’ home and asked if he could obtain a purification in accordance with local custom, and Croesus purified him (the rite is nearly the same in Lydia as it is in Greece). Once he had done it in the customary fashion, Croesus asked the man who he was and where he was from. ‘What is your name, sir?’ he asked. ‘You have come here from Phrygia to seek refuge at my hearth, but whereabouts in Phrygia are you from? And what man or woman did you kill?’
‘My lord,’ he replied, ‘Gordias the son of Midas is my father, and my name is Adrastus. It was my own brother that I killed, by accident. I’m here because I’ve been expelled from my home by my father, and stripped of everything.’
Croesus’ response was as follows: ‘You are among friends now: your family and mine are friends. As long as you stay here in my house, you will have everything you want. Try to let the burden of your misfortune weigh you down as little as possible, because that will do you the most good.’
[36] So Adrastus lived in Croesus’ house. While he was there, a huge monster of a boar arrived on Mount Olympus in Mysia and kept coming down from his mountain base and ruining the Mysians’ fields. The Mysians often went out after him, but they failed to inflict the slightest injury on him, although he hurt them. In the end a Mysian delegation came to Croesus to tell him about it. ‘My lord,’ they said, ‘an enormous monster of a boar has appeared in our land and is wreaking havoc on our farmlands. All our attempts to get him have failed. So please could you send us your son with some of your élite young fighting men, and dogs too, so that we can drive the beast from our land.’
Faced with this request, Croesus remembered his dream and replied as follows: ‘No, I won’t let my son go to you, so you had better forget about him. He has only just got married, and he’s busy with that. But I will send you some of my élite troops, and you can have the whole pack of my hunting-dogs, and I will give them strict instructions to do their very best to help you drive the beast out of your land.’
[37] That was good enough for the Mysians, but then Croesus’ son, who had heard the Mysians’ request, came in to see his father. When Croesus insisted that he was certainly not going to send his son to help them, the young man said, ‘Father, in times past I used to perform the most admirable and noble deeds; I used to go to war or go out hunting, and win distinction there. But these days you’ve been keeping me from both these activities, even though you have no evidence of any cowardice or faint-heartedness on my part. What impression do you think I must give as I come and go in the city square? What kind of a man will my fellow citizens take me to be? What will my new bride think of me? What kind of a husband will she think she is living with? Please, either let me go on the hunt or persuade me that this course of action is better for me.’
[38] ‘Son,’ Croesus answered, ‘I’m certainly not doing this because I’ve noticed a cowardly streak in you, or any other defect for that matter. But an apparition came to me in a dream while I was asleep and told me that you didn’t have long to live, and that an iron spearhead was going to cause your death. It was because of this apparition that I was anxious for your wedding to take place, and that is also why I am refusing to send you on this mission. I’m taking these precautions in case there’s a way for me to hide you away while I am alive. You are in fact my one and only son; the other one, with his ruined hearing, I count as no son of mine.’†
[39] ‘What a dream!’ the young man said. ‘I don’t blame you for trying to protect me. But there’s something you don’t understand about the dream, something you haven’t noticed, and it’s only fair to let me explain it to you. You say that the dream told you that an iron spearhead was going to cause my death. But does a boar have hands? Where is its iron spearhead for you to worry about? If the apparition had told you that a tusk or something like that was going to cause my death, then of course you should have taken these precautions. But in fact it was a spear. So since it’s not men we’re going up against, please let me go.’
[40] ‘All right, son,’ Croesus replied, ‘I give in. Your explanation of the dream does make a kind of sense. I’ll change my mind and let you go on the hunt.’
[41] After this conversation, Croesus sent for Adrastus, the Phrygian. When he arrived, Croesus said, ‘Adrastus, when you had been brought low by grim misfortune—not that I’m holding it against you—I purified you and took you into my house. I have covered all your expenses. I have done you a lot of good, and now you ought to return the favour. I’d like you to be my son’s body-guard when he goes out on this hunt, in case any bandits ambush you on the road and try to do you harm. And besides, you too should be seeking out opportunities for distinguishing yourself: you come from a distinguished family and you’re endowed with physical strength.’
[42] ‘My lord,’ Adrastus said, ‘I wouldn’t normally have anything to do with this kind of task; it isn’t appropriate for someone who has met with the kind of misfortune I have to associate with those of his peers who are successful, nor do I want to. In fact, I’d have found plenty of reasons for not going. But you are insistent and I have to do what you want, because I ought to repay you for the favours you have given me. I’m ready to do it, then, and you can expect your son, whom you are putting into my care, to return home unharmed. As his bodyguard, I’ll see to it.’
[43] This was his reply to Croesus. Some time later they set out, along with the élite young fighting men and the dogs. Once they had reached Olympus, they started searching the mountain for the beast. They found it, stood in a circle around it, and began to throw their spears at it. This was the point at which Croesus’ guest-friend, the one who had been purified of manslaughter and whose name was Adrastus, threw his spear at the boar, missed it, and hit Croesus’ son. Since it was a spear that hit him, he fulfilled the prophecy of the dream. A runner set out to let Croesus know what had happened, and when he reached Sardis he told him about the encounter with the boar and his son’s death.
[44] Croesus was devastated at his son’s death and was all the more aggrieved because he himself had purified the killer of manslaughter. He was so terribly upset that he called on Zeus as the god responsible for purification to witness what his guest-friend had done to him, and he also called on the same god in his capacities as god of the hearth and god of friendship—as god of the hearth because he had taken the visitor into his home without realizing that he was feeding his son’s killer, and as god of friendship because he sent as a bodyguard for his son the man who turned out to be his worst enemy.
[45] Later the Lydians arrived carrying the body, with the killer following along behind them. He stood in front of the corpse, stretched out his arms towards Croesus and gave himself up to him. He told Croesus to take his life over the corpse, because now, on top of his earlier misfortune, he had destroyed the life of the one who had purified him, and there was no point in his going on living. Croesus heard him out and felt pity for Adrastus, even though he had troubles enough of his own. ‘My friend,’ he said, ‘your declaration that you deserve death is all the compensation I want from you. You are not to blame for the terrible thing that has happened to me; you were just an unwitting instrument. Responsibility lies with one of the gods, who even warned me some time ago what was going to happen.’
So Croesus gave his son a proper burial. But Adrastus, the son of Gordias and grandson of Midas, who had killed his own brother and now his purifier as well, waited until it was quiet around the tomb and then, realizing that there was no one in his experience who bore a heavier burden of misfortune than himself, he took his own life at the graveside.
[46] For two years Croesus sat in deep grief over the loss of his son, but then, when Cyrus the son of Cambyses deprived Astyages the son of Cyaxares of his power, the growing might of the Persian caused Croesus to put aside his grief and he began to wonder whether there might be a way for him to restrain the growing power of the Persian before it became too great. Once the idea had taken hold, he immediately devised a way to test the oracles—the one in Libya as well as the Greek ones. He sent men off to the various locations—to Delphi, to Abae in Phocis, to Dodona, and others to Amphiaraus and Trophonius, and to Branchidae in Miletus. These were the Greek oracles he sent men to consult, and then he dispatched others to consult Ammon in Libya. The reason he sent men all over the place like this was to test the wisdom of the oracles; then he planned to send men a second time to any which proved accurate, to ask whether he should undertake an invasion of Persia.
[47] The instructions he gave the men before sending them out to test the oracles were as follows. They were to keep track of the number of days from the time they left Sardis, and on the hundredth day they were to consult the oracles and ask what the Lydian king, Croesus the son of Alyattes, was doing. They were to have the response of each of the oracles written down and then they were to bring them back to him. Now, no one records what the rest of the oracles said, but at Delphi, as soon as the Lydian emissaries had entered the temple to consult the god and asked the question Croesus had told them to ask, the Pythia spoke the following lines in hexameter verse:
I know the number of grains of sand and the extent of the sea;
I understand the deaf-mute and hear the words of the dumb.
My senses detect the smell of tough-shelled tortoise
Cooked in bronze together with the flesh of lambs;
Beneath it lies bronze, and bronze covers it.
[48] The Lydians wrote down this prophecy delivered by the Pythia and returned to Sardis. The other emissaries also arrived with their oracular responses, and as they did so Croesus unfolded each one and read what had been written down. None of them satisfied him, but on hearing the one from Delphi, he offered up a prayer and accepted it; in his opinion, only the oracle at Delphi was a true oracle, because it had realized what he had been doing. For once he had sent his emissaries to the oracles, he had waited for the critical day and then put into effect the following plan. His idea was to come up with something unthinkable and unimaginable, so he chopped up a tortoise and some lamb’s meat and cooked them together in a bronze pot with a bronze lid on the top.
[49] That was the response the Delphic oracle gave Croesus. I am not in a position to give details of the response given by the oracle of Amphiaraus to the Lydians when they had performed the traditional rites at the temple, because there is in fact no record of it either; all I can say is that in Croesus’ opinion this oracle too gave him an accurate response.
[50] Croesus’ next step was to set about propitiating the Delphic god with the generosity of his sacrifices. He offered three thousand of every kind of sacrificial animal; he heaped a huge pyre out of couches overlaid with gold and silver, golden cups, and purple cloaks and tunics, and burnt them to ashes. He thought he stood a better chance of winning the god over by doing this. He also told all the Lydians that every one of them was to sacrifice whatever he could.
When he had finished sacrificing, he melted down an enormous amount of gold and beat it out into 117 ingots. Each ingot was six palms long, three palms wide, and one palm high. Four of them were made out of pure gold, each weighing two and a half talents, while the rest of the ingots were white gold, each weighing two talents. He also had made out of pure gold a statue of a lion, which weighed ten talents. When the temple at Delphi burnt down, this lion fell off the ingots which were acting as its base; it now sits in the Corinthian treasury, weighing six and a half talents, because three and a half talents of gold melted off it.
[51] Once these items were finished, Croesus sent them to Delphi; he also sent other things at the same time. First, there were two huge bowls, one of gold and one of silver. The gold one used to stand on the right of the entrance to the temple, with the silver one on the left. They too were relocated when the temple burnt down; the gold bowl sits in the Clazomenaean treasury, weighing eight and a half talents and twelve minas, and the silver one in the corner of the temple porch. It has a capacity of six hundred amphoras, because the Delphians use it as a mixing-bowl at the festival of the Theophania. The Delphians claim that it was made by Theodorus of Samos, and I see no reason to disagree, since it strikes me as an extraordinary piece.
In addition, Croesus sent four silver jars, which stand in the Corinthian treasury, and he sent a votive offering of two aspergilla too, one of gold and one of silver. On the golden one there is an inscription ‘from the Lacedaemonians’, and they claim that it was they who dedicated it. They are wrong, however, because it was one of Croesus’ offerings, and it was a Delphian who wrote the inscription in order to please the Lacedaemonians; I know who it was, but I refrain from mentioning his name. The statue of the boy through whose hand water trickles is Lacedaemonian in origin, but neither of the aspergilla is. Croesus sent plenty of other dedicatory offerings at the same time, none of which is inscribed, including some round, cast bowls of silver and also a golden statue of a woman which is three cubits tall, and which according to the Delphians is a statue of the woman who was Croesus’ baker. Croesus also dedicated his wife’s necklaces and belts.
[52] So much for the items Croesus sent to Delphi. As for Amphiaraus, once Croesus had found out about his courage and his misfortune, he dedicated to him a shield made entirely of gold, and a spear which was made of solid gold from its shaft to its head. Both these items were still lying in Thebes in my day—in the temple of Ismenian Apollo, to be precise.
[53] Croesus instructed those of his men who were to take the gifts to the sanctuaries to ask the oracles whether he should make war on the Persians and whether he should make an ally of any other military force. When they reached their destinations, the Lydians dedicated their offerings and then approached the oracles with their question: ‘Croesus, king of the Lydians and of other peoples, is of the opinion that yours are the only true oracles in the world. Accordingly, he has given you the gifts you deserve for your insight, and now his question to you is whether he should make war on the Persians and whether he should make an ally of any other military force.’ The answers both oracles gave to the question were perfectly consistent with each other: they told Croesus that if he made war on the Persians, he would destroy a great empire, and they advised him to find out which was the most powerful Greek state and ally himself with it.
[54] When Croesus heard the answers his men brought back, he was delighted with the oracles and was convinced that he would destroy Cyrus’ empire. First he found out how many people lived at Delphi, and then he sent agents there once again to give every man two gold staters. The Delphians repaid Croesus and the Lydians by giving them precedence in consulting the oracle, exemption from taxes, front seats at festivals, and the right, granted in perpetuity to any Lydian, to become a citizen of Delphi.
[55] Since he now knew that the oracle was accurate, Croesus intended to drink deep of it, and after giving this present to the Delphians he consulted it a third time. This time he wanted a statement on the question whether his rule would last a long time. The Pythia’s response was as follows:
When a mule becomes Persian king, it is time,
Tender-footed Lydian, for you to flee beside the pebbly Hermus
Without delay, and without worrying about cowardice.
[56] When this response reached Croesus, it afforded him far more pleasure than anything else the oracle had told him, because he was sure that a mule would never replace a man as the Persian king, and that in consequence he and his descendants would rule for ever. He next turned his mind to investigating which was the most powerful Greek state, so that he could gain them as his allies. As a result of his enquiries, he discovered that Lacedaemon and Athens were the outstanding states, and that Lacedaemon was populated by Dorians while Athens was populated by Ionians. For these two peoples†—the one Pelasgian, the other Hellenic—had been pre-eminent in the old days. The Pelasgians never migrated anywhere, but the Hellenes were a very well-travelled race. When Deucalion was their king, they were living in Phthia, but in the time of Dorus the son of Hellen they were in the territory around Mounts Ossa and Olympus, known as Histiaeotis. Then they were evicted from Histiaeotis by the Cadmeans and settled on Mount Pindus, where they were called Macedonians. Next they moved to Dryopis, and from Dryopis they finally reached the Peloponnese and became known as the Dorians.
[57] I am not in a position to say for certain what language the Pelasgians used to speak, but if it is appropriate to judge by those Pelasgians who still exist today—the ones who live in the town of Creston north of Tyrrhenia (who used to inhabit the country which is now called Thessaliotis and so shared a border with the people now known as Dorians), the ones who founded Placia and Scylace on the Hellespont (who used to be inhabitants of Attica along with the Athenians) and all those other places which were Pelasgian settlements but have changed their names—judging by them, the Pelasgians spoke a non-Greek language. So if the whole Pelasgian race was like them too, the Attic people (which used to be Pelasgian) must also have learnt a new language at the time when they became Hellenized. For the fact that neither the Crestonians nor the Placians speak the same language as any of their neighbours, but do speak the same language as each other, shows that they retained the form of language they brought with them when they moved to the places they now inhabit.
[58] It seems clear to me, however, that the Hellenes have always spoken the same language, ever since they began. Although when they were separate from the Pelasgians they were weak, they expanded from these origins until instead of being small they encompassed a great many peoples, once the Pelasgians in particular had combined with them, along with quite a few other non-Greek peoples. It is also my view that when the Pelasgians spoke a non-Greek language they never grew to any great size.
[59] Anyway, Croesus discovered that, of the two peoples in question, the one in Attica had been oppressed and fragmented by Pisistratus the son of Hippocrates, who was in those days the tyrant of Athens. Once, when Hippocrates was a spectator at the Olympic Games (he was an ordinary citizen at the time), a really extraordinary thing had happened to him. He had finished sacrificing, and the pots full of meat and water were standing there, when they boiled and started overflowing, even though they were not on a fire. Chilon the Lacedaemonian happened to be on hand to see the miracle. He advised Hippocrates either not to get married—that is, not to bring a child-bearing wife into his house—or, failing that, if he happened to have a wife already, to get rid of her and to disown any son he had. Hippocrates refused to listen to these suggestions of Chilon’s, and some time later Pisistratus was born. When there was a factional dispute between the people of the coast, whose leader was Megacles the son of Alcmaeon, and the people of the plain, led by Lycurgus the son of Aristolaïdes, Pisistratus—with his mind set on tyranny—formed a third party. He gathered his supporters together and made himself appear to be the leader of the hill people. Then he put the following plan into effect. He wounded himself and his mules and drove his cart into the city square, making it seem as though he was trying to escape from some enemies who had set upon him with murderous intent (or so he said) as he drove out of town. He asked the Athenian people to provide him with personal guards; he had already won their respect as a military commander during the campaign against Megara, during which not the least of his important achievements was the capture of Nisaea. The Athenian people were completely taken in by his trick and chose from among the citizen body some men to give him—that is, those who became his club-carriers, if not his spear-carriers, because they followed him around carrying wooden clubs. Pisistratus started an uprising with their help and together they took control of the Acropolis. After that, Pisistratus ruled Athens, but he did not interfere with the existing structure of offices or change the laws; he administered the state constitutionally and organized the state’s affairs properly and well.
[60] Not long afterwards, though, Megacles and Lycurgus united their supporters into a single party and expelled him. That was how Pisistratus came to take control of Athens the first time, but his rule was not yet secure enough to prevent him losing it. However, now that they had got rid of him, Megacles and Lycurgus fell out with each other all over again. Megacles was coming off worst in the dispute, and so he sent a message to Pisistratus, asking him whether he would consider marrying his daughter in order to become tyrant. Pisistratus accepted the offer and agreed to his terms. Now, the trick that he and Megacles played in order to bring about his return was by far the most simple-minded one I have ever come across, given that Greeks had long been distinguished from non-Greeks by being more clever and less gullible—assuming that, even at this late date, they really did play this trick on the Athenians, who are supposed to be the most intelligent of the Greeks. There was a woman called Phya in the deme of Paeania who was only three fingers short of four cubits tall and was also very good-looking. They dressed this woman up in a full set of armour, put her on a chariot, and, after showing her how to hold herself in order to give the most plausible impression, set out for the city with her. Runners were sent ahead to act as heralds, and they, on arriving in the city, made the announcement they had been told to make. ‘Men of Athens,’ they said, ‘Athena is giving Pisistratus the singular honour of personally escorting him back to your Acropolis. So welcome him.’ They took this message from place to place, and word soon reached the country demes that Athena was bringing Pisistratus back. Meanwhile, the city-dwellers were so convinced that the woman was actually the goddess that they were offering prayers to her—to a human being—and were welcoming Pisistratus back.
[61] So this is how Pisistratus became tyrant again. He married Megacles’ daughter, as he had promised Megacles he would, but because he already had grown-up sons, and because the Alcmaeonidae were supposed to be under a curse, he did not want to have children by his new wife, so he did not have sex with her in the usual way. At first his wife kept it secret, but later she told her mother (who may or may not have questioned her about it), and the mother told her husband. Megacles was furious at the slight and, in an angry frame of mind, he made peace with his political rivals. When Pisistratus heard about the actions that were being taken against him, he got right out of the country and went to Eretria. Once he was there, he consulted with his sons, and Hippias won the day by arguing that they should regain power. They set about collecting contributions from all the communities which were under some kind of obligation to them and, although a number of communities were extremely generous with their financial support, the Thebans were the most generous of all with their money. Eventually, to cut a long story short, they were fully equipped for their return. Argive mercenaries had come from the Peloponnese, and a volunteer from Naxos, whose name was Lygdamis, came and raised morale a great deal by bringing both money and men.
[62] They set out from Eretria and came home after ten years of exile. The first place in Attica that they took was Marathon. While they were camped there, they were joined by supporters from the city and there was also an influx of men from the country demes who found the rule of a tyrant more pleasant than freedom. So their ranks were swelling. Now, the Athenians in the city had taken no account of Pisistratus while he was collecting money, or even afterwards, when he had taken Marathon; but when they found out that he was marching on the city, they came out to defend the city against him. On the one hand there were the Athenians, proceeding with full strength against the returning exiles; on the other hand there were Pisistratus’ troops, proceeding against the city from their base at Marathon. The two sides met at the sanctuary of Athena in Pallene and took up positions opposite each other. At this juncture, a seer called Amphilytus of Acarnania came up to Pisistratus—it was divine providence that he was there—and delivered the following prophecy in hexameter verse:
The net has been cast, the mesh is at full stretch,
And the tuna will dart in the moonlit night.
[63] These were Amphilytus’ inspired words to Pisistratus. Pisistratus understood the meaning of the prophecy, told Amphilytus he accepted its validity, and led his army to battle. The Athenians from the city were actually busy with their midday meal just then, if they had not already finished, in which case they were playing dice or sleeping. Pisistratus and his men fell on the Athenians and routed them. Then Pisistratus thought up a very clever plan to stop the fleeing Athenians from regrouping and to make sure they stayed scattered. He had his sons mount their horses and ride up ahead. Whenever they caught up with a group of fugitives they followed Pisistratus’ instructions and told them that they need not worry and that each man should return to his own home.
[64] The Athenians followed this suggestion, and so Pisistratus took control of Athens for the third time. This time he planted his tyranny firmly, with the help of large numbers of mercenary troops and a substantial income, partly gained locally and partly coming in from the Strymon River area. He also took the children of those Athenians who had stood their ground without immediately running away and sent them to Naxos, where he had put Lygdamis in charge; here too, the island’s opposition to him had been suppressed by military means. Another thing he did, as the oracles advised, was purify the island of Delos. The way he performed the purification was to dig up all the land that was visible from the sanctuary, remove the corpses and transfer them to another part of the island. And so Pisistratus was the tyrant of Athens. Some Athenians had fallen in the battle, and others, including the Alcmaeonidae, were in exile from their homeland.
[65] So Croesus gathered that the Athenians were currently in this state of oppression. Where the Lacedaemonians were concerned, however, he discovered that they had got through a time of great difficulty and now had the upper hand over the Tegeans in the war. The Lacedaemonians had been at war with the Tegeans before, during the reign of Leon and Hegesicles in Sparta, but they always came to grief against them, even though they were successful against all their other opponents. Also, the Lacedaemonians had previously had just about the worst customs in the whole of Greece; not only were their domestic policies no good, but they also had no dealings with foreigners. But they changed their constitution for the better, and this is how it happened.
Lycurgus, a Spartiate of some eminence, went to consult the oracle at Delphi and as soon as he entered the temple the Pythia said:
Lycurgus, here you are. You have come to my rich temple,
Beloved of Zeus and all who dwell on Olympus.
Should I address you, in my prophecy, as a god or as a man?
I think it would be better to call you a god, Lycurgus.
There are those who say that the Pythia did not stop there, but also taught him the organizational structure which the Spartans currently have. This is not what the Lacedaemonians themselves say, however. They say that when Lycurgus became the guardian of Leobotes (who was his nephew, and was one of the two Spartan kings), he imported their current constitution from Crete. As soon as he became Leobotes’ guardian, he changed the whole constitution and took measures to ensure that these new laws were not broken. It was also Lycurgus who subsequently instituted their military organization—the sworn companies, the divisions of thirty, and the communal messes—and established the ephors and the council of elders as well.
[66] These were the changes that altered their system for the better. When Lycurgus died they built a shrine to him and they hold him in great reverence. Because their land was good and the population quite large, they soon grew and flourished—and then they stopped being content with peace. Convinced that they were stronger than the Arcadians, they put a question to the Delphic oracle which referred to the whole of Arcadia. The Pythia’s response was as follows:
You ask for Arcadia? You ask a lot; I will not give it to you.
There are many men in Arcadia, toughened by a diet of acorns,
And they will stop you. But I do not want to be niggardly.
I will give you the dance-floor of Tegea; you can caper there
And measure out her beautiful plain with a rope.
Faced with this response, the Lacedaemonians left the rest of Arcadia alone and attacked Tegea. They took chains with them, because they expected to reduce the people of Tegea to slavery, as the Pythia’s ambiguous response had led them to believe they would. In fact, however, they came off worst in the engagement and those of them who were taken prisoner wore the chains which they themselves had brought, and measured out the Tegean Plain with a rope as labourers on the land. The actual chains with which they were tied up were still preserved in Tegea in my time, hanging in the temple of Athena Alea.
[67] Anyway, although this earlier war of theirs against the Tegeans never went well for them, in Croesus’ time, during the reign of Anaxandridas and Ariston in Lacedaemon, the Spartiates gained the upper hand in the war, and this is how they did so. Since they were constantly being beaten by the Tegeans, they sent emissaries to Delphi to ask which god they should propitiate in order to start winning the Tegean War, and the Pythia replied that they had to bring the bones of Orestes the son of Agamemnon back home. They could not discover Orestes’ grave, however, so they sent emissaries again, this time to ask the god to tell them where Orestes was buried. The Pythia’s response to this question of theirs was as follows:
On the Arcadian plain there is a place called Tegea
Where strong necessity drives the blast of two winds,
Where there is blow and counter-blow, grief piled on grief.
There the life-giving earth holds the son of Agamemnon,
Whom you must bring home if you would be overlord of Tegea.
Despite a thorough search, however, even this response brought the Lacedaemonians no closer to discovering Orestes’ burial-place, until it was found by Lichas, who was one of those Spartan officials they call ‘Benefactors’. The Benefactors are the citizens—five every year—who are passing out of the ranks of the Knights because they are the oldest; they have to spend the year of their withdrawal from the Knights in constant travel here and there on missions for the Spartan authorities.
[68] It was one of these Benefactors, Lichas, who made the discovery, and he did so through a combination of luck and intelligence. It was possible at that time for Lacedaemonians to have dealings with Tegea, and Lichas arrived at a forge there. He watched the smith beating iron and was impressed by his work. The smith saw that he was impressed, stopped what he was doing and said, ‘So you think I do amazing work with iron, do you, my Laconian friend? I tell you, if you’d seen what I’d seen, you’d really be amazed. You see, I decided to make a well here in this yard. As I was digging, I came upon a coffin which was seven cubits long! Since I didn’t believe that people were really taller in the past than they are nowadays, I opened it up—and the corpse I saw inside was exactly the same size as the coffin! I measured it before putting it back in the ground.’
Lichas thought about the smith’s description of what he had seen and came to the conclusion that the description matched what the oracle had said about Orestes. He reached this conclusion by realizing that the ‘winds’ referred to the two bellows he could see the smith had, that ‘blow and counter-blow’ referred to the hammer and the anvil, and that ‘grief piled on grief’ referred to the iron the smith was beating, since (on his interpretation of the metaphor) the discovery of iron brought grief to men.
Once he had reached this conclusion, he returned to Sparta. He explained the whole thing to the Lacedaemonians, and they faked a charge against him which led to his banishment. He went to Tegea, told the smith about his misfortune, and tried to rent the yard from him. At first, the smith would not let him have it, but eventually Lichas won him over and moved in. Then he dug up the grave, collected the bones, and took them with him to Sparta. And ever since then, whenever there was a military trial of strength between the two sides, the Lacedaemonians easily won. In fact, by the time in question most of the Peloponnese was under their control.
[69] On the basis of all this information, then, Croesus sent agents to Sparta, to take gifts and to ask for an alliance. He had told them what to say, and when they arrived in Sparta they said, ‘These are the words we bring from Croesus, king of the Lydians and other peoples: “Lacedaemonians, the oracle advised me to make the Greek my ally and now I have learnt that you are the leading Greek people. You, therefore, are the ones to whom I am extending the invitation the oracle recommended. I want to be on good terms with you and to enter into an alliance with you without treachery or deceit.”’
This was the declaration Croesus made through his agents to the Lacedaemonians, who had in fact already heard of the oracle’s answer to Croesus. They were pleased that the Lydians had approached them, and they swore solemn oaths of friendship and alliance with Croesus. Actually, they were already indebted to Croesus for certain favours he had done them in the past, because the Lacedaemonians had once sent men to Sardis to buy gold, which they wanted to use for a statue of Apollo (the one which now stands in Thornax in Laconia), but although they came to buy it, Croesus gave it to them for free.
[70] For this reason, and also because he had chosen them rather than any other Greeks as his friends, the Lacedaemonians accepted Croesus’ offer of alliance. They were ready if he ever called on them. They also wanted to give him something in return, so they made a bronze bowl which was extensively decorated with pictures on the outside of its rim and which had a capacity of three hundred amphoras. They sent this bowl on its way, but it never arrived at Sardis, and there are two alternative reasons given for this. The Lacedaemonians say that when it was off the island of Samos on its way to Sardis, the Samians found out about it, sent longships after it, and stole it; but the local Samian account is that the Lacedaemonians who were taking the bowl to Sardis were too late, and when they found out that Sardis had fallen and that Croesus had been taken prisoner, they sold the bowl in Samos, where the people who had bought it—they were just ordinary citizens—set it up as a dedication in the temple of Hera. And perhaps it might make sense that when those who sold it got back to Sparta they would claim that it had been stolen by the Samians.
[71] So that is what happened to the bowl. Meanwhile, due to his misunderstanding of the oracle, Croesus invaded Cappadocia, on the assumption that he would depose Cyrus and destroy the Persian empire. While Croesus was mobilizing his troops for the attack on Persia, he received some advice from a Lydian called Sandanis. Now, Sandanis had been regarded as clever even before this, but the opinion he expressed on this occasion gave his reputation in Lydia an enormous boost. ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘you are getting ready to attack the kind of men who wear nothing but leather, including their trousers. Their food consists of what they can get, not what they might want, because of the ruggedness of their land. They drink no wine, just water, and figs are the only good things they have to eat.† They have nothing, so if you win, what will you gain from them? But if you’re defeated, think of all the good things you will lose. Once they have experienced the benefits of our way of life, they will cling to them and it will be impossible to dislodge them. For my part, I am thankful that the gods do not give the Persians the idea of attacking Lydia.’ Although this speech of his did not convince Croesus, it is true that before the Persians conquered Lydia, they had no delicacies or anything good.
[72] The Greeks call the Cappadocians Syrians. At this time, Cyrus was their ruler, but before being part of the Persian empire, the Syrians had been the subjects of the Medes. For the boundary between the Median and Lydian empires was the Halys, which rises in the mountains of Armenia, flows through Cilicia, and then continues with Matiene to the north and Phrygia to the south; after leaving these countries behind, its course takes it north, where it skirts the territory of the Syrian Cappadocians and to the west that of the Paphlagonians. The Halys, then, makes a separate region out of almost all the lands in coastal Asia from that part of the sea between Cyprus and the mainland to the Euxine Sea. This region is the neck of the whole continent, and its extent is such that a man travelling light would take five days to cross it.
[73] The main reasons for Croesus’ invasion of Cappadocia, in addition to the fact that his desire for land led him to want to increase his share of territory, were his faith in the oracle and his wish to punish Cyrus for what had happened to Astyages. Astyages the son of Cyaxares was Croesus’ brother-in-law and the king of the Medes, and Cyrus the son of Cambyses had defeated him and was holding him captive. This is how Astyages became Croesus’ brother-in-law. A rebel band of nomadic Scythians slipped into Median territory, which was ruled at the time by Cyaxares, who was the son of Phraortes and grandson of Deioces. At first Cyaxares treated the Scythians well, on the grounds that they had come to him as suppliants; in fact, he thought highly enough of them to entrust some teenage boys to them, to learn their language and their skill at archery.
Time passed. Now, the Scythians used to go out hunting all the time and they always brought something back for Cyaxares. One day, however, they were unlucky and failed to catch anything. When they returned empty-handed, Cyaxares (who was obviously a hot-tempered man) treated them in an extremely harsh and humiliating manner. They felt that this treatment from Cyaxares was unwarranted, and they decided after consideration to chop up one of their young pupils, prepare him for the table in the way that they had usually prepared wild animals, and serve him up to Cyaxares as if he were really game from their hunting; they planned to make their way then as quickly as possible to Alyattes the son of Sadyattes in Sardis. This is exactly what happened. Cyaxares and his guests in feasting ate some of this meat and the Scythians who had done the deed sought refuge with Alyattes.
[74] After this, Cyaxares demanded the return of the Scythians, but Alyattes refused to hand them over, so war broke out between the Lydians and the Medes. The war lasted for five years and although plenty of battles went the Medes’ way, just as many went the Lydians’ way too. They even once fought a kind of night battle. In the sixth year, when neither side had a clear advantage over the other in the war, an engagement took place and it so happened that in the middle of the battle day suddenly became night. Thales of Miletus had predicted this loss of daylight to the Ionians by establishing in advance that it would happen within the limits of the year in which it did in fact happen. When the Lydians and the Medes saw that night had replaced day, they did not just stop fighting; both sides also more actively wanted an end to the war. Peace between them was brokered by Syennesis of Cilicia and Labynetus of Babylon, who were anxious that the two sides should enter into a formal peace treaty and arranged for there to be mutual ties of marriage between them. That is, they decided that Alyattes should give his daughter Aryenis in marriage to Cyaxares’ son Astyages, on the grounds that strong treaties tend not to last in the absence of strong ties. These peoples formalize their treaties in the same way the Greeks do, with the extra feature that when they cut into the skin of their arms, each party licks the other’s blood.
[75] So this was the Astyages whom—for reasons I shall explain in a later narrative—Cyrus had defeated and was holding captive, despite the fact that Astyages was his mother’s father. It was because Croesus had this complaint against Cyrus that he sent emissaries to the oracle to see if he should attack Persia. And so, when he received the ambiguous response from the oracle, he assumed that it was favourable to him and invaded Persian territory.
When Croesus reached the Halys he next used existing bridges to get his army across. At least, that is what I think, but the usual account of the Greeks is that Thales of Miletus got the army across. The story goes that Croesus did not know how his troops were going to cross the river, since the bridges I mentioned were not in existence at the time. But Thales was in the camp, and he helped Croesus by making the river flow on both sides of the army, instead of only to the left. This is how he did it, they say. He started upstream, above the army, and dug a deep channel which was curved in such a way that it would pass behind the army’s encampment; in this way he diverted the river from its original bed into the channel, and then, once he had got it past the army, he brought it back round to its original bed again. The immediate result of this division of the river was that it became fordable on both sides. There are those who go so far as to claim that the original riverbed completely dried up, but I find this implausible, because if it were true, how would they have crossed the river on their way back?
[76] Once Croesus and his army were across the river, they found themselves in the part of Cappadocia called Pteria, which is the most impregnable region of Cappadocia and lies more or less on a line with the town of Sinope on the Euxine Sea. Croesus established a camp there and set about destroying the Syrians’ farms. He captured the capital of Pteria and reduced the inhabitants to slavery, and he also overran the outlying settlements, forcing the Syrian population to become refugees, even though they had not offered him any provocation. Meanwhile Cyrus mustered his army and went to meet Croesus, conscripting all the inhabitants of the regions he passed through on the way. Before setting off with his army on this expedition, he had sent messengers to the Ionians and tried to incite them to rebel against Croesus, but the Ionians had refused to listen. Anyway, Cyrus reached Pteria and positioned his army opposite Croesus’ camp, so Pteria was the site of the trial of strength between the two armies. A fierce battle took place, with heavy losses on both sides, but by nightfall, when the two armies separated, neither side had won.
[77] Now, the army with which Croesus had gone into battle was much smaller than that of Cyrus, and he blamed his lack of success on the number of troops he had. So when Cyrus did not come out to engage him the next day, Croesus pulled his army back to Sardis. What he planned to do was this. He had made an alliance with the Egyptian king Amasis, which preceded his alliance with Lacedaemon, and he had also entered into a similar treaty with the Babylonians too (whose ruler at the time was Labynetus). He intended to send for the Egyptians and the Babylonians, according to their sworn promises, as well as telling the Lacedaemonians to come at a specified time; then, once they were all present and he had mustered his own army too, he would let the winter go by and attack the Persians as soon as it was spring. With these thoughts in mind, when he got back to Sardis he dispatched heralds to his various allies, calling on them to assemble in Sardis in four months’ time. As for the army he already had, the one which had engaged the Persians, he dismissed the foreign element in its entirety and let them return to their various homes, because he never actually expected Cyrus to march on Sardis after they had been so evenly matched in their first contest.
[78] While Croesus was making these plans, all the outskirts of the city became infested with snakes, and as they appeared the horses used to stop grazing in their pastures, walk over to where the snakes were, and eat them. This struck Croesus as ominous—as indeed it was—and he immediately sent emissaries to Telmessus, to the shrine where omens were interpreted. The emissaries arrived and were told by the Telmessians what the omen meant, but they could not make their report to Croesus, because he was in enemy hands before they completed their voyage back to Sardis. However, the Telmessians’ interpretation was that Croesus should expect a foreign army to invade his land and overcome the local inhabitants; a snake, they said, is a child of the earth, while a horse is a hostile intruder. So this was the reply the Telmessians gave to Croesus’ question; although he had already been captured, at the time they had not heard what had happened in Sardis and to Croesus.
[79] As soon as Croesus withdrew his troops after the battle in Pteria, Cyrus learnt that he intended to disband his men. After some thought, he realized that he had better march as quickly as possible on Sardis, before the Lydian forces could gather for the second time. No sooner had he come to this decision than he put it into action and marched into Lydia. He himself was the messenger through whom Croesus heard of his arrival. This put Croesus into an impossible situation, because things had not gone according to his expectations; nevertheless, he led his troops out to battle. The Lydians were the most courageous and warlike race in Asia at that time; they fought on horseback, carried long spears, and were superb horsemen.
[80] The two sides met on the plain in front of the city of Sardis. This plain is broad and bare, with a number of rivers flowing through it, including the Hyllus. All these rivers are tributaries of the largest river, the Hermus, which rises in the mountain sacred to Mother Dindymene and issues into the sea by the town of Phocaea. When Cyrus saw the Lydians forming up for battle on this plain, he realized that the Lydian cavalry was a threat, so he adopted the following tactics, which were suggested to him by a Mede called Harpagus. There were camels with the army, used to carry food and baggage. Cyrus had them all collected and unloaded, and then he mounted men on them in full cavalry gear. Once the men were ready, he ordered them to advance against Croesus’ cavalry with the rest of the army following them—first the infantry behind the camels, and then his entire regular cavalry bringing up the rear. When all his troops had taken up their positions, he commanded them to kill every Lydian they came across without mercy, but to spare Croesus, even if he was resisting capture. These were his instructions. He had the camels positioned to confront the cavalry because horses are afraid of camels and cannot stand either their sight or their smell. In other words, the reason for the stratagem was to disable Croesus’ cavalry, which was in fact exactly the part of his army with which Croesus had intended to make a mark. So battle was joined, and as soon as the horses smelled and saw the camels, they turned tail and Croesus’ hopes were destroyed. However, this did not turn the Lydians into cowards; when they realized what was happening, they leapt off their horses and engaged the Persians on foot. Losses on both sides were heavy, but eventually the Lydians were pushed back to the city, where they were trapped behind their walls and besieged by the Persians.
[81] So the Persians were besieging the city. Croesus expected the siege to last a long time, so he sent men out of the city with further dispatches for his allies. Whereas the men he had sent before had taken messages requesting the allies to gather in Sardis in four months’ time, this current lot of messengers were to ask them to come and help as quickly as possible, since he was under siege.
[82] The men were dispatched to all his allies, including the Lacedaemonians. Now, it so happened that the Lacedaemonians themselves were at that time engaged in a dispute with Argos about the region known as Thyreae. The Lacedaemonians had taken over this place Thyreae, which had been part of Argive territory, and were occupying it. (Argive territory extended as far west as Malea and included not only the mainland but also the island of Cythera and the rest of the islands there as well.) When the Argives came to reclaim the land the Lacedaemonians had taken, the two sides got together and agreed that three hundred men from each army would fight and that whichever side won would keep the land. The bulk of each army, however, would disperse and return to within its own borders and not stay during the fight; this was to prevent either side being in a position to come and help their own men, if they saw them being beaten. Once these terms had been agreed, the two armies dispersed except for the selected men who were left behind to fight, which they proceeded to do. The contest between them was so evenly matched that eventually only three men remained out of the six hundred—Alcenor and Chromius for the Argives and Orthryades for the Lacedaemonians. They were the only survivors at nightfall. At that point, the two Argives assumed that they were the winners and hurried away to Argos, while Orthryades the Lacedaemonian stripped the Argive corpses, carried their weapons back to his own camp, and held the position he had been assigned. The next day both sides came to find out what had happened. At first, they each claimed the victory for themselves: the Argives argued that more of their men had survived, while the Lacedaemonians pointed out that although the others had fled the battlefield, their own man had stayed and stripped the Argive corpses. In the end, the quarrel spilled over into fighting. Losses on both sides were heavy, but the Lacedaemonians won.
Ever since then, the Argives have cut their hair short, although they had previously been required to wear it long. They made it a rule, sealed with a curse, that no Argive man should grow his hair and that the women were not to wear gold until they had recovered Thyreae. The Lacedaemonians, however, instituted the opposite custom; although they had previously kept their hair short, they now started to wear it long. They also say that Orthryades, the sole survivor of the three hundred, was too ashamed to return to Sparta when all his comrades had died, and committed suicide right there in Thyreae.
[83] That was the situation facing the Spartiates when the herald arrived from Sardis to ask them to come and help Croesus lift the siege. Despite their problems, the Spartiate response to the man’s news was to set about providing help. But in the middle of their preparations, when their ships were ready, another message came, this time with the news that the Lydian city had fallen and that Croesus had been taken prisoner. So, with a sense of deep regret, the Spartiates called off their preparations.
[84] This is how Sardis fell. On the fourteenth day of the siege, Cyrus sent riders to the various contingents of his army and announced that there would be a reward for the first man to scale the wall. This induced his men to try, but without success. Then, when everyone else had given up, a Mardian called Hyroeades went up to have a go at a particular part of the acropolis where no guard had been posted, because the steepness and unassailability of the acropolis at that spot had led people to believe that there was no danger of its ever being taken there. Even Meles, the past king of Sardis, had omitted this spot when he was carrying around the acropolis the lion to which his concubine had given birth, in response to the Telmessian judgement that Sardis would never be captured if the lion was carried around the walls. Meles carried it around the rest of the wall, where the acropolis was open to attack, but he ignored this place because of its unassailability and steepness. It is on the side of the city which faces Tmolus. Anyway, this Mardian, Hyroeades, had the day before seen a Lydian climb down this part of the acropolis after his helmet (which had rolled down the slope) and retrieve it. He noted this and thought about it, then he led a band of Persians in the ascent. Soon a lot of them had climbed up, and then Sardis was captured and the whole city was sacked.
[85] As for Croesus himself, here is what happened. As I mentioned earlier, he had a son who was fine in other respects, but could not speak. In the past, when things were going well, Croesus had done everything possible for him; he had tried all kinds of plans, including sending men to Delphi to ask about him. The Pythia’s reply was as follows:
Croesus of Lydia, ruler of many, you are being very foolish.
You should not desire to hear in your home the sound you have long prayed for
Of your son speaking. It is far better for you not to,
For you will hear it first on a day of misfortune.
Now, during the capture of the city, a Persian soldier failed to recognize Croesus and came up to kill him. Croesus saw him coming, but was too overwhelmed by the catastrophe that was taking place to care: it did not matter to him that he might be put to the sword and die. But this son of his, the one who could not speak, was so frightened and upset at the sight of the Persian approaching that he burst into speech and said, ‘Man, don’t kill Croesus.’ These were the first words he ever spoke, but after that he carried on speaking for the rest of his life.
[86] So the Persians took Sardis and captured Croesus himself. His rule had lasted fourteen years, the siege had lasted fourteen days, and as the oracle had foretold he had put an end to a great empire—his own. The Persians took their prisoner to Cyrus, who built a huge funeral pyre and made Croesus (who was tied up) and fourteen Lydian boys climb up to the top. Perhaps he intended them to be a victory-offering for some god or other, or perhaps he wanted to fulfil a vow he had made, or perhaps he had heard that Croesus was a god-fearing man and he made him get up on to the pyre because he wanted to see if any immortal being would rescue him from being burnt alive. Anyway, that is what he did. Meanwhile (the story goes), although Croesus’ situation up on top of the pyre was desperate, his mind turned to Solon’s saying that no one who is still alive is happy, and it occurred to him how divinely inspired Solon had been to say that. This thought made him sigh and groan, and he broke a long silence by repeating the name ‘Solon’ three times.
When Cyrus heard him, he told his translators to ask Croesus who it was he was calling on. The translators went up and asked him. At first Croesus made no reply, but then, when he was coerced, he said, ‘Someone whom I would give a fortune to have every ruler in the world meet.’ This was meaningless to them, of course, so they repeated their question. When they persisted and crowded around him, he told them how Solon had arrived at his court in the first place, all the way from Athens, how he had seen all his wealth and dismissed it as rubbish (or words to that effect), and how in his case everything had turned out as Solon had said it would, although his words applied to the whole of mankind—and particularly to those who thought themselves well off—just as much as they did to him. Now, the pyre had been lit, and as Croesus was telling his story, flames were licking around its edges. But when the translators relayed the story to Cyrus, he had a change of heart. He saw that he was burning alive a fellow human being, one who had been just as well off as he was; also, he was afraid of retribution, and reflected on the total lack of certainty in human life. So he told his men to waste no time in dousing the flames and getting Croesus and the others down from the pyre. When they tried, however, they found it was too late—the fire was out of control.
[87] What happened next, according to the Lydian account, was this. Croesus realized that Cyrus had changed his mind. When he saw that it was too late for them to control the fire, despite everyone’s efforts to quench it, he called on Apollo. ‘If any gift of mine has pleased you,’ he cried, ‘come now and rescue me from this danger.’ Weeping, he called on the god, and suddenly the clear, calm weather was replaced by gathering clouds; a storm broke, rain lashed down, and the pyre was extinguished.
As a result of this, Cyrus realized that Croesus was in the gods’ favour and was a good man. So once he had got Croesus down from the pyre he asked him who had persuaded him to invade his country and be his enemy rather than his friend. ‘My lord,’ Croesus replied, ‘it was my doing. You have gained and I have lost from it. But responsibility lies with the god of the Greeks who encouraged me to make war on you. After all, no one is stupid enough to prefer war to peace; in peace sons bury their fathers and in war fathers bury their sons. However, I suppose the god must have wanted this to happen.’
[88] That is what Croesus said. Cyrus untied him and had him seated near by. He was very impressed with him, and he and his whole entourage admired the man’s demeanour. But Croesus was silent, deep in thought. Then he turned and at the sight of the Persians looting the Lydian city he said, ‘My lord, shall I tell you what just occurred to me or is this an inappropriate time for me to speak?’
Cyrus told him not to worry and to say whatever he wanted, so Croesus asked, ‘What are all these people rushing around and doing so eagerly?’
‘They are sacking your city,’ Cyrus replied, ‘and carrying off your property.’
‘No,’ Croesus replied. ‘It’s not my city and property they are stealing; none of it belongs to me any more. It is your property they are plundering.’
[89] Cyrus was intrigued by Croesus’ words, so he dismissed everyone else and asked Croesus what, in his opinion, the situation held for him. Croesus answered, ‘Since the gods have given me to you as your slave, I consider it my duty to pass on to you any special insights I have. Persians are naturally aggressive, and they are not used to possessions. So if you just stand by and let them loot and keep all this valuable property, you should expect the one who gets hold of the most to initiate a coup against you. However, I have a suggestion to make, which you might like. Put men from your personal guard on sentry duty at all the city gates and have them take the spoils away from those who are trying to bring them out of the city, on the pretext that a tenth of it has to be offered to Zeus. Under these circumstances, you won’t be hated for the forcible removal of their property; they will appreciate the rightness of what you’re doing and willingly hand it over.’
[90] Cyrus was delighted with what Croesus was saying; he thought the suggestion was excellent. He was full of praise for Croesus and told his personal guards to put Croesus’ idea into practice. Then he said to Croesus, ‘Your royal background, Croesus, has not affected your ability to do good deeds and offer sound advice. Whatever you would like me to give you will be yours straight away; you have only to ask.’
‘Master,’ Croesus replied, ‘nothing would give me more pleasure than to be allowed to send these shackles of mine to the god of the Greeks, whom I revered more than any other god, and to ask him if it is his normal practice to trick his benefactors.’
Cyrus asked what wrong he thought the god had done him, that he was making this request, and Croesus told him the whole story of his plans and the oracle’s replies; he emphasized the offerings he had dedicated and told how he had marched against the Persians because of the oracle’s encouragement. He concluded by repeating his request for permission to go and make this complaint against the god. Cyrus laughed and said, ‘Yes, of course you have my permission, Croesus, and the same goes for future requests of yours too.’
Croesus took Cyrus at his word and sent a delegation of Lydians to Delphi. He told them to lay the shackles on the threshold of the temple and ask the god if he was not ashamed to have used his oracles to encourage Croesus to march against the Persians by leading him to believe that he would put an end to Cyrus’ empire—an empire which produced victory-offerings like these, they were to say, pointing to the shackles. And they were also to ask whether Greek gods were normally so ungrateful.
[91] The Lydians went to Delphi and said what Croesus had told them to say. The Pythia’s reply, we are told, was as follows: ‘Not even a god can escape his ordained fate. Croesus has paid for the crime of his ancestor four generations ago, who, though a member of the personal guard of the Heraclidae, gave in to a woman’s guile, killed his master, and assumed a station which was not rightfully his at all. In fact, Loxias wanted the fall of Sardis to happen in the time of Croesus’ sons rather than of Croesus himself, but it was not possible to divert the Fates. However, he won a concession from them and did Croesus that much good: he managed to delay the fall of Sardis for three years. Croesus should appreciate, then, that his capture has happened that much later than was ordained. In the second place, Loxias came to his help when he was on the pyre. Moreover, Croesus has no grounds for complaint as regards the oracle. Loxias predicted that if he invaded Persia, he would destroy a great empire. Faced with this, if he had thought about it he would have sent men to enquire whether Loxias meant Cyrus’ empire or his own. Because he misunderstood the statement and failed to follow it up with another enquiry, he should blame no one but himself for what happened. Then again, in response to his final question Loxias told him about a mule, but Croesus misunderstood this too. The point is that Cyrus is this mule, because he comes from parents of different nationalities. His mother was of nobler lineage, since she was a Mede and a daughter of Astyages the Median king, but his father was of baser blood, since he was a Persian and a subject of the Medes—so it was his own mistress he married, despite being her inferior in all these ways.’
This was the Pythia’s response to the Lydians. They took it back to Sardis and relayed the statement to Croesus. When he heard it he realized that the fault was his and not the god’s.
[92] That is the story of Croesus’ reign and the first conquest of Ionia. Greece holds plenty of other votive offerings made by Croesus besides the ones already mentioned. In Boeotian Thebes, for instance, there is a golden tripod which he dedicated to Ismenian Apollo; in Ephesus the golden cows and most of the pillars were set up by Croesus; in the temple of Athena Before the Temple at Delphi there is a huge golden shield. These offerings of his were still surviving in my day, although others have perished. In Branchidae in Miletus there are, I hear, offerings made by Croesus which are equal in weight and similar in kind to those he made at Delphi. The ones he dedicated at Delphi and at the shrine of Amphiaraus were his own property (in fact, they were a proportion of the estate he inherited from his father), but the rest came from the estate of one of his enemies, a man who had become an adversary of Croesus by supporting Pantaleon’s bid for power before Croesus became king. Pantaleon was the son of Alyattes, but Croesus and he were only half-brothers, since Croesus was born to Alyattes from a Carian wife, while Pantaleon’s mother was Ionian. Once his father had bequeathed control of the kingdom to him, Croesus tortured this opponent of his to death by having him hauled over a carding-comb. Then, as I have already said, he sent the man’s property (which he had previously consecrated) to the places mentioned. So much for his dedicatory offerings.
[93] Compared with other countries, Lydia does not really have any marvels which are worth recording, except for the gold-dust which is washed down from Mount Tmolus. However, there is one edifice in Lydia which is by far the biggest in the world, with the exception of those in Egypt and Babylon, and this is the tomb of Alyattes, Croesus’ father. The base of the tomb is made out of huge blocks of stone, and the rest of it is a mound of earth. It was built by traders, artisans, and prostitutes. Even in my day there were five plaques at the top of the tomb, engraved with a written record of what each of these three groups had done, which prove, when the figures are added up, that the prostitutes made the greatest contribution. The point is that the daughters of every lower-class Lydian family work as prostitutes so that they can accumulate enough of a dowry to enable them to get married, and they arrange their own marriages. The circumference of the tomb is six stades and two plethra, and it is thirteen plethra in breadth. Near the tomb there is a large lake called Lake Gyges, which never dries up, according to the Lydians. That is what Alyattes’ tomb is like.
[94] Apart from this practice of having their female children work as prostitutes, Lydian customs are not very different from Greek ones. They were the first people we know of to strike gold and silver coins and use them, and so they were also the first to retail goods. According to native Lydian tradition, the games which both they and the Greeks at present have in common were invented by them. They claim that the invention of these games coincided with their colonization of Tyrrhenia, and here is what they say about it. During the reign of Atys the son of Manes there was a severe famine throughout Lydia. At first, the Lydians patiently endured it, but as it went on and on they tried to find some ways to alleviate the situation, and a number of different ideas were proposed by different people. Anyway, according to them, that was how they came to invent all sorts of games, including dice, knucklebones, and ball games. The only game the Lydians do not claim to have invented themselves is backgammon. Once they had invented all these games, they say, their procedure with regard to the famine was as follows. They spent the whole of every alternate day playing games, so that they would not want food, and then on the days in between they would stop playing and eat.
Eighteen years passed in this way, and there was still no end to their troubles; in fact, they just got worse. Then their king divided the whole population into two groups and drew lots to decide which group would stay in Lydia and which would emigrate. He appointed himself the ruler of those who were to stay there, and he put his son, who was called Tyrrhenus, in command of the emigrants. The group whose lot it was to leave their country made their way down to Smyrna, where they built ships for themselves. They put on board all the equipment they might need and sailed away in search of land and livelihood. Their journey took them past a number of peoples, but eventually they reached the Ombricians, where they founded settlements and still live to this day. But they changed their name and instead of ‘Lydians’ they named themselves after the king’s son, who had led them there—that is, they made up a name for themselves based on his and called themselves Tyrrhenians. So the Lydians were reduced to slavery under the Persians.
[95] The next task of this account of ours is to learn more about Cyrus, the man who destroyed Croesus’ empire, and about how the Persians came to be the leading race in Asia. My version will be based on what certain Persians say, those who seek to tell the truth rather than exalt Cyrus’ achievements. But I know of three other versions of the Cyrus story.
Assyrian dominance of inland Asia had lasted for 520 years when the Medes first rebelled against them. In fact, their war of independence against the Assyrians improved them; they cast off the yoke of slavery and became free men. Their example was later followed by all the rest of the peoples who made up the Assyrian empire.
[96] After gaining their independence, however, the mainland peoples all returned to a state of tyranny. There was a clever Mede called Deioces (whose father’s name was Phraortes), who had designs on becoming a tyrant. This is what he did. Deioces was already a person of some standing in his village (the Medes used to live in village communities), and now he began to practise integrity in a more wholehearted and thorough fashion—and did so, what is more, even though there was at the time considerable lawlessness throughout Media, because he was well aware of the incompatibility of lawlessness and justice. The Medes from his village noticed his conduct and appointed him their judge, and he did in fact behave with integrity and honesty, since he was courting power. This conduct of his earned him a great deal of praise from his fellow citizens—so much so that his reputation for being the only man to give fair judgements spread to the other villages. When people there heard about Deioces, they began to go to him and let him judge their cases too, and they were happy to do so, because they had previously met with unfair judgements; eventually, he was the only one they ever turned to.
[97] The number of people coming to him was constantly increasing, as they heard that the truth determined the outcome of the cases he tried. When Deioces realized that everything was being referred to him, he started to refuse to take the seat where he had previously sat to deliver his verdicts, and he said that he would no longer try cases, on the grounds that it was doing him no good to spend his days hearing others’ cases to the neglect of his own affairs. When theft and lawlessness returned to the villages, and on a far greater scale than before, the Medes met and considered what action to take under the circumstances. I suspect that Deioces’ supporters played a major part in this debate. ‘The country is ungovernable’, they said, ‘on our current system, so let’s make one of us king. Then the country will be well governed and we’ll be able to concentrate on our jobs instead of losing our homes thanks to lawlessness.’ That was more or less the argument which convinced them of the need for monarchy.
[98] They were immediately faced with the question of whom to appoint as king. Everyone was full of praise for Deioces and wholeheartedly endorsed his nomination, until at length they agreed that he should be their king. He ordered them to build him a palace fit for a king and to assign him personal guards for his protection, and the Medes did so: they built him a large, secure residence in a part of the country he designated, and they let him pick his personal guards from among the whole Median population. Once power was in his hands, Deioces insisted that the Medes build a single city and maintain this one place, which involved caring less for their other communities. The Medes obeyed him in this too; they built the place which is now known as Ecbatana—a huge, impregnable stronghold consisting of concentric circles of defensive walls. This stronghold is designed so that each successive circle is higher than the one below it just by the height of its bastions. This design is helped, of course, to a certain extent by the fact that the place is on a hill, but it was also deliberately made that way. There are seven circles altogether, and the innermost one contains the royal palace and the treasuries. The largest of the walls is approximately the same size as the wall around Athens. The bastions of the outer five circles have all been painted various colours—first white, then black, red, blue, and orange. But as for the bastions of the last two circles, the first are covered in silver and the second in gold.
[99] So Deioces had this stronghold built for himself, surrounding his own residence, but he told the whole population to build their houses outside the stronghold. Once the building programme was completed, Deioces was the first to establish the following rules: no one was to enter into the king’s presence, but all business was to be conducted through messengers; the king was to be seen by no one; and furthermore absolutely no one was to commit the offence of laughing or spitting in the king’s presence. The reason he instituted this grandiose system of how to behave in relation to himself was to prevent any of his peers seeing him. They had been brought up with him, their lineage was no worse than his, and they were just as brave as he was, so he was worried that if they saw him they might get irritated and conspire against him; on the other hand, if they could not see him, they might think that he had changed.
[100] Once he had established this system and had used his position as tyrant to protect himself, he became a harsh champion of justice. People used to write their suits down and send them in to him, and then he would assess them and send his verdicts back out. That was how he dealt with lawsuits. Another system he instituted was that if he heard that an offence had been committed, he would have the perpetrator brought to him and then inflict on him the punishment the crime deserved. And he had people spying and listening for him throughout his kingdom.
[101] Anyway, Deioces united the Median people (but only the Median people) and ruled over it. The Medes consist of the following tribes: the Busae, Paretacenians, Struchates, Arizanti, Budians, and Magi. These are all the tribes of the Medes there are.
[102] Deioces ruled for fifty-three years and then, after his death, his son Phraortes succeeded to the kingdom. Phraortes, however, was not satisfied with ruling Media alone. He made war on Persia, which was only the first country he attacked—and the first he made a subject state. Afterwards, with two strong peoples under his command, he conquered Asia tribe by tribe. Eventually his campaigns brought him into conflict with Assyria, and in particular those of the Assyrians who held Ninus. Although these Assyrians had formerly controlled the whole country, they had subsequently been abandoned by their allies, who all rebelled from them. Nevertheless, they were still prosperous, and in his war against them a major part of Phraortes’ army was wiped out, and he himself was killed, having reigned for twenty-two years.
[103] After Phraortes’ death, Cyaxares became king; he was Phraortes’ son and Deioces’ grandson, and to judge by the stories, he was far more warlike than even his predecessors. He was the first to divide his Asian troops into regiments and to make separate units out of the spearmen, archers, and horsemen, who had previously all been jumbled up indiscriminately. He is the one who was fighting with the Lydians when the eclipse occurred, and who united the whole of inland Asia—the part beyond the River Halys—under his control. Then he gathered all his subjects together and marched on Ninus, to take revenge for his father’s defeat. He intended to destroy Ninus, and he did defeat the Assyrians in battle, but during his siege of the city he was attacked by a huge Scythian army, led by their king Madyes the son of Protothyes. The Scythians had driven the Cimmerians out of Europe and, as the Cimmerians fled into Asia, the Scythians followed them. That is how they came to invade Asia and in due course to reach Median territory.
[104] From Lake Maeetis to the River Phasis and Colchis is a thirty-day journey for a man travelling light, and then it does not take long to cross over from Colchis to Median territory. There is only one race in between, the Saspeires, and Median territory begins immediately after theirs. However, this was not the path of the Scythian invasion; they turned aside and took the much longer upper route, with the Caucasian mountains on their right. Then the Medes and the Scythians clashed; the Medes lost the battle, their empire crumbled and the Scythians occupied the whole of Asia.
[105] From there they marched on Egypt. When they reached Syrian Palestine, the Egyptian king Psammetichus came to meet them. With a combination of bribery and entreaty he persuaded them not to go any further and they turned back. On their way back they came to the town of Ascalon in Syria. Most of the Scythians bypassed the town without doing it any harm, but a few of them, who had fallen behind the main body, plundered the sanctuary of Heavenly Aphrodite. As I learnt by enquiry, this sanctuary is the oldest of all the sanctuaries of Heavenly Aphrodite. Even the temple on Cyprus was founded from this one, as the Cyprians themselves acknowledge, and the one on Cythera was founded by Phoenicians who came from this part of the world—that is, from Syria. The goddess afflicted the Scythians who plundered her temple in Ascalon and all their descendants for ever with hermaphroditism. And so, as well as admitting that this is why they suffer from this disease, the Scythians also tell visitors to their country that they can see the condition of these people, whom the Scythians call enareis.*
[106] The Scythian domination of Asia lasted twenty-eight years, and their expulsion came about because of their abusive and disdainful attitude. It was not just that they used to exact a tax which they imposed on every single individual, but also that, as if the tax was not enough, they used to ride around and plunder people’s belongings. Cyaxares and the Medes invited a great many of them to a feast, got them drunk, and then killed them. So the Medes regained their empire and took control again of the same peoples as before. They also took Ninus (I will explain how elsewhere) and subdued all of Assyria except for Babylon and its territory. Some time later Cyaxares died, after a reign of forty years (including the years of Scythian domination).
[107] Cyaxares’ son Astyages succeeded to the kingdom. Now, he had a daughter called Mandane, and he dreamt that she urinated so much that she not only filled his city, but even flooded the whole of Asia. He described this dream to some of the Magi who could interpret dreams, and the details of what they told him frightened him. The time came when Mandane was old enough to marry. Although there were Medes of his rank, his fear of the dream made him refuse to marry her to any of them; instead, he gave her to a Persian called Cambyses, whom he found to be of noble lineage and peaceful behaviour, although he regarded him as the social inferior by far of a Mede of the middle rank.
[108] A few months after Mandane married Cambyses, Astyages had another dream in which a vine grew from Mandane’s genitals and overshadowed the whole of Asia. He told the dreaminterpreters what he had seen and then had his daughter, who was pregnant, sent from Persia. When she came, he kept a close watch on her, because he wanted to kill the child she was carrying; for the Magi had interpreted his dream to mean that his daughter’s offspring would rule in his place. So that was what Astyages was guarding against. When Cyrus was born, Astyages summoned a relative of his called Harpagus; there was no one among the Medes he trusted more, and Harpagus was the steward of all his property. ‘Harpagus,’ he said, ‘you should never disregard any job I ask you to do for me, nor should you betray me and side with others rather than me: you would be encompassing your own downfall later. I want you to get the baby Mandane bore, take him to your own home, and kill him. How you bury the body is up to you.’
‘My lord,’ Harpagus replied, ‘you have never detected the slightest fault in me in the past, and I am constantly alert to the danger of offending you at any time in the future too. If this is what you would like to happen, it is my duty to serve and obey.’
[109] That was the reply Harpagus gave. The child was handed over to him, dressed for its death, and he set off weeping for home. When he got there he told his wife everything that Astyages had said.
‘And what do you think you’re going to do?’ she asked him.
‘Not what Astyages told me,’ he replied. ‘Even if he gets even more deranged and demented than he is now, I won’t go along with his plan or serve him in this kind of murder. There are plenty of reasons why I won’t kill the child, not the least of which is that he’s a relative of mine. Also, Astyages is old now, but has no male offspring. Suppose, when he dies, that the tyranny devolves on to Mandane, whose son he is now using me to kill. The only possible outcome for me will be that my life will be in danger. Still, for the sake of my own safety, the child has to die, but it must be one of Astyages’ men who commits the murder and not one of mine.’
[110] No sooner said than done. He sent a message to a man called Mitradates, who of all Astyages’ herdsmen was the one who, Harpagus knew, pastured his cattle in countryside that particularly suited his purpose—that is, in mountains full of wild animals. He lived with another slave, his wife, whose name, translated into Greek, was Cyno or ‘bitch’, because her Median name was Spaco, and the Median word for a female dog is spaka. The foothills of the mountains, where this herdsman grazed his cattle, are north of Ecbatana in the direction of the Euxine Sea. That part of Media, where it borders on the territory of the Saspeires, is very mountainous, high, and wooded, whereas the whole of the rest of the country is flat. The herdsman responded to Harpagus’ summons very promptly, and when he arrived Harpagus said, ‘Astyages wants this child dead as quickly as possible, so it is his command that you take it and leave it in the most remote part of the mountains. He also told me to tell you that if you do not kill the child, but keep it alive in some way, he will put you to death in the most terrible fashion. And I have been ordered to see the child exposed.’
[111] The herdsman listened to what Harpagus had to say, picked up the child, and retraced his steps back to his hut. Now, this same herdsman’s wife was in fact due to go into labour any day, and by a kind of providence she gave birth while the herdsman was travelling to the city. Each of them was concerned for the other: the herdsman was worried about his wife going into labour and she was worried about the unusual summons her husband had received from Harpagus. When he got back and she saw him unexpectedly standing there, she was the first to speak; she asked him why Harpagus had been so eager to send for him. He replied, ‘My dear, the things I’ve seen and heard while I was in the city! I wish I hadn’t. It should never have happened to our masters. The whole of Harpagus’ household was given over to weeping and wailing. I didn’t know what to make of it, but I went inside. As soon as I was inside, I saw a baby lying there wriggling and bawling, wearing golden jewellery and fancy clothes. Harpagus saw me and told me to pick the baby up straight away and to take it with me and leave it somewhere in the mountains, wherever there are the most wild animals. He said that these orders came to me from Astyages, who had also threatened me, repeating over and over what would happen to me if I didn’t carry them out. So I picked the baby up and took it with me. I imagined that the mother was one of the house-slaves; I certainly couldn’t have guessed where it really came from. But I was surprised to see the gold and clothes it was wearing, and then there was the open weeping and wailing in Harpagus’ house. Anyway, an attendant escorted me out of the city and handed the baby over to me, and as soon as we set out he told me the whole story. It turns out that it is actually the child of Mandane the daughter of Astyages and Cambyses the son of Cyrus, and Astyages told him to kill it. And now here it is.’
[112] With these words, the herdsman uncovered the child and showed it to his wife. When she saw the healthy, good-looking baby, she burst into tears, flung her arms around her husband’s knees and begged him not to expose it on the mountainside under any circumstances. He said that he had no choice in the matter, because Harpagus was going to send people to check up on them, and that he would die a horrible death if he did not carry out his instructions. The woman could not win her husband over, so she tried a different approach and said, ‘Since I can’t persuade you not to expose the child, here’s what I suggest you do, if it’s absolutely inevitable that the exposed infant is to be seen. You see, I gave birth too, but it was stillborn. So why don’t you take my baby and leave it out there, and we can bring up the son of Astyages’ daughter as if he were our own? If you do this, you won’t be caught deceiving our masters, and the plan also works well for us because the baby which is already dead will receive a royal burial and the one which is still alive will not lose his life.’
[113] The herdsman thought that his wife’s suggestion was excellent, under the circumstances, and he immediately set about putting it into practice. The child he had brought to kill he handed over to his wife, while he took his own dead child and put it in the container he had used to carry the other one. Then he dressed it up in all the other baby’s clothes, took it to the most remote part of the mountains, and left it there. Two days after exposing the child, the herdsman travelled to the city, leaving one of the underherdsmen to guard it; he went to Harpagus and said that he was ready to show the baby’s body to him. Harpagus sent his most trusted personal guards, and they carried out an inspection on his behalf and buried the herdsman’s child. So the one child lay in its grave, while the other—the one who was later called Cyrus—was adopted and brought up by the herdsman’s wife, although she called him something else, not Cyrus.
[114] Now, the boy’s identity was revealed when he was 10 years old. This, or something like this, is what happened. He was in the same village, the one where the royal herds were, playing with other boys his age in the road. The game involved the boys choosing someone to be their king, and they chose him—the one they called the herdsman’s son. He gave them various jobs to do: some built houses, some formed his bodyguard, one of them was the King’s Eye, and one of them was privileged enough to be allowed to bring messages in to him. To each of them he assigned a task. Now, one of his playmates, who was the son of an eminent Mede called Artembares, refused to carry out one of Cyrus’ orders, so Cyrus told the other boys to grab him. They did so, and Cyrus gave the boy a very severe thrashing. The boy was furious at having received what he regarded as a humiliating punishment, and as soon as he was free he went to the city and complained to his father of the way Cyrus had treated him—except that he did not say it was Cyrus, because that was not yet his name; he said that it was the son of Astyages’ herdsman. Artembares went in an angry frame of mind to Astyages and told him about the horrific treatment his son—whom he had brought with him—had received. He showed Astyages the boy’s shoulders and said, ‘My lord, look at the insolent way we have been treated by one of your slaves, the son of a herdsman.’
[115] Astyages listened to him and saw the evidence. He decided to punish the boy because of Artembares’ position in society, and so he sent for the herdsman and the child. When they both arrived, Astyages fixed his gaze on Cyrus and said, ‘So did you assault this boy? Did you—and we know what your father is—did you assault this man’s son, the son of the principal man in my kingdom?’
‘Yes, master, I did,’ Cyrus replied, ‘and I was right to do so. You see, some of the village boys, including him’—Cyrus pointed to Artembares’ son—‘were playing a game and made me their king, since they thought I had what it takes to do the job. All the other boys did what I told them to do, but he went on refusing to do what he was told and ignoring me, until he was punished for it. If that was wrong and I deserve to get into trouble for it, here I am.’
[116] While the boy was speaking, Astyages began to feel that he knew who he was. The boy’s features seemed to resemble his own, he spoke like a free man rather than a slave, and his age fitted in with the amount of time that had passed since the exposure of the infant. He was so astonished that for a while he could not speak, but at last, with some difficulty, he pulled himself together. He wanted to send Artembares away in order to get the herdsman by himself and interrogate him, so he said: ‘Artembares, I will take care of this matter, and I will do so in a way that will leave you and your son no grounds for complaint.’ So he dismissed Artembares and told his attendants to take Cyrus inside. When he and the herdsman were alone, just the two of them together, Astyages asked how he came to have the boy and who it was who gave him to him. The herdsman replied that the boy was his own son and that the boy’s mother was still with him. Astyages told him that he was stupid to want to bring terrible punishment down on himself, and at the same time he gave his guards the signal to seize the man. As he was being led away to torture, he began to tell the truth. Starting from the beginning, he gave an honest and thorough account of what had happened, and finally begged and beseeched Astyages to pardon him.
[117] Astyages was not particularly concerned with the herdsman, now that he had explained what had actually happened, but he was extremely displeased with Harpagus and he told his personal guards to summon him. When Harpagus arrived Astyages asked, ‘Harpagus, how exactly did you kill that child I entrusted to you—I mean the one born to my daughter?’
When Harpagus saw the herdsman inside, he decided that his best course was not to lie, in case further questioning caught him out. ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘once I had taken charge of the baby, I got to wondering whether there was a way for me to carry out your wishes and yet, without giving you any reason to find fault with me, to avoid being branded an assassin by your daughter and by myself too. This is what I did. I summoned that herdsman there, gave him the baby, and told him that it was you who had ordered it killed. This at least was no more than the truth, since those were your instructions. But I handed the baby over to him with express instructions to expose it in a remote part of the mountains and to stay there and watch over it until it was dead, and I accompanied these instructions with all kinds of threats against him if he failed to do what he had been told. Once he had carried out my orders and the child was dead, I sent my most trusted eunuchs and they examined the corpse for me and buried him for me. That is what happened in this matter, my lord; that is how the child met his death.’
[118] Harpagus had told him the truth, but Astyages was furious at what at happened. He did not let Harpagus know how angry he was with him, however. First, he repeated for Harpagus’ benefit the herdsman’s side of the story, and then, once he had been through the whole sequence of events, he finished by telling him that the boy was still alive and that it was all for the best. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘I didn’t feel at all good about what I’d done to the boy, and my daughter’s hostility towards me was very upsetting. But as it happens, everything has turned out fine. So why don’t you send your son to meet this young newcomer, and then join me for dinner? We will celebrate the sacrifice of thanksgiving I am going to make to the gods who are responsible for keeping the boy safe.’
[119] At these words, Harpagus prostrated himself before the king. He was encouraged by the thought that his offence had turned out to be useful and that in view of the fortunate results he had been invited to dinner, and in this frame of mind he set off home. Now, he had just the one son, a boy of about thirteen years, and as soon as he got home, he sent him to Astyages, with instructions to go there and do whatever he was told. Then in his delight he gave his wife the good news.
However, when Harpagus’ son arrived, Astyages murdered him and dismembered him. He baked some of his flesh, stewed the rest, prepared it all for the table, and kept it ready. The time for the meal arrived, and Harpagus and all the other guests presented themselves. The tables were laden; Astyages and the others were served with mutton, but Harpagus was given his own son’s flesh to eat—everything except the head, hands and feet, which were lying covered up in a dish elsewhere. When he thought that Harpagus had eaten his fill, Astyages asked him if he had enjoyed the meal. Harpagus said that he had, very much so. Then the servants who had been given the job brought in the boy’s head, hands, and feet, all still covered up. Standing before Harpagus, they asked him to take the lid off the dish and to help himself to anything he wanted. Harpagus did as they suggested; he uncovered the dish and saw his son’s remains. However, he did not allow the sight to disconcert him, but he retained his self-control. Astyages asked him if he recognized the creature whose flesh he had eaten. Harpagus replied that he did and that the king could do no wrong. Then he picked up what was left of his son’s body and returned home—in order to gather the remains together and bury them all there, I suppose.
[120] That was how Astyages punished Harpagus. What should he do with Cyrus, though? He summoned exactly the same Magi who had given him the earlier† interpretation of his dream and when they came he asked them what they made of the dream for him. Their response was the same as before: they said that if the boy had remained alive rather than having already died, he would inevitably have become king. ‘The boy is alive,’ Astyages replied. ‘He didn’t die, and he lives out in the country. The boys in his village made him their king, and he accomplished everything by acting just like a real king. He gave everyone their various jobs to do—as his bodyguards, porters, heralds, and so on—and ruled over them. Now, what does this seem to you to suggest?’
The Magi said, ‘If the boy is alive and ruled as a king, although everyone concerned was acting in ignorance, that need not worry you. In fact, it should give you grounds for confidence, because he won’t gain power a second time. It is not unknown for even our prophecies to be fulfilled in trivial matters, and things like dreams may come true in an insignificant manner.’
Astyages replied as follows: ‘That’s very much what I think too. Now that the boy has been called a king, my dream has come true and this child is no longer a threat to me. All the same, I’d appreciate your advice, once you’ve given the matter due consideration, as to what course of action will best preserve my house—and keep you safe too.’
‘My lord,’ the Magi said, ‘it’s true that the prosperity of your rule is very important to us as well, because the alternative is for power to fall into foreign hands. If it devolves on to this boy, who is Persian, we Medes will be enslaved by the Persians and will become worthless outcasts. But you are one of us. As long as you are king, then, power is partly ours too, and we have important standing in society thanks to you. We are bound to do all we can to look out for you and your rule. If we had seen anything alarming in the present situation, we would have told you all about it in advance. In fact, though, we ourselves are encouraged by the fact that the dream has spent itself in an insignificant way, and we see no reason why you shouldn’t have the same attitude too. So send this boy out of your sight; dismiss him to Persia and to his parents.’
[121] Astyages was very pleased when he heard this advice and he sent for Cyrus. ‘Child,’ he said, ‘once I saw something in a dream. Now, what I saw didn’t come to pass, but I was worried enough about it to have tried to wrong you. Still, it was your destiny to survive. So now go in peace to Persia, and I will detail an escort to accompany you. There you will find a father and mother who are quite different from Mitradates the cowherd and his wife.’
[122] With these words, Astyages dismissed Cyrus. He returned to Cambyses’ house, where his parents took him in. When they found out who he was, they were overjoyed, because they had been certain that he had died all that time ago. They asked him how he had survived. ‘Until just now,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t have been able to answer. I would have been way off the mark, but while travelling here I heard all about my personal misfortunes. I mean, I was convinced that I was the son of Astyages’ herdsman, but on the way here the people who were escorting me told me the whole story.’ He explained that he had been brought up by the herdsman’s wife, and he went on praising her throughout his story and referring to Cyno, the bitch. His parents seized on this name and, because they wanted the Persians to think of their son’s survival as even more miraculous than it was, they started spreading the rumour that after his exposure Cyrus had been reared by a bitch.
[123] That was how this rumour started. Now, Cyrus grew up to be the bravest and best-liked man of his generation, so Harpagus made overtures to him by sending him gifts. Harpagus wanted to make Astyages pay for what he had done, but he did not think that he, an ordinary citizen, had the resources to bring about his punishment by himself. He watched Cyrus growing up, however, and set about cultivating an alliance with him, because he thought Cyrus’ treatment at Astyages’ hands was comparable with his own. Even before this, though, he had taken certain steps: in view of Astyages’ oppression of the Medes, Harpagus had met with all the most important Medes, one by one, and had tried to convince them of the necessity of setting up Cyrus as their leader and bringing Astyages’ reign to an end. Once he had successfully accomplished this and all was ready, he wanted to let Cyrus know his plan. Cyrus was living in Persia, however, where the roads were guarded, so there was only one way for Harpagus to get the message through. The method he devised involved the clever use of a hare. He slit open its stomach and, leaving it just as it was, without removing any of its fur, he inserted a letter in which he had written down his ideas; then he sewed up the hare’s stomach again. He gave his most loyal house-slave nets, to make him look like a hunter, and sent him off to Persia, with verbal instructions to give Cyrus the hare and to tell him to open it up himself, when there was no one else with him.
[124] Everything went according to plan; Cyrus received the hare and slit it open. He found the letter inside, took it out, and read it. The message was as follows: ‘The gods must be watching over you, son of Cambyses, or else you would not have been so lucky. You should make your murderer Astyages pay. I call him your murderer because that is what he wanted you—dead—and only the gods and I kept you alive. Anyway, I’m sure you’ve known for a long time all about what happened to you and about how I suffered at Astyages’ hands because I refused to kill you and gave you to the herdsman instead. If you take my advice, you will rule all the territory that Astyages now rules. Persuade the Persians to revolt and march on Media. It will all work as you want, whether the commander appointed by Astyages to take charge of the forces ranged against you is myself or some other eminent Mede, because they will be the first to desert from him, come over to your side, and try to bring about his downfall. Everything is ready here, then, so do as I suggest—and don’t delay.’
[125] Once he had received this message, Cyrus began to think up a subterfuge to persuade the Persians to rebel, and he came up with a very neat plan, which he proceeded to put into effect. He wrote what he had in mind in a letter and called the Persians to a meeting, where he unrolled the letter and read out that Astyages had appointed him commander of the Persian forces. ‘And now, men of Persia,’ he said, ‘I command you all to present yourselves here with scythes.’
That was Cyrus’ order. Now, a large number of tribes go to make up the Persian race, and not all of them were convened by Cyrus and persuaded to rebel from Median rule—only those on whom all the other tribes depended, namely the Pasargadae, the Maraphians, and the Maspians. The Pasargadae are the noblest of these peoples and include the clan of the Achaemenidae, which provides Persia with its kings. The other Persian tribes are as follows: the Panthialaei, Derusiaei, and Germanii (who all work the land), and the Daï, Mardians, Dropici, and Sagartians (who are nomadic).
[126] So they all came, bringing their scythes with them. Now, there was a patch in that region of Persia, about eighteen or twenty stades on each side, which was full of thorny shrubs. Cyrus ordered them to clear this area in one day. Once the Persians had completed their assigned task, he next told them to present themselves on the following day fresh from bathing. Meanwhile, Cyrus collected all his father’s goats, sheep, and cattle, slaughtered them, and got ready to entertain the Persian army; he also supplied them with wine and the most enjoyable food available. Next day, when the Persians arrived, he provided couches for them in the meadow to lie on and treated them to a feast.
When they had finished eating, Cyrus asked them whether they preferred yesterday’s programme or today’s. They replied that there was an enormous difference between the two: yesterday’s events held nothing but trouble, while today’s were nothing but good. Cyrus seized on this remark and revealed his plan in its entirety. ‘Men of Persia,’ he said, ‘this is the situation you’re in. If you choose to take my advice, you can enjoy the advantages you have enjoyed today and thousands of others too, without having to work like a slave to get them. If you choose not to take my advice, however, your life will consist of countless chores like yesterday’s. So do as I suggest: free yourselves from slavery. I believe that I was destined by providence to undertake this task, and I am sure that you are at least the equals of the Medes in everything, including warfare. Since this is so, there is no time to waste: rise up against Astyages!’
[127] The Persians had hated Median rule for a long time, so now that they had found a leader, they enthusiastically went about gaining their independence. When Astyages found out what Cyrus was up to, he sent a message ordering him to appear before him. Cyrus told the messenger, however, to inform Astyages that he would come sooner than Astyages wanted. When he received this message, Astyages armed all the Medes and, in his delusion, appointed Harpagus the commander of his forces, forgetting what he had done to him. So the Medes marched out and engaged the Persians, but only some of them—those who were not privy to the conspiracy—began to fight, while others deserted to the Persians, and the majority deliberately fought below their best and fled.
[128] As soon as Astyages found out that the Median army was in shameful disarray, he sent a threatening message to Cyrus, which read: ‘Cyrus will still regret it.’ His next actions were first to impale the Magian dream-interpreters who had persuaded him to let Cyrus go, and then to arm the Medes who were left in the city, however young or old they were, and to lead them out against the Persians. In the ensuing battle, the Medes were defeated. Astyages himself was captured, and he lost all the men he had led out against the Persians.
[129] Harpagus came to where Astyages was being held prisoner to gloat over him and mock him. He lashed him with his tongue in a number of ways, and also, remembering the dinnerparty at which he had served him with his son’s flesh, he asked him what it was like being a slave rather than a king. Astyages looked at him and asked him in return whether he was taking credit for what Cyrus had achieved. Harpagus replied that since he had written the letter, the result could fairly be attributed to him. Astyages pointed out that he had just admitted to being the most stupid and unjust person alive—the most stupid because if he really was responsible for what had happened, he could have become king himself instead of presenting someone else with the power, and the most unjust because if it was absolutely necessary for him to confer the kingship on someone else and not to take it for himself, it would have been more just to confer this blessing on a Mede rather than a Persian, yet because of that dinner he had enslaved the Medes. The result was that the Medes had through no fault of their own exchanged mastery for slavery, while the Persians, who had previously been the slaves of the Medes, had now become their masters.
[130] So this is how Astyages’ reign came to an end, after he had ruled for thirty-five years. Thanks to his cruel behaviour the Medes became subject to the Persians after having dominated that part of Asia which lies beyond the River Halys for 128 years, not counting the period of Scythian control. Later, they regretted what they had done and rebelled against Darius, but the rebellion was put down again when they were defeated in battle. At the time in question, however, during Astyages’ reign, the Persians under Cyrus rose up against the Medes, and they have ruled Asia ever since. Cyrus did no further harm to Astyages, but kept him at his court until his death.
So that is the story of Cyrus’ birth and upbringing, and that is how he came to be king. Later, he defeated Croesus (who was the aggressor in the affair, as I have already explained), and so gained control over the whole of Asia.
[131] Now, the Persians, to my certain knowledge, have the following practices. It is not one of their customs to construct statues, temples, and altars; in fact, they count those who do so as fools, because (I suppose) they do not anthropomorphize the gods as the Greeks do. Their worship of Zeus consists in going up to the highest mountain peaks and performing sacrifices; they call the whole vault of heaven Zeus. They also sacrifice to the sun and the moon, and to earth, fire, water, and the winds. Originally, these were the only deities to whom they offered sacrifices, but since then they have also learnt from the Assyrians and Arabians to sacrifice to the Heavenly Aphrodite. Aphrodite is called Mylitta by the Assyrians, Alilat by the Arabians, and Mitra by the Persians.
[132] The way the Persians sacrifice to these deities is as follows. They do not construct altars or light fires when they are going to perform a sacrifice, nor do they use libations, reed-pipes, garlands, or barley. Whenever anyone decides to perform a sacrifice to one of the gods, he takes the animal to a purified place and invokes the deity, wreathing his tiara (usually with myrtle). He† is not allowed to exclude others and pray for benefits for himself alone; he prays for the prosperity of the king and the whole Persian race, since he is, after all, a member of the Persian race himself. Once he has chopped up the limbs of the sacrificial victim into pieces and boiled the meat, he spreads out the freshest grass he can find—usually clover—and places all the meat on it. When this arrangement is in place, a Magus comes up and chants a theogony—at least, that is what they say the song is about. There always has to be a Magus present in order for a sacrifice to take place. After a short pause, the person who has performed the sacrifice takes the meat away and does whatever he wants with it.
[133] It is Persian custom to regard a person’s birthday as the most important day of the year for him. They consider it their duty to serve larger quantities at dinner on their birthday than they do on any other day. Well-off Persians serve an ox, a horse, a camel, or a donkey, roasted whole in an oven; poor Persians serve some smaller creature from their flocks. They do not eat many main courses as a rule, but they eat a lot of extra courses, and not all together. That is why the Persians say that Greeks are still hungry at the end of a meal: it is because nothing worth while is served as an extra after a meal; if it were, the Persians say, the Greeks would not stop eating. They are extremely fond of wine, and they are not supposed to vomit or urinate when anyone else can see. Although they have to be careful about all that, it is usual for them to be drunk when they are debating the most important issues. However, any decision they reach is put to them again on the next day, when they are sober, by the head of the household where the debate takes place; if they still approve of it when they are sober, it is adopted, but otherwise they forget about it. And any issues they debate when sober are reconsidered by them when they are drunk.
[134] There is a way of telling whether or not two Persians who meet on the street are of the same social standing. If they are, then instead of saying hello to each other, they kiss each other on the lips; if either of them is from a slightly lower rank, they kiss each other on the cheeks; and if one of them is the other’s inferior by a long way, he falls to the ground and prostrates himself in front of the other person.
After themselves, they hold their immediate neighbours in the highest regard, then those who live the next furthest away, and so on in order of proximity; so they have the least respect for those who live furthest away from their own land. The reason for this is that they regard themselves as by far the best people in the world in all respects, and others as gradually decreasing in goodness, so that those who live the furthest away from them are the worst people in the world. During the period of Median dominance, there was even a hierarchy of rulership among the various peoples. The Medes ruled all of them at once, including their immediate neighbours, who ruled their neighbours, who in turn ruled the people next to them. The same principle governs the way the Persians assign respect, because their race consists of a series of rulerships and mandates.
[135] Nevertheless, the Persians adopt more foreign customs than anyone else. For example, they wear Median clothes because they consider them to be more attractive than their own, and they wear Egyptian breastplates for fighting. Also, they learn and then acquire the habit of all kinds of divertissements from various parts of the world, including the practice of having sex with boys, which they learnt from the Greeks. Every Persian man has a number of wives, but far more concubines.
[136] After bravery in battle, manliness is proved above all by producing plenty of sons, and every year the king rewards the person producing the most; they think that quantity constitutes strength. Their sons are educated from the time they are five years old until they are twenty, but they study only three things: horsemanship, archery, and honesty. Until they are five years old, they are not taken into their fathers’ sight, but live with the women. This is to prevent a father being grieved by the death of a son during the period of his early upbringing.
[137] I think this custom of theirs is very good, and I also approve of the fact that no one, not even the king, can execute anyone who has been accused of only a single crime, nor can any other Persian do irreversible harm to any of his house-slaves for committing a single crime. But if after due consideration he finds that the crimes committed outweigh in number and in gravity the services rendered, then he can give way to anger.
They say that no one has ever killed his own father or mother. They insist that all such incidents would inevitably be found on examination to have been the work of a child substituted for a genuine child, or of a bastard; they simply deny the plausibility of a full parent being killed by his own child.
[138] Anything they are not allowed to do they are also forbidden to talk about. The most disgraceful thing, in their view, is telling lies, and the next most disgraceful thing is being in debt; but the main reason (among many others) for the proscription of debt is that, according to the Persians, someone who owes money is obliged to tell lies as well.
If any town-dweller contracts any form of leprosy, he is not allowed back inside the town and he is forbidden to have any dealings with other Persians. They say that the disease is a result of having offended the sun. Any foreigner who contracts it is driven out of the country by crowds of people, and so are white doves, which are accused of the same offence.
Because rivers are objects of particular reverence for them, they do not urinate or spit into them, nor do they wash their hands there or allow anyone else to either.
[139] It also happens to be the case—as I have noticed, even though the Persians themselves have not remarked on it—that their names (which reflect their physical characteristics and their prestige) all end with the same letter—the one the Dorians call ‘san’ and the Ionians ‘sigma’. Anyone who looks into the matter will find that it is not merely common for Persian names to have the same ending, but universal.
[140] I can mention these Persian customs with confidence because I know about them, but there are others, to do with the dead, which are talked about obliquely, as if they were secrets. It is said that the body of a Persian man is not buried until it has been mauled by a bird or a dog. I know for certain that the Magi do this, because they let it happen in public; but the Persians cover corpses in wax before burying them in the ground.
Magian customs are very different from everyone else’s, and especially those of the priests in Egypt, in that while the latter avoid the contamination of killing any living thing (except for the purposes of ritual sacrifice), Magi with their own hands kill everything except dogs and people; in fact, they turn it into a major achievement and indiscriminately kill ants, snakes, and anything else which crawls on the ground or flies in the air. As far as this custom is concerned, it has always been that way and we can leave it to continue. I now resume my earlier narrative.
[141] The first thing the Ionians and Aeolians did after the Lydians had been defeated by the Persians was send a delegation to Cyrus at Sardis, since they wanted the terms of their subjection to him to be the same as they had been with Croesus. Cyrus listened to the delegation’s suggestions and then told them a story. A pipe-player once saw some fish in the sea, he said, and played his pipes in the hope that they would come out on to the shore. His hopes came to nothing, so he grabbed a net, cast it over a large number of the fish, and hauled them in. When he saw the fish flopping about, he said to them, ‘It’s no good dancing now, because you weren’t willing to come out dancing when I played my pipes.’ The reason Cyrus told this story to the Ionians and Aeolians was that the Ionians had in fact refused to listen to Cyrus earlier, when he had sent a message asking them to rise up against Croesus, whereas now that the war was over and won, they were ready to do what he wanted. So that was his angry response to them. When his message got back to the Ionians in the cities, they all built defensive walls and met in the Panionium—all of them, that is, except the Milesians, who were the only ones whose treaty with Lydia Cyrus renewed. The rest of the Ionians, however, agreed unanimously to send a message to Sparta to ask for help.
[142] In terms of climate and weather, there is no fairer region in the whole known world than where these Ionians—the ones to whom the Panionium belongs—have founded their communities. There is no comparison between Ionia and the lands to the north and south, some of which suffer from the cold and rain, while others are oppressively hot and dry.
They do not all speak exactly the same language, but there are four different dialects. Miletus is the southernmost Ionian community, followed by Myous and Priene; these places are located in Caria and speak the same dialect as one another. Then there are the Ionian communities in Lydia—Ephesus, Colophon, Lebedus, Teos, Clazomenae, and Phocaea—that share a dialect which is quite different from the one spoken in the places I have already mentioned. There are three further Ionian communities, two of which are situated on islands (namely, Samos and Chios), while the other, Erythrae, is on the mainland. The Chians and Erythraeans speak the same dialect, but the Samians have a dialect which is peculiar to themselves. So these are the four types of dialect spoken there.
[143] Of these Ionian communities, then, the Milesians were out of harm’s reach because of the treaty they had made with Cyrus, and the islanders were in no danger because the Phoenicians were not yet under Persian control and the Persians themselves were not a seafaring race. The split between these Ionians and the rest came about for a single reason and a single reason only. There was a time when the whole Greek race was weak, and the Ionians constituted by far the weakest and most insignificant part of it. Apart from Athens, there was no other city of any distinction. The majority of the Ionians, including the Athenians, avoided the name and did not want to be called ‘Ionian’; even now, in fact, I think most of them feel that the name is degrading. However, these twelve communities were proud of the name and founded for their own exclusive use a sanctuary which they called the Panionium and which they decided not to let any other Ionians use—not that any of them even asked to do so, except the Smyrnans.
[144] The Dorians from the region now known as Five Towns (though it used to be called Six Towns) do much the same. They too make sure that none of their Dorian neighbours are admitted into the Triopian sanctuary; indeed, they even excluded those of their own number who abused the customs of the sanctuary from making use of the place. It has long been the rule that winners in the games sacred to Triopian Apollo were awarded bronze tripods, and that the recipients of these tripods were not allowed to take them out of the sanctuary but had to dedicate them there to the god. Once, however, a man from Halicarnassus, whose name was Agasicles, disregarded the rule after his victory and took his tripod back home, where he nailed it down. For this offence, the five towns—Lindos, Ialysus, Camirus, Cos, and Cnidos—excluded the sixth town, Halicarnassus, from making use of the sanctuary. So that was the penalty imposed by the five towns on the Halicarnassians.
[145] I think that the reason the Ionians formed a league of twelve communities and refused to admit more is that they were also twelvefold when they lived in the Peloponnese, just as the Achaeans (who drove them out of the Peloponnese) are now. The twelve Achaean communities, counting westward from Sicyon, are as follows: Pellene, Aegeira, Aegae (through which flows the River Crathis, which never runs dry and which the river in Italy was named after), Bura, Helice (where the Ionians took refuge after they had been defeated by the Achaeans), Aegium, Rhypes, Patrae, Pharae, Olenus (which is on the River Peirus, a river of some size), Dyme, and finally Tritaeae, which is the only one of these towns which is inland.
[146] These are the twelve divisions of the present-day Achaeans, and they were formerly the twelve divisions of the Ionians, which is why the Ionians created twelve settlements. It is sheer stupidity to say that they did so because they are somehow more Ionian than the rest of the Ionians or have a nobler origin than the others. In the first place, a not insignificant proportion of the citizens of the twelve communities are Abantians from Euboea, who have no right to the name ‘Ionian’; then there is an admixture of Minyans from Orchomenus, Cadmeans, Dryopians, Phocian expatriates, Molossians, Pelasgians from Arcadia, Dorians from Epidaurus, and a number of other peoples. As for those who came from the town hall of Athens and who consider themselves to be the noblest Ionians—well, they did not bring wives with them on their voyage of colonization, but murdered some Carians and took their daughters to be their wives. It is because of this massacre that the women made it a rule (a rule they bound themselves to by oaths and passed on from mother to daughter) never to share a meal with their husbands and never to call out to them by name—these were, after all, the men who had gained them as their wives by murdering their fathers, husbands, and children. These events took place in Miletus.
[147] Moreover, some of these Ionians were ruled by Lycians descended from Glaucus the son of Hippolochus, some by Caucones from Pylos, who were descended from Codrus the son of Melanthus, and some by both at once. All the same, it is true that they adhere to the name ‘Ionian’ more than any other Ionians, so let them have their claim to be pure Ionians. In fact, however, the name applies to everyone who can trace his origin back to Athens and who celebrates the festival of Apaturia, which is celebrated everywhere except at Ephesus and Colophon. The excuse they give for being the only ones not to celebrate the Apaturia is some murder or other.
[148] The Panionium is a sacred place in Mycale; it faces north and is dedicated, by the common consent of the Ionians, to Poseidon of Helicon. Mycale is the west-facing headland jutting out from the mainland towards Samos where the Ionians from the twelve communities used to meet to celebrate a festival to which they gave the name ‘Panionia’. It is a feature not just of Ionian festivals, but of Greek festivals in general, that they all end in the same letter, just like the names of Persians.†
[149] So much for the Ionian communities. The Aeolian ones are as follows: Cyme (that is, ‘Phriconian’ Cyme), Lerisae, New Walls, Temnus, Cilla, Notium, Aegiroessa, Pitane, Aegaeae, Myrina, and Gryneia. These are the eleven original Aeolian communities which remain from the twelve there used to be on the mainland, until one of them, Smyrna, was taken over by Ionians. In actual fact, the land these Aeolians occupy is more fertile than that owned by the Ionians, but it does not have such a good climate.
[150] This is how the Aeolians lost Smyrna. They took in some men from Colophon who had come off worst in a political dispute and had been banished from their homeland. These Colophonian exiles waited until the Smyrnans were involved in a festival to Dionysus outside the town walls, and then closed the gates and took control of the town. Aeolians came from everywhere to help and an agreement was reached whereby if the Ionians returned the Aeolians’ personal effects the Aeolians would abandon Smyrna. Once this agreement had been put into effect, the eleven communities distributed the Smyrnans among themselves and enrolled them in their citizen bodies.
[151] So these are the Aeolian communities on the mainland, apart from the ones around Mount Ida, which form a different unit. As for the island communities, there are five on Lesbos (the sixth town on Lesbos, Arisba, the Methymnans enslaved, despite their common ancestry), one on Tenedos, and another one on the so-called Hundred Islands. The inhabitants of Lesbos and Tenedos had as little to fear as the Ionian islanders, but the rest of the Aeolian communities took a joint decision to fall in behind the leadership of the Ionians.
[152] Matters proceeded apace, and when the messengers sent from Ionia and Aeolis arrived in Sparta, they chose a Phocaean called Pythermus to speak for them all. He wore a purple cloak so as to attract the Spartiates’ attention and get as many of them as possible along to the meeting. He gained an audience and spoke at length, requesting help for their people, but he did not convince the Lacedaemonians, who decided against supporting the Ionians. The Ionian delegation left, but, despite having rejected them, the Lacedaemonians still sent men in a penteconter to reconnoitre Cyrus’ situation and see what was happening in Ionia—at least, that seems to me to have been the purpose of the mission. When these men reached Phocaea they sent to Sardis their most distinguished member, a man called Lacrines, to deliver a message to Cyrus, telling him not to harm any settlement on Greek soil, since the Lacedaemonians would not tolerate it.
[153] Cyrus’ response to this message was reputedly to have asked some Greeks in his entourage who on earth Lacedaemonians were, and how numerous they were, that they addressed him in this way. Once he had been told about them, he is supposed to have replied to the Spartiate agent as follows: ‘I have never yet found occasion to fear the kind of men who set aside a space in the middle of their town where they can meet and make false promises to one another. If I remain healthy, their tongues will be occupied with events at home rather than those in Ionia.’ This was intended by Cyrus as a slur against Greeks in general, because they have town squares where they buy and sell goods, whereas it is not Persian practice to use such places at all and the town square is entirely unknown among them.
Next, Cyrus entrusted Sardis to a Persian called Tabalus, and put a Lydian called Pactyes in charge of collecting Croesus’ gold and that of all the other Lydians, while he himself marched back to Ecbatana, taking Croesus with him. He was not concerned about the Ionians for the time being, because Babylon, the Bactrians, the Sacae, and the Egyptians were all making difficulties for him. These were the people he was intending to lead his army against personally, while he sent another commander against the Ionians.
[154] Once Cyrus had marched away from Sardis, Pactyes led the Lydians in an uprising against Tabalus and Cyrus. He went down to the coast and, since he had all the gold from Sardis, he set about hiring mercenaries and persuading the people living in the coastal region to join his forces. Then he marched against Sardis, trapped Tabalus in the acropolis, and proceeded to lay siege to him there.
[155] The news of these events reached Cyrus on the road and he said to Croesus, ‘When will I be free of this business, Croesus? It doesn’t look as though the Lydians will ever stop making work for me and trouble for themselves. I’m wondering whether it might not be best to reduce them to slavery. At the moment I suppose I’ve behaved like someone who has killed the father but spared the children. It’s true that I have you here beside me, my prisoner, when you were more than a father to the Lydians, but I did give them back their city, and so I’m surprised to find them rebelling.’
Croesus was afraid that Cyrus would drive his people out of Sardis, so faced with this expression of the king’s thoughts he said, ‘My lord, what you’ve said is perfectly reasonable, but you shouldn’t be motivated completely by anger. Don’t turn an ancient city into an empty ruin when it wasn’t to blame for the earlier situation and isn’t now either. I was responsible for the first incident and on my head fell the consequences; as for the current situation, it is Pactyes who has done you wrong, since he was supposed to be your representative in Sardis, so let him pay the penalty to you. You can be lenient towards the Lydians and still issue them a directive to ensure that they never rebel and are no threat to you. Send a message that they are forbidden to own weapons of war, that they are to wear tunics under their coats and slippers on their feet, that they are to take up the cithara and the harp, and that they are to raise their sons to be retailers. Before long, my lord, you will see them become women instead of men, and so there will be no danger of them rising up against you.’
[156] There were three reasons why Croesus put these proposals to Cyrus. First, he was sure that the Lydians would be better off this way than if they were reduced to slavery and sold; second, he was aware that if he did not make a cogent suggestion, he would not persuade Cyrus to change his mind; and third, he was afraid that, if the Lydians escaped the danger they were currently facing, they would at some time in the future rise up against the Persians and be destroyed. Anyway, Cyrus liked the idea; he calmed down and told Croesus that he would do as he suggested. He sent for a Mede called Mazares and told him to repeat Croesus’ proposals to the Lydians as directives, and also to sell into slavery everyone who had joined the Lydian attack on Sardis, except for Pactyes himself, who was at all costs to be brought back to him alive.
[157] Cyrus made these arrangements while he was on the road and then completed his journey to the Persian heartlands. As for Pactyes, when he discovered that an army was bearing down on him, he fled in fear to Cyme. Meanwhile, Mazares the Mede marched to Sardis with some of Cyrus’ troops (not the whole army). The first thing he did, on finding that Pactyes and his forces were no longer there, was force the Lydians to carry out Cyrus’ orders—orders which resulted in a complete alteration of the Lydian lifestyle. Next, he sent men to Cyme to ask the town to surrender Pactyes. The Cymeans decided to seek advice from the god in Branchidae, where there was a long-established oracle which was commonly consulted by all the Ionians and Aeolians. Branchidae is in Milesian territory, overlooking the harbour of Panormus.
[158] So the Cymeans sent emissaries to the priests at Branchidae to ask what the gods would prefer them to do about Pactyes, and the response was that they should surrender him to the Persians. That was the course of action they set in motion, once they had heard the oracle’s response. Although that was the preference of the majority, however, an eminent Cymean called Aristodicus the son of Heraclides stopped them from carrying out the plan, because he did not find the oracle credible; in fact, he thought the emissaries were lying. So he wanted to wait until another delegation of emissaries, including himself, had gone and repeated the question about Pactyes.
[159] When the delegation reached Branchidae, Aristodicus took the role of spokesman and put the question to the oracle in the following way: ‘Lord, Pactyes of Lydia came and sought refuge with us to escape violent death at the hands of the Persians. They demand his surrender and are telling us to hand him over. Although we are afraid of the power of Persia, we have not dared to give him up so far, since he is a suppliant; we first want you to make absolutely clear to us which of the two possible courses of action we should follow.’
The god gave the same reply to this question of Aristodicus’ as he had given before: he told them to surrender Pactyes to the Persians. In response Aristodicus put into effect a plan he had made. He walked all around the temple and evicted the sparrows and all the other kinds of birds which had made their nests in the building. The story goes that as he was doing this a voice came from the temple and addressed itself to Aristodicus by saying: ‘Have you no respect? How dare you do this? How can you strip my temple of its suppliants?’
Aristodicus, it is said, was not stuck for a reply. ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘are you really helping your suppliants like this and at the same time commanding the Cymeans to surrender theirs?’
‘Yes,’ answered the god, ‘that is my command. Why? To hasten the impiety and consequent destruction of Cyme, so that you never again come to consult me on the issue of the surrender of suppliants.’
[160] When the Cymeans heard the response the oracle had given to Aristodicus’ question, they did not want to surrender Pactyes and be destroyed, but they also did not want to keep him and be besieged. They therefore sent him off to Mytilene. So Mazares sent heralds to the Mytileneans demanding Pactyes’ surrender, and the fact that some money was offered as well induced them to set about complying with the demand. I cannot say for certain exactly how much money was involved, because the plan came to nothing. When the Cymeans found out what the Mytileneans were up to, they sent a ship to Lesbos and moved Pactyes to Chios. However, the Chians hauled him out of the sanctuary of Athena the Guardian of the Community and handed him over to the Persians. The reward the Chians received for doing this was Atarneus, which is located opposite Lesbos in Mysia. Now that the Persians had been given Pactyes, they kept him under guard, since they wanted to bring him before Cyrus. For quite a long time afterwards, no Chian would use barley from Atarneus as an offering to any of the gods nor would he use grain from there to make sacrificial cakes; in fact, nothing from that region was allowed in any sanctuary.
[161] The next thing Mazares did, once the Chians had surrendered Pactyes to him, was undertake a campaign against everyone who had been involved in besieging Tabalus. First he reduced Priene to slavery and then he overran the whole plain of the Meander River and let his men plunder it. Magnesia received the same treatment, but then Mazares fell ill and died.
[162] After his death another Mede, Harpagus, took over the command. (Harpagus was the one whom Astyages, the king of the Medes, had entertained with that obscene dinner and who had helped win the kingdom for Cyrus.) After he had been put in charge of the army by Cyrus, he marched into Ionia and set about making use of earthworks to capture the towns there. This entailed pinning the inhabitants inside a town, and then building earthworks up against the walls to allow the town to be captured.
[163] The first Ionian town he attacked was Phocaea. The Phocaeans were the earliest Greeks to make long voyages by sea; they opened up the Adriatic, Tyrrhenia, Iberia, and Tartessus. The ships they used for these voyages were penteconters rather than round-bodied ships. When they reached Tartessus they became friendly with the Tartessian king, whose name was Arganthonius. He had ruled Tartessus for eighty years, and lived to be 120 altogether. The Phocaeans got to be on such very good terms with him that he initially suggested that they leave Ionia and settle wherever they liked within his kingdom. The Phocaeans did not want to do that, however, so next—because they had told him about the growth of the Persian empire—he gave them money to build a wall around their town. The amount he gave was extremely generous, because the wall makes a circuit of quite a few stades, and all of it is constructed out of huge blocks of stone which fit closely together.
[164] That is how the Phocaeans’ wall came to be built. Harpagus marched his army up to it and the siege of the town began. Harpagus let it be known that he would be satisfied if the Phocaeans were willing to tear down just one of the wall’s bastions and consecrate just one building. The Phocaeans, however, could not abide the thought of being enslaved and they requested a single day to debate the matter, after which they would give him their reply; they also asked him to pull his army back from the wall while they were deliberating. Harpagus gave them permission to go ahead with their deliberations, despite the fact that he was, as he told them, well aware of what they intended to do. So while Harpagus led his army away from the wall, the Phocaeans launched their penteconters, put their womenfolk, children, and all their personal effects on board, along with the statues and other dedicatory offerings from their sanctuaries, except those which were made out of bronze or stone or were paintings—anyway, once everything else was on board they embarked themselves and sailed to Chios. So the Persians gained control of a Phocaea which was emptied of men.
[165] The Phocaeans offered to buy the islands known as the Oenussae from the Chians, but the Chians refused to sell them, because they were worried that if the islands became a trading-centre, their own island would consequently be denied access to trade. So the Phocaeans made Cyrnus their destination, because twenty years earlier, on the advice of an oracle, they had founded a community there called Alalia. Arganthonius was by then dead. In preparation for the voyage to Cyrnus they first put in at Phocaea and massacred the Persian contingent which Harpagus had left to guard the place; once that job was done, they next called down terrible curses on any of their number who stayed behind and did not take part in the expedition. They also sank a lump of iron in the sea and swore that they would not return to Phocaea until this iron reappeared. As they were fitting out their ships for the voyage to Cyrnus, however, over half of their fellow citizens were so overcome by longing and sorrow for the city and the customs of their native land that they broke their promises and sailed back to Phocaea. The ones who kept their promises, however, set sail from the Oenussae.
[166] For five years after reaching Cyrnus, they lived together with the earlier settlers and established their sanctuaries there. But because they were continually raiding all the local settlements, the Tyrrhenians and Carthaginians joined forces and attacked them, each providing sixty ships for the venture. The Phocaeans got sixty of their own ships ready too and went out to meet the enemy in the Sardonian Sea. A battle ensued in which the Phocaeans gained a rather Cadmean victory, in the sense that they lost forty of their own ships and the twenty which survived had bent rams and so were unfit for active service. They sailed back to Alalia, where they picked up their women and children and as much of the rest of their property as the ships could carry; then they left Cyrnus and sailed to Rhegium.
[167] The Carthaginians and Tyrrhenians ⟨drew lots to divide⟩ the crews of the wrecked Phocaean ships between themselves ⟨and, among the Tyrrhenians, the Agyllans⟩† gained by far the largest number of prisoners. They took them to a place outside the town and stoned them to death. Afterwards, anything connected to Agylla—whether it was an animal from their flocks or for their carts, or a human being—which passed through the place where the Phocaeans were stoned to death and lay buried became crippled, lame, and paralysed. The Agyllans sent men to consult the oracle at Delphi, to try to find a way to remedy their offence. The Pythia told them to initiate the practice which is still followed in Agylla even today—that of making generous offerings to the dead Phocaeans and holding an athletic contest and a chariot-race in their honour.
That was how these Phocaeans met their death. The others, the ones who escaped to Rhegium, used it as a base from which they set out and gained a site in the land of Oenotria to build a community, which is the one nowadays called Hyele. They established the town once they had been told by a man from Poseidonia that the oracle had not been referring to the island Cyrnus, but had meant them to establish the hero Cyrnus. So that is what happened to the Ionian town of Phocaea.
[168] The inhabitants of Teos adopted almost exactly the same course of action too. Once Harpagus had overrun their fortifications with his earthworks, the whole population took to their ships and sailed away to Thrace, where they founded the city of Abdera. Abdera had actually been founded earlier by a man from Clazomenae called Timesius, but it had not turned out well for him. In fact, he was driven out of the country by the Thracians. However, he is now worshipped as a hero by the Teans in Abdera.
[169] The Phocaeans and the Teans were the only Ionians who emigrated from their native lands rather than endure slavery. The rest of them (apart from the Milesians) stood up to Harpagus just as much as the emigrants did, and every man among them fought bravely for his own community, but the difference was that, once they had been defeated and their towns and cities taken, they stayed in their native land and submitted to Persian government. The Milesians (as I said before) had entered into a treaty with Cyrus himself and so kept quiet. That was how Ionia came to be enslaved for the second time, and Harpagus’ conquest of the mainland Ionians frightened the islanders into surrendering to Cyrus as well.
[170] Despite their defeat, the Ionians still used to meet in the Panionium, and my information is that Bias of Priene made a very valuable suggestion to them there—a suggestion which would have made them the most prosperous Greek people, if they had followed it. He proposed that the Ionians should pool their resources, set sail for Sardo, and then found a single city for all Ionians. This, he said, would enable them not just to avoid slavery, but to thrive, since they would inhabit the largest island in the world and exercise authority over all the rest. However, he added, if they stayed in Ionia, he could not foresee freedom for them.
This proposal by Bias of Priene was made to the Ionians after their defeat, but another good proposal had been put to them, even before the conquest of Ionia, by Thales of Miletus, a man originally of Phoenician lineage. He suggested that the Ionians should establish a single governmental council, that it should be in Teos (because Teos is centrally located in Ionia), and that all the other towns should be regarded effectively as demes.
[171] So much for the suggestions made by Bias and Thales to the Ionians. Harpagus followed his conquest of Ionia with campaigns against the Carians, the Caunians, and the Lycians, and he took contingents of both Ionians and Aeolians along with him. Now, the Carians came to the mainland from the Aegean islands. Long ago, when they were subjects of Minos and were called the Leleges, they had inhabited the islands. As far as I have been able to gather from my enquiries, they used not to pay Minos any tribute, but they would man ships for him on demand. So since Minos was successful in war and conquered a great deal of land, the Carians were far and away the most important race at this time. (The Greeks have adopted three practices which were originally Carian discoveries. It was the Carians who originally started tying plumes on to their helmets, they were the first to put designs on their shields, and they were also the first to fit shields with handles. Previously, no handles had been involved and the universal practice of those who used to wear shields was to manoeuvre them by means of a leather strap which lay around the neck and left shoulder.) Much later, the Dorians and Ionians made the Carians abandon the islands and then they arrived on the mainland. At any rate, that is the Cretan version of what happened to the Carians, but the Carians themselves disagree. They think they are indigenous mainlanders and have always had the name they have now. For proof, they point to the antiquity of the sanctuary of Carian Zeus at Mylasa. Mysians and Lydians are allowed to use this sanctuary too, on the grounds that they are related to the Carians, because in Carian legend Lydus and Mysus were the brothers of Car. So Mysians and Lydians can use the sanctuary, but no other non-Carians can, even if they speak the same language as the Carians.
[172] In my opinion the Caunians are indigenous, though they say they came originally from Crete. However, their language has come to approximate that spoken by the Carians (or the Carian language has come to approximate that spoken by the Caunians; I would not like to say for certain which alternative is correct), although it is true that their way of life is quite different from everyone else’s, including the Carians’. For instance, the best thing of all in their opinion is to get together in groups, formed on the basis of age or friendship, and drink—men, women, and children too. Their religious rituals used to be imported from abroad, but later they turned against this and decided to rely only on their ancestral deities, so the entire male adult Caunian population put on armour and, stabbing the air with their spears, advanced up to the border with Calynda. What they claimed to be doing was expelling the foreign gods.
[173] So much for the Caunians and their customs. The Lycians were originally from Crete; in fact there was a time, long ago, when the whole of Crete was in the hands of non-Greeks. The island became embroiled in a dispute for the kingdom between Sarpedon and Minos, the sons of Europa, which Minos won. He banished Sarpedon and his supporters from the island, and they came to the part of Asia called Milyas. Now, in antiquity Milyas was the region which is nowadays inhabited by Lycians, and the Milyans were in those days called the Solymians. During Sarpedon’s reign, the inhabitants were known as the Termilae, which is the name they brought with them from Crete and is what the Lycians are still called even today by the neighbouring peoples. But later Lycus the son of Pandion (who was banished from Athens by his brother Aegeus) came to Sarpedon and the Termilae, and eventually the Lycians came to be named after Lycus. Their way of life is a mixture of Cretan and Carian. One custom which is peculiar to them, and like nothing to be found anywhere else in the world, is that they take their names from their mothers rather than from their fathers. Suppose someone asks his neighbour who he is: he will describe himself in terms of his mother’s ancestry—that is, he will list all the mothers on his mother’s side. Also, if a female citizen and a male slave live together as a couple, her children are considered legitimate, whereas if a male citizen—even one of the highest rank—marries a woman from another country or a concubine, his children have no rights of citizenship.
[174] Anyway, the Carian effort was unremarkable and they were duly reduced to slavery by Harpagus. Nor was it only the Carians who were ineffectual: the same also goes for all the Greeks who live in that part of the country. These include the Cnidians, who were originally Lacedaemonian emigrants and who occupy a coastal region known as Triopium. Starting at the Bybassian peninsula, Cnidian territory is—except for a thin stretch of land—entirely surrounded by water: it is bounded to the north by the Gulf of Ceramicus and to the south by the sea off Syme and Rhodes. So while Harpagus was in the process of subduing Ionia, the Cnidians started to dig through that thin bit of land (it is no more than five stades wide), with the intention of turning their territory into an island. All of Cnidos was to be included, because the isthmus through which they were digging was exactly where their territory ends and the mainland begins. Now, a good many Cnidians set to work, but the number of injuries caused by shattered stone—particularly affecting the eyes, but elsewhere on the body too—seemed unexpectedly and even miraculously high, so they sent emissaries to Delphi to ask what it was that was blocking them. According to native Cnidian tradition, the Pythia’s response, in iambic trimeters, was as follows:
The isthmus is not to be fortified or dug through;
If Zeus had wanted an island, he would have made an island.
Faced with this response from the Pythia, the Cnidians stopped their digging, and when Harpagus and his army arrived they surrendered without offering battle.
[175] The inland country north of Halicarnassus was inhabited by the Pedasians. Now, whenever they or their neighbours were threatened by some disaster, the priestess of Athena grew a long beard. This happened on three occasions. The Pedasians were the only people living in or around Caria to hold out against Harpagus for any length of time; they caused him a great many problems with the stronghold they built on a hill called Lida.
[176] Eventually, however, the Pedasians were overcome. As for the Lycians, when Harpagus and his troops marched into the plain of Xanthus, the Xanthians came out and engaged him in battle, despite the fact that they were up against superior numbers. They showed great bravery, but they lost the battle and became trapped inside the city. They brought everything—wives, children, property, and house-slaves—to the acropolis, set fire to it, and burnt it to the ground. Then they pledged terrible oaths, came out of the city, and died fighting. Every single Xanthian was killed there. Almost any Lycian who claims to be a Xanthian today is actually an immigrant, unless he is from one of the eighty families who survived because they happened to be away from Xanthus at the time. That is how Harpagus took Xanthus, and since the Caunians largely followed the example of the Lycians, the fall of Caunus came about in almost exactly the same way too.
[177] While Harpagus was laying waste to coastal Asia, Cyrus himself was doing the same in inland Asia. He systematically defeated every tribe, one after another. I will pass over most of these and mention only those which gave him the most difficult time and were the most noteworthy.
[178] Once he had subdued the rest of the continent, Cyrus launched a strike against the Assyrians. Now, among all the many important cities in Assyria, the most famous and well fortified—and the place where the royal palace was located after the devastation of Ninus—was Babylon. Here is a description of the city. It is situated on a huge plain, and the length of each of its sides (it forms a square) is 120 stades; altogether, then, the circumference of the city is 480 stades long. So much for its size. Its design differs from that of any other city in the known world. First there is a wide, deep moat, full of water, surrounding the entire city. Then there is a defensive wall 50 royal cubits thick and 200 cubits high (a royal cubit is three fingers longer than an ordinary one).
[179] I had better add an explanation of where the earth that was dug out of the moat was used and a description of the construction of the wall. The earth that the excavation of the moat yielded was being made into bricks even while the digging was going on. Whenever they had moulded enough bricks, they fired them in kilns. Then, using a mortar of hot bitumen and inserting a course of reed mats every thirty layers of bricks, they built first the banks of the moat and then, by the same method, the wall itself. Along the edges of the top of the wall they built, facing one another, one-room buildings which were separated by gaps wide enough for a four-horse chariot to drive through. The wall contains a hundred gates, of solid bronze, with bronze posts and lintels too. Now, there is another place eight days’ journey away from Babylon called Is, where there is an insignificant river (also called Is) which is a tributary of the Euphrates. This River Is produces, along with its water, plenty of lumps of bitumen, and the bitumen which was used for the wall of the city of Babylon was fetched from there.
[180] So that is how Babylon’s defensive wall was built. The city has two districts, because a river—the Euphrates—divides the city down the middle. The Euphrates is a wide, deep, and fast-flowing river which rises in Armenia and issues into the Red Sea. Each wall, then, curves when it reaches the river and from there angles back along each bank of the river as a low wall of fired brick. The city itself is packed with three-storeyed and four-storeyed houses and criss-crossed by straight streets, some running right through the city and others at right angles to them going down to the river. At the end of each of these transverse streets there are postern gates set into the wall which runs beside the river—one gate for each alleyway. As well as being bronze (like the other gates) these postern gates also afford access to the river.
[181] This wall is a breastplate, then, but another wall runs along inside this first one. It too surrounds the city, and although it is not much weaker than the first one, it is less thick. In the centre of one of the two districts of the city stands the royal palace, surrounded by a tall, strong wall, and in the centre of the other there is a bronze-gated sanctuary to Zeus as Bel, still standing in my day and forming a square with each side two stades long. In the middle of the sanctuary has been built a solid tower, a stade long and the same in width, which supports another tower, which in turn supports another, and so on: there are eight towers in all. A stairway has been constructed to wind its way up the outside of all the towers; halfway up the stairway there is a shelter with benches to rest on, where people making the ascent can sit and catch their breath. In the last tower there is a huge temple. The temple contains a large couch, which is adorned with fine coverings and has a golden table standing beside it, but there are no statues at all standing there. No one is allowed to spend the night there except a single local woman who (according to the Chaldeans, who are the priests of Bel) has been selected from among all the local women by the god.
[182] The Chaldeans also say that the god comes in person to the temple and rests on the couch; I do not believe this story myself, although it is exactly the same as what happens in Thebes (that is, Egyptian Thebes), according to the Egyptians. The parallel even extends to the fact that a woman sleeps in the temple of Zeus at Thebes as well, and it is said that neither of these women has intercourse with any man. The same goes for the prophetess of the god at Patara in Lycia, when there is one. I mean, an oracle is not a constant feature of the place, but when there is a prophetess there, she spends every night shut up inside the temple with the god.
[183] Lower down in the Babylonian sanctuary there is also another temple, where there is a large golden statue of a seated Zeus, with a large golden table beside him; the base of the statue and the throne on which he is seated are both golden too. As the Chaldeans told it, eight hundred talents of gold went into the making of these pieces. Outside the temple there is a golden altar, and also another large altar which is used for sacrificing the pick of the flocks, while they are allowed to sacrifice only unweaned creatures on the golden altar. On the larger altar the Chaldeans also burn a thousand talents of frankincense each year during the festival of this god. At the time of Cyrus’ conquest this precinct also contained a statue of solid gold, twelve cubits high. I did not see it myself, but I am repeating what the Chaldeans say. Darius the son of Hystaspes had designs on this statue, but did not have the effrontery to take it; however, his son Xerxes did take it, as well as killing the priest who was telling him not to touch it. Anyway, this is how the sanctuary has been decorated, apart from numerous private votive offerings.
[184] The design and ornamentation of the walls and sanctuaries of Babylon were the work of a number of Babylonian kings (who will feature in my Assyrian narrative), but also of two women. Five generations separated these two queens. The one who ruled first was called Semiramis, and the remarkable dykes on the plain were her work. Before then, the river had used to flood the whole plain.
[185] The second of these two queens was called Nitocris. She was a more intelligent ruler than her predecessor. Apart from the monuments she left to posterity, which I am going to describe, she also noticed the size and restlessness of the Median empire, saw that other places, including Ninus, had been taken by them, and took all the precautions she possibly could. The first precaution she took was to alter the course of the River Euphrates (the river which flows through the middle of Babylon). Up until then the river had flowed in a straight line, but she had channels dug above the city which made its course so very crooked that it actually flows past one of the Assyrian villages—called Ardericca—at three points. Even today, anyone travelling from our sea to Babylon will come to this village three times, on three separate days, as he sails down the Euphrates.
This was quite a feat she accomplished. Another one was to have an embankment built along both sides of the river; this is well worth seeing for its bulk and height. Some way north of Babylon, she had a lake excavated next to the river and not far away from it; she had it dug down to the water level at each point, and it was broad enough to have a perimeter of 420 stades. She had all the earth that was excavated from this site used for the embankments by the river. Once the lake had been excavated, she had a pavement built around it, made out of stones brought from elsewhere.
The reason for both of these projects—diverting the river and creating by means of the excavation an area of nothing but marshland—was to reduce the speed of the river by having it spend its current against numerous curves, and to force anyone sailing to Babylon to take a meandering course followed by a lengthy circuit of the lake. These works of hers were carried out in the part of the country where there were passes and the shortest route from Media, in order to prevent the Medes mingling with her people and gathering information about her affairs.
[186] So she gave the city this thorough defensive system, and then, with that basis in place, added the following projects. Since the city was divided by the river into two districts, whenever anyone wanted to cross from one district to the other in the time of earlier rulers, they had to be ferried across, which was a nuisance, I am sure. She took care of this problem too. The excavation of the basin for the lake gave her the opportunity to leave another monument to posterity as well, from the same project. She quarried huge long stones, and when the stones were ready and the lake site had been excavated, she completely diverted the river into the excavated site. While it was filling up, the old river bed dried out. This gave her the time to build up the banks of the river in the city and the stairs from the postern gates to the riverside with fired bricks in the same way as in the construction of the defensive wall. She also used the quarried stones to build a bridge, more or less in the centre of the city, and she joined the stones together with braces of iron and lead. During the day squared-off planks of wood used to be laid on it, so that the Babylonians could walk across on them, but at night these planks would be removed so that people did not cross over and steal from one another. When the excavated lake had been filled by the river and the bridge had been completed down to the last detail, she let the Euphrates flow out of the lake and back to its original bed. So in becoming a marsh the excavated site was thought to serve a useful purpose, and at the same time the Babylonians gained a bridge.
[187] Here is a clever trick which this same queen played. She had a tomb built for herself over the busiest city gates, in a prominent place right above the actual gates, and she had the tomb engraved with the following inscription: ‘Any subsequent king of Babylon who is short of money may open my tomb and take as much as he wants. But it will not go well for him if he opens the tomb for any other reason than because he is short of money.’ The tomb was undisturbed until Darius became king. He resented the fact that he could not use these gates (because that would have involved his riding under a corpse) and that the money was just lying there with its beckoning inscription, but he could not take it. So he opened the tomb. He found no money, however, but there was the corpse and the following message: ‘Only greed and avarice could have led you to open the tomb of the dead.’ That is the kind of person this queen is supposed to have been.
[188] Cyrus’ strike was launched against this woman’s son, who was called Labynetus after his father and had succeeded to the Assyrian kingdom. Now, the Great King goes on his military expeditions well equipped with food and livestock from home, and he also brings water from the River Choäspes (on whose banks the city of Susa is situated), because water from no other river except the Choäspes is allowed to pass the king’s lips. This Choäspes water is boiled, and wherever the king might be campaigning on any given occasion, he is accompanied by a large number of four-wheeled wagons, drawn by mules, which carry the water in silver containers.
[189] On his way to Babylon, Cyrus came to the River Gyndes. This river rises in Matiene, flows through the land of the Dardanae and joins another river, the Tigris, which flows past the town of Opis and issues into the Red Sea. Now, as Cyrus was negotiating the crossing of this river, which was deep enough to be navigable, one of his sacred white horses charged violently into the water and tried to swim across, but the river submerged it in its current and swept it away. Cyrus was extremely angry with the river for this brutal act and he warned it that he would reduce its strength to such an extent that in the future even women would easily be able to cross it without getting their knees wet. Having issued this threat, he abandoned his expedition against Babylon and divided his army into two halves. Then he marked out a hundred and eighty plumb-straight channels on either bank of the river, radiating out in every direction, positioned half of his army on each side and ordered his men to start digging. He had a considerable work-force at his disposal, and so the work proceeded well, but they still spent the whole summer working there.
[190] So Cyrus punished the Gyndes River by dividing it into three hundred and sixty channels. At the start of the second spring he resumed his march on Babylon. The Babylonians brought their army out of the city and awaited Cyrus’ arrival. When he drew near the city, the Babylonians engaged him, but they lost the battle and were driven back into the city. Now, this was not the first time that Cyrus’ expansionist ambitions had come to their attention; they had noticed how he attacked every race indiscriminately, and they had for very many years been stockpiling food in the city. So they were not at all bothered by the siege. As more and more time went by and there was no progress in the matter, Cyrus did not know what to do.
[191] Perhaps it was someone else’s suggestion for a way out of his difficulties, or perhaps he discovered what to do by himself, but anyway what he did was this. He stationed his army at some distance from† the point where the river entered Babylon, and posted some other troops behind the city, where the river comes out again. He told his men to wait until they saw the river become fordable, and then to enter the city that way. Once he had posted them there and given them these instructions,† he himself withdrew, along with that part of his army which was unfit. When he came to the lake, he did more or less exactly what the Babylonian queen had done to the river and the lake: that is, he dug a channel to divert the river into the marshy lake, so that once the river had subsided, its original bed became fordable. This was what the Persians who had been stationed by the river were there for, and when the Euphrates had subsided until the water reached more or less the middle of a man’s thigh, they entered Babylon along the river-bed. If the Babylonians had heard or learnt in advance what Cyrus was up to, they would have allowed the Persians to enter the city and then massacred them. If they had locked all the postern gates that gave on to the river and mounted the low walls which ran along the banks of the river, they would have caught the Persians like fish in a trap. As things were, however, the Persians were upon them before they knew anything about it. And according to local sources, the city is so huge that the Babylonians living in the centre were unaware of the capture of their compatriots from the edges of the city, and in fact, at the time of the city’s fall, were dancing and enjoying themselves, since it happened to be a holiday—until they found out the hard way what was going on. So that is how Babylon fell the first time.
[192] I will give a number of examples to illustrate the resources of Babylon, including the following. The whole of the Great King’s empire is divided up for the purpose of feeding him and his army (this is apart from tribute-payment, which is a separate obligation). Now, for four of the twelve months of the year, Babylonian territory provides the food, while the whole of the rest of Asia does so for the remaining eight months. In other words, Assyrian territory alone has one third of the resources of the rest of Asia. The administration (or satrapy, to use the Persian word) of this territory is by far the most powerful of all the administrative posts in the Persian empire, as is shown by the fact that while Tritantaechmes the son of Artabazus held this post as the king’s deputy, his income was a full artaba of silver every day of his satrapy—an artaba being a Persian measure equivalent to an Attic medimnus and three choenixes. Over and above the horses he kept for military purposes, he also had his own private herds of eight hundred stud stallions and sixteen thousand mares—one stallion to cover twenty mares. He had so many Indian hunting-dogs to maintain that four sizeable villages from the plain were exempted from any other form of taxation and had to provide food for the dogs. These are the kinds of resources the governor of Babylon has at his disposal.
[193] Assyria has a low rainfall, but it is enough to get the crops’ roots to begin growing. However, it is irrigation by the river that makes the crops ripen and the grain appear. It is not like Egypt, where the river itself rises and floods the fields; in Assyria they use manual labour and swipes to irrigate the crops. For Babylonian territory is completely criss-crossed by canals, just as Egypt is. The largest of these canals, which is navigable, tends south-east and leads from the Euphrates to another river, the Tigris, on which the city of Ninus was built. Cereal crops flourish here far better than anywhere else we know of. While they do not even begin to try to grow other plants, such as figs, vines, and olive-trees, cereal crops grow so well that a yield of 200 times the weight of the seed grain is not unusual and, when the soil is exceptionally fertile, the yield can increase to 300 times the weight of the seed grain. In this country blades of wheat and barley grow to a width of at least four fingers. I am not going to mention the size of the plants that grow from millet-seed and sesame-seed, although I know how big they are, because I am well aware of the sceptical response even my account of the crops has evoked in those who have not been to the Babylonian countryside. They do not use olive oil at all, but they get oil from sesame seeds. Palm-trees grow all over the plain, and the majority of them produce fruit, which people use to make food, wine, and syrup. The method of cultivation of the palm in Assyria resembles the cultivation of the fig in Greece in a number of ways, and not least in the way they tie the fruit of what the Greeks call the ‘male’ palm-trees to the date-bearing trees, so that the gall-wasp (which is carried by the male trees in their fruit, as is also the case with wild figs, in fact) can penetrate the date and cause it to ripen rather than fall off prematurely.
[194] I will now give a description of what was to me the most amazing thing in Assyria, after Babylon itself. They have boats plying the river down to Babylon which are completely round and are made of leather. In Armenia, which is upstream from Assyria, they cut branches of willow and make them into a frame, around the outside of which they stretch watertight skins to act as a hull; they do not broaden the sides of the boat to form a stern or narrow them into a prow, but they make it round, like a shield. Then they line the whole boat with straw and send it off down the river laden with goods. Their cargo is most commonly palm-wood casks filled with wine. The boats are steered by two men, who stand upright and wield a paddle each; one of them pulls the paddle towards his body, while the other pushes his paddle away from his body. These boats vary in size from very large downwards; the largest of them can manage cargo weighing five thousand talents. Each boat carries a live donkey—or, in the case of the larger boats, several donkeys. At the end of their voyage in Babylon, when they have sold their cargo, they sell off the frame of the boat and all the straw, load the donkeys up with the skins, and drive them back to Armenia. They do this because the current of the river is too strong for boats to sail up it, and that is why they make these boats out of skins rather than wood. Once they have got back to Armenia with their donkeys, they make themselves more boats in the usual way.
[195] That is what their boats are like. As for their clothing, they wear a linen tunic which reaches down to their feet; on top of this they wear another tunic, made out of wool, and they put a white shawl around their shoulders. Their shoes are of a local design and resemble Boeotian slippers. They wear their hair long and wrap a turban around their heads. They perfume their whole bodies. Every man has a signet-ring and a hand-carved staff, and every staff bears a design of some kind—an apple, a rose, a lily, an eagle, or something. It would be abnormal for any of them to have a staff which was not emblazoned with a device. So much for their outfits.
[196] I now turn to their customs, the most sensible of which, in my opinion, is also practised, I hear, by the Illyrian tribe, the Eneti. Once a year, in every village, this is what they used to do. They used to collect all the young women who were old enough to be married and take the whole lot of them all at once to a certain place. A crowd of men would form a circle around them there. An auctioneer would get each of the women to stand up one by one, and he would put her up for sale. He used to start with the most attractive girl there, and then, once she had fetched a good price and been bought, he would go on to auction the next most attractive one. They were being sold to be wives, not slaves. All the well-off Babylonian men who wanted wives would outbid one another to buy the good-looking young women, while the commoners who wanted wives and were not interested in good looks used to end up with some money as well as the less attractive women. For once the auctioneer had finished selling off the best-looking girls, he used to make the most ugly one stand up, or a handicapped girl if there was one there, and he would proceed to auction her off by announcing that the man who was prepared to take the least money could have her for his wife, until she was given to whoever named the smallest amount of money. But it was thanks to the good-looking women that there was money available, and so the attractive girls helped the unattractive girls and the handicapped ones find husbands. No one was allowed to arrange his own daughter’s marriage to a man of his choice, and no one was allowed to take a girl he had just bought back home without first taking a pledge; he had to pledge that he would indeed live with her, and then he could take her back home. If they did not get on, the rule was that the man returned the money. Anyone who wanted to could legitimately come from another village and take part in the auction. Anyway, this was their finest custom, but it has lapsed and they have recently found an alternative. Since their loss of independence they have been reduced to squalor and economic ruin, and nowadays every commoner who lacks an income has his female children work as prostitutes.
[197] Their next most sensible custom is as follows. Because they do not consult doctors, when someone is ill they carry him to the main square, where anyone who has personal experience of something similar to what the ill person is suffering from, or who knows someone else who has, comes up to him and offers him advice and suggestions about his illness. They tell him what remedy they found effective in their own case, or what they saw working in someone else’s case, which enabled them to recover from a similar illness. No one is allowed to walk past a sick person in silence, without asking what sort of illness he has.
[198] They use honey to embalm the dead, and their mourning procedure is similar to that of Egypt. Whenever a Babylonian man has had sex with his wife, he sits and purifies himself with incense, while his wife does the same elsewhere. At daybreak they both wash as well, and they cannot touch any bowls and so on until they have washed. This is exactly the same as what the Arabians do.
[199] The most disgraceful Babylonian custom is that at some point in her life every woman of the land is required to sit in a sanctuary of Aphrodite and have sex with a strange man. It is not unknown for women who are snobbish because of their wealth, and who refuse to associate with the rest of the women there, to drive to the sanctuary in covered carts† and stand there surrounded by a large retinue of attendants. The usual practice, however, is for a number of women to sit in the precinct of Aphrodite wearing a garland made of string on their heads. New women are constantly coming into the precinct to replace the ones who are leaving. Plumb-straight lanes run this way and that through the women, and men they have never met before walk along these lanes and take their pick of the women. A woman sitting in the sanctuary is not allowed to return home until one of the strangers has thrown money into her lap and had sex with her (which happens outside the sanctuary). The man who throws the money has to say: ‘I call on the goddess Mylitta to bless you’—Mylitta being the Assyrian name for Aphrodite. It can be any amount of money: by religious law she is not allowed to refuse it because it becomes sacred. The first man to throw money is the one she has to leave with; she cannot reject anyone. Once she has had sex with him, she has fulfilled her sacred obligation to the goddess and she is free to return home. Afterwards, you can offer her as much money as you like, but you will not get her. Women who are attractive and tall get to go home quickly, while the ugly ones wait for a long time without being able to do their duty. In fact, some of them wait three or four years. Almost exactly the same custom is practised in some parts of Cyprus too.
[200] So much for Babylonian customs. There are also three clans there who eat nothing but fish. Once they have caught them, they dry them in the sun, and then put them in a mortar, grind them up with pestles, and sieve the powder through pieces of muslin. Then they knead the powder into a kind of dough and have it this way, or they bake it like bread, according to their individual preferences.
[201] After having conquered the Assyrians, Cyrus was eager to bring the Massagetae under his rule. They are said to be a large tribe, with a reputation for being warlike. They live in the east, beyond the River Araxes and opposite the Issedones. There are some who claim that they are a Scythian people.
[202] Accounts of the size of the Araxes vary: some make it larger than the Ister, some smaller. There are said to be a great many islands in it which are about as big as Lesbos, and whose inhabitants live during the summer months off all kinds of roots that they dig up, while during the winter they eat the fruit from a kind of tree which, they have discovered, they can put into storage when ripe and keep for later consumption. They have also discovered a kind of plant whose fruit they use when they meet in groups. They light a bonfire, sit around it, throw this fruit on the fire, and sniff the smoke rising from the burning fruit they have thrown on to the fire. The fruit is the equivalent there to wine in Greece: they get intoxicated from the smoke, and then they throw more fruit on to the fire and get even more intoxicated, until they eventually stand up and dance, and burst into song.
That is how these people are supposed to live. The Araxes rises in Matiene (as does the Gyndes, the river Cyrus divided into three hundred and sixty channels), and it ends in forty mouths, all except one of which issue into marshes and swamps, which are said to be the homes of people who eat raw fish and normally wear sealskin clothing. The one of the mouths which keeps cleanly to its channel flows into the Caspian Sea. The Caspian Sea is isolated and does not interconnect with the other sea. I say ‘the other sea’ because the whole of the sea the Greeks sail and the one beyond the Pillars of Heracles which is called the Atlantic and the Red Sea are actually a single sea.
[203] The Caspian, however, is a distinct sea, a sea in its own right. Its length is such that it would take someone fifteen days to row across it, and at its broadest point it would take eight days. To the west of the Caspian spreads the Caucasus, which is the largest mountain range in the world, with the tallest peaks. The Caucasus is home to a wide variety of peoples, most of whom live entirely off wild plants. In this part of the country there are said to be trees with leaves which are such that people crush them, mix them with water, and then use the juice to paint figures on their clothes. These figures do not wash out, but grow old along with the rest of the cloth as if they had been woven in from the start. The people here are said to have sex out in the open, as herd animals do.
[204] So the Caucasus presses in on the western shore of this sea—the Caspian, as it is called. To the east, however, the sea is succeeded by a plain which goes on for ever, as far as the eye can see. The Massagetae, whom Cyrus was eager to attack, occupy quite a sizeable portion of this huge plain. There were a number of significant factors tempting and inducing him to undertake this campaign. The main two were the apparently miraculous nature of his birth, and the good fortune that attended him in war, in the sense that any race which Cyrus sent his troops after found it impossible to escape.
[205] At the time the Massagetae were ruled by a woman, since her husband had died. Tomyris was her name. Cyrus sent an ambassador to her with a message ostensibly of courtship, saying that he wanted her to be his wife. However, Tomyris realized that it was not her he was courting so much as the Massagetan kingdom, so she rejected his advances. Since Cyrus had got nowhere by trickery, he next marched to the Araxes and started to wage open war against the Massagetae. He began by bridging the river to enable his army to cross and building towers on the boats which ferried his troops across the river.
[206] While this work was in progress, Tomyris sent the following message to Cyrus: ‘King of Persia, abandon your zeal for this enterprise. You cannot know if in the end it will come out right for you. Stop and rule your own people, and put up with the sight of me ruling mine. But no: you are hardly going to take this advice, since peace is the last thing you desire. If you really are committed to a trial of strength with the Massagetae, you need not bother with all the hard work of bridging the river; we will pull back three days’ journey away from the river and then you can cross over into our land. Or if you would rather meet us in your own land, you withdraw the same distance.’
After hearing this message, Cyrus called all the leading Persians to a conference, and once the meeting had convened he threw the matter open for discussion, looking for advice as to what he should do. They unanimously felt that they should meet Tomyris and her army on their own ground.
[207] However, Croesus of Lydia was at the meeting and he disapproved of this idea. He argued against the prevalent view. ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘I told you before, when Zeus gave me to you, that I would do all I could to avert any catastrophe I saw threatening your house.† My own experiences have taught me an unwelcome lesson. If you are think both you and the army under your command are immortal, there’s no point in my telling you my opinion; but if you are aware that you are a human being and that your subjects are too, then the first thing you should appreciate is that human affairs are on a wheel, and that as the wheel turns around it does not permit the same people always to prosper. Now, my view of the issue currently before us contradicts the others’. The idea that we should meet the enemy in our own land is risky. Why? Because if you lose the battle you will also lose your whole empire. After all, if the Massagetae win, they’re obviously not going to run back home; they’ll march on into your provinces. On the other hand, if you win, you won’t gain as much as you would if you had crossed into their territory, beaten the Massagetae there, and pursued them as they ran away. This scenario is the opposite of the one I described before, because if you beat the enemy you will march straight into Tomyris’ domain. And apart from what I’ve said, it would be intolerably demeaning for Cyrus the son of Cambyses to withdraw and give ground to a woman. So I think we should cross the river and advance as far as they pull back, and then try to get the better of them by putting the following plan into effect. You see, a Persian-style good life and anything approaching real luxury is, I hear, something with which the Massagetae have no acquaintance or familiarity. Therefore, what I think we should do for these men is slaughter huge numbers of our livestock, prepare them for the table, and serve them up in our camp as a feast—a feast which also includes endless flagons of undiluted wine and a wide assortment of foods. Then we should leave the least important part of the army behind and pull the rest of the men back to the river again. If I am not mistaken, as soon as the Massagetae catch sight of all these good things, they will go for them, and that will give us the chance to achieve a magnificent victory.’
[208] Faced with these conflicting viewpoints, Cyrus abandoned the first one and adopted Croesus’ plan. So he told Tomyris to pull her troops back, because he was going to cross over the river into her territory. And that is what she did, just as she had originally said she would. Cyrus handed Croesus over to his son Cambyses, to whom he was intending to leave the kingdom, and told him to treat Croesus with respect and kindness if the crossing and the assault on the Massagetae did not go well. Then he sent Croesus and his son back to Persia and proceeded to cross the river with his army.
[209] So Cyrus crossed the Araxes, and that night, asleep in the land of the Massagetae, he had a dream. He seemed in his dream to see Hystaspes’ eldest son with wings growing out of his shoulder-blades; with one wing he cast a shadow over Asia, with the other he overshadowed Europe. Now, Hystaspes the son of Arsames was an Achaemenid, and his eldest son was called Darius. At that time Darius was about 20 years old, and had been left behind in Persia, because he was still too young to go to war. When he woke up, Cyrus reflected on the dream. It struck him as an important dream, so he called for Hystaspes, took him aside, and said, ‘Hystaspes, your son has been caught plotting against me and my empire. I am certain of his guilt, and I will tell you why. The gods care for me and they show me everything that is going to happen in advance. Now, last night, while I was asleep, I saw in a dream the eldest of your sons with wings growing from his shoulders; with one of these wings he was casting a shadow over Asia, and with the other he overshadowed Europe. As a result of this dream there can be absolutely no doubt that he is conspiring against me. I want you to go back to Persia as quickly as possible and make sure that on my return, once I have been victorious here, you bring your son before me for examination.’
[210] Cyrus’ assumption in saying this was that Darius was conspiring against him, but in fact the gods were forewarning him of his own impending death there, and telling him that his kingdom would devolve on to Darius. Anyway, Hystaspes replied, ‘My lord, there had better not be any Persian alive who is plotting against you. If there is, his death cannot come too soon, as far as I am concerned. After all, you have given the Persians their independence, when formerly they were slaves, and made them rulers of all others, when formerly they were ruled by others. If your dream tells you that my son is conspiring against you, I hand him over to you for you to deal with as you see fit.’ With these words, Hystaspes crossed the Araxes and returned to Persia to watch over his son Darius for Cyrus.
[211] Cyrus advanced a day’s journey into Massagetan territory from the Araxes and then did as Croesus had suggested. Then Cyrus and those of his men who were in peak condition withdrew back to the Araxes, leaving behind those who were unfit. A third of the Massagetan forces attacked this remnant of Cyrus’ army, who put up some resistance, but were slaughtered. Once they had overcome this opposition, the Massagetae noticed the feast, which had been laid out, and they reclined and ate it. When they had eaten and drunk their fill, they fell asleep—and then the Persians fell on them. Many of the Massagetae were killed, but even more were taken prisoner, including Queen Tomyris’ son, who was the commander of the army and whose name was Spargapises.
[212] When news of what had happened to her army and her son reached the queen, she sent a herald to Cyrus with the following message: ‘You bloodthirsty man, Cyrus! What you have done should give you no cause for celebration. You used the fruit of the vine—the wine which you swill until it drives you so mad that as it sinks into your bodies foul language rises up to your tongues. That was the drug, that was the trick you relied on to overcome my son, rather than conquering him by force in battle. Now I am giving good advice, so listen carefully: give me back my son, and then you can leave this country without paying for the brutality with which you treated a third of the Massagetan army. But if you do not, I swear by the sun who is the lord of the Massagetae that for all your insatiability I will quench your thirst for blood.’
[213] This was the message that was brought back to Cyrus, but he took not the slightest notice of it. When Spargapises, the son of Queen Tomyris, recovered from the wine and saw the trouble he was in, he begged Cyrus to release him from his chains. Cyrus granted his request, but as soon as Spargapises was free and had regained control of his hands, he killed himself.
[214] That was how Spargapises died. Since Cyrus refused to take her advice, Tomyris mustered all her forces and engaged Cyrus in battle. I consider this to be the fiercest battle between non-Greeks there has ever been, and in fact I have information that this was actually the case. At first, the two sides stood some distance apart and fired arrows at each other, and then, when they had no more arrows left to shoot, they came at each other and fought with spears and daggers. They fought at close quarters for a long time, and neither side would give way, until eventually the Massagetae gained the upper hand. Most of the Persian army was wiped out there, and Cyrus himself died too; his reign had lasted for twenty-nine years. Tomyris filled a wineskin with human blood and searched among the Persian corpses for Cyrus’ body. When she found it, she shoved his head into the wineskin, and in her rage addressed his body as follows: ‘Although I have come through the battle alive and victorious, you have destroyed me by capturing my son with a trick. But I warned you that I would quench your thirst for blood, and so I shall.’ Of all the many storiesthat are told about Cyrus’ death, this one seems to me to be the most trustworthy.
[215] The Massagetae resemble the Scythians in both their clothing and their lifestyle. In battle they may or may not be on horseback, since they rely on both methods, and as well as using bows and spears it is normal for them to wield sagareis. They make very extensive use of gold and bronze; they use bronze for the heads of their spears and arrows and for the blades of their sagareis, and gold to decorate their headgear, belts, and chest-bands. The same goes for their horses too: they put bronze breastplates on their fronts, but use gold on their bridles, bits, and cheek-bosses. Iron and silver play no part in their lives, however, because there is in fact none to be found in their country, although there is gold and bronze in abundance.
[216] As for their customs, although each man marries a wife, they all make their wives available for anyone else to have intercourse with. In Greece this is said to be a Scythian custom, but it is Massagetan, not Scythian. If a Massagetan desires a woman, he hangs his quiver outside her wagon and has sex with her, with no fear of reprisal. The only imposed limit on life there is as follows. When a person becomes very old, all his relatives come together and sacrificially kill him and some livestock along with him; then they stew the meat and eat it. They believe that there is no more fortunate way to die, whereas anyone who dies after an illness is buried in the ground rather than eaten, and they regard it as a calamity that he did not get to be sacrificed. They do not cultivate the land, but live off cattle and fish, which the Araxes River provides for them in vast quantities. They also drink milk. The only god they worship is the sun, to whom they sacrifice horses. The thinking behind this ritual is that they should offer the swiftest mortal creature to the swiftest of the gods.