6 The Delphic Oracle (§ §13-14)

The Lydians were displeased with the circumstances of Candaules’s death and protested.^[1] Gyges and the people agree to let the Delphic Oracle decide the issue and determine whether the kingship should be restored to the Heraclidae. The oracle decides in Gyges’s favor but declares that the Heraclidae will take vengeance on Gyges’s posterity in the fifth generation afterward. This generation will be Croesus’s.^[2] It is not clear why the Lydians would have consulted an oracle so far away; perhaps its prominence as the oracle par excellence was enough to ensure acceptance of its decision.^[3] It is, of course, possible as well that Gyges bribed the oracle to render a favorable judgment; such bribery is documented later by Herodotus (6.66). Such an incident would lend more force to the ironic allusion to Archilochus’s line.

We should pause here to consider the question of the vengeance on the fifth generation after Gyges.^[4] To many readers it seems cruel and unfair for someone to suffer so much later for the sin of his ancestor.^[5] Indeed, something strikes most of us as unfair when the punishment comes so long after the crime. Somehow we feel that swift justice is best. How does Gyges suffer if he is spared and his great-great-grandson bears the onus of punishment? As it is a common view in antiquity that such suffering is often delayed, let us consider how such a view may have come into being.

It is the job of the gods to uphold moira, the way things are. Even the gods are subject to moira, and though they can violate it, they choose not to, for it is important that the order of the universe be upheld. Thus in Iliad 16, when Patroclus is about to slay Zeus’s son Sarpedon, Zeus reflects on whether he should save his favorite. Hera comes to him and warns him that he can if he wants to, but if he does, all the other gods will save their favorites. Zeus thinks of the chaos that would result and, weeping tears of blood, allows his son to die. In so doing Zeus behaves as a god should, upholding moira.

Now when a person commits a notorious crime, it is the moira of the situation that his offspring suffer for the crime. For example, if a man murders a number of people and is caught, a certain opprobrium attends also the son of this murderer. If the crime of the father were especially horrendous, even into the third generation people might whisper to one another as the murderer’s grandson approached, “There goes the grandson of so and so, the notorious murderer.” In the remembrance of the crime of his grandfather the grandson suffers. Now in observing that such suffering is natural, I am not suggesting that it ought to happen or that it is fair that it happen. The grandson of a notorious murderer might himself be a fine chap. But, given the way people are and the way our memories work, association with the foul deeds of his grandfather will, in the normal course of events, be a source of pain to him. Even if people warn one another not to discriminate against the chap on account of the deeds of a long-gone grandfather, in the warning itself there is an association with the villain that will cast a shadow over the descendant. In short, right or wrong, it is natural that children and, in cases of exceptional wrong doing, that grandchildren suffer for the crimes of their ancestors. It is, simply, the way things are.

Now let us suppose that for some reason someone does not suffer for the crimes of his father, nor does a grandson. Moira—the way things are—has been violated. As it is the job of the gods to uphold moira, they must see to it that someone suffer, else there will be a hole in the universe. Thus, even many generations later, the gods will remember that the natural order requires suffering. Gyges, despite his claims of compulsion, behaved atrociously. Much more obviously than Candaules, he knew that what he was doing was wrong; the gods could not tolerate that wrongdoing go unpunished.^[6]

That such is the mechanism by which this kind of postponed punishment works Herodotus confirms in Book Seven with his story of the Spar­ tan envoys who went to Persia. When Darius sent a messenger to Sparta asking for earth and water, signs of her submission, the Spartans threw him into a well (7.133). Years later, at the shrine of Talthybius, Agamemnon’s herald, favorable signs could not be obtained, so the Spartans decided at an assembly that a Spartan ought to offer his life to atone for the Persian herald. Two rich Spartans, Sperthias and Bulis, volunteered and went to Media to see Xerxes to pay with their lives for Sparta’s crime against Darius’s messengers. Though they refused to bow down and in other ways behaved bravely, Xerxes dismissed them, saying, “they have violated the customary usage of all mankind by killing heralds; but I will not chastise them, nor by killing them will I release the Spartans from their guilt” (7.136). Clearly Xerxes knows that the guilt will continue if the wrong is not requited, and in light of his coming war with Sparta it is certainly in his interest for the guilt to continue (he needs every ally he can get!). Herodotus tells the extraordinary conclusion to the story:

So it was that the wrath of Talthybius rested for the moment, because the Spartans had done as they had, even though the men, Sperthias and Bulis, came back home to Sparta. But long after­ wards it woke into life, at the time of the war between the Atheni­ans and Peloponnesians, according to the story the Lacedaemonians tell. It is indeed in this aspect that the thing seems to me to be most cleverly the work of the gods. For that the wrath of Talthy­bius fell upon envoys and never ceased until it had found its fulfill­ment, is the course of justice. But that it should fall upon the chil­dren of those men who had gone up to Susa to the King’s presence—upon Nicolas, the son of Bulis, and on Aneristus, the son of Sperthias—that is what makes it clear to me that it was a matter of divine contrivance because of Talthybius’s wrath. For these two men were sent by the Lacedaemonians as envoys into Asia, were betrayed by Sitalces, son of Tereus, King of Thrace, and by Nymphodorus, son of Pytheas of Abdera, were taken prisoner at Bisanthe on the Hellespont, and, being shipped to Attica, were executed by the Athenians and, along with them, Aristeas, son of Adimantus, a Corinthian. This happened many years after the King’s expedition. (Tr. David Grene)

As Gyges was guilty of a serious wrong, it is only fitting that he should suffer. Since he doesn’t, the gods bring it about that the suffering come later on, in the fifth generation. Why doesn’t Gyges himself suffer? We cannot, of course, know the answer to this question, but it is possible to hazard a guess. His guilt is diminished somewhat, I think, by the fact of his basic goodness, a goodness shown in his sound arguments and over­come only because of the considerable stress his king and queen placed upon him. He did try, as we have seen, to persuade Candaules not to require him to see the queen naked and he did beseech her not to require him to kill Candaules. These actions, plus his generosity to Delphi, all speak in his behalf. We shall see later, in the case of Croesus, a similar divine postponement of the penalty. When it comes to Croesus, moreover, there is an additional element of poetic justice in his suffering. One of his motives in attacking the Persians was to avenge his uncle Astyages (1.73- 75), an avenging that was itself postponed for many years.

The oracle’s warning that the Heraclidae should have vengeance on Gyges in the fifth generation was not taken seriously by the Lydians, as Herodotus says, until it happened (τούτου τοῦ ἔπεος Λυδοί τε καὶ οἱ βασιλέες αὐτων λόγον οὐδένα ἐποιεῦντο, πρὶν δὴ ἐπετελέσθη). It is natural that the Lydians, who have gone twenty-two generations without a change of dynasty, should assume that the constancy would go on forever, and it is appropriate that Croesus, the single great example of vicissitude—because he more than anyone else in the History tried to insure himself against it—should be the one upon whom the vengeance was taken. Croesus, as we shall see, undertook to find the best oracle and then to consult it about his military operations. If he had recalled what the oracle had said to Gyges, he might have realized that more oracular pronouncements could not prevent his fall. Herodotus has crafted a story drenched in irony, of which this is but a sample.

Now there is a question of whether the Heraclidae themselves partici­pated in the fall of fifth generation Croesus. It seems to me that in a certain sense they did, albeit unwittingly. According to Herodotus (5.43, 7.208, 8.114, 9.26, 9.33), the Spartan kings, like the family of Candaules, are descended from Heracles. When Croesus is looking for allies later on, he chooses the Spartans (1.69). They are glad to be his allies, but when the time comes for them to help, it will be too late—Sardis will have already fallen. But the very fact of having them as allies induced Croesus to attack Persia, contributed to his overconfidence, and thus helped to bring about his defeat. This may seem a tangential way of contributing to the vengeance, but given the importance of family lines in Herodotus, the interconnectedness of causes, and, moreover, the emphasis given to the fact of the Spartan alliance, it seems to me possible that the historian wants us to understand that the Spartan Heraclidae participated (albeit unintentionally) in the vengeance in this way.

Gyges was very generous with Delphi so generous that one might suspect him, if not of bribery,^[7] of trying to buy himself into the good graces of the divinity. With incredible subtlety Herodotus gives many hints as to his meaning, and an illustration here will show the sort of thing I have in mind. When Herodotus gives details that are not at all necessary to the story he is telling, he is conveying additional meaning through them. Herodotus tells us that the great treasures that Gyges gave to Delphi are stored in the Corinthian treasure-house, not the treasure-house of the Corinthian people, but in that of Cypselus son of Eetion. This is the first of two important corrections Herodotus makes, thus drawing considerable attention to them. He then says that Gyges was the first barbarian to give gifts to Delphi; he again corrects himself to say that Gyges was the first after Midas son of Gordias. What is the meaning behind these statements? We need to see how Cypselus and Midas figure in the History; as it turns out, they are significant.

We learn about Cypselus in Book Five (5.92), when Socles warns the Spartans about establishing tyrannies. Socles tells how Eetion was warned to destroy a son born to him; that when Cypselus was born, his mother saved him by hiding him in a chest; that the lad grew up and received from Delphi an oracle that he interpreted as predicting that he would achieve absolute power; that his sons would retain it, but that it would be lost by his grandsons. He became tyrant of Corinth and drove many into exile and committed many other atrocities. His son Periander committed still more, of which the worst was publicly stripping naked all the women of Corinth.^[8] So there are many obvious resemblances between Cypselus, tyrant of Corinth, and Gyges: irregular seizure of power; confirmation by the Delphic oracle (and obviously, since Cypselus had his own treasury there, generous gratitude shown to Delphi), and a clear indication that the power would not last many generations. In addition, there is the theme of improper seeing of naked women. Surely, then, Herodotus’s mention of this detail about the treasure-house may be intended to stir up in the reader these associations; if so, it is obvious that the detail is not gratuitous, and Gyges shares by association the opprobrium of the late usurper.

Midas son of Gordias figures much sooner in Herodotus’s account: after Croesus has dreamt about his son Atys’s dying by an iron weapon, he is visited by Adrastus the Phrygian, son of Gordias, son of Midas (1.35)—a descendant of the same Midas who so generously gave to Delphi! As these families are linked by the tragedies of their sons, so too they are linked by their gifts to the oracle. One can only wonder—and perhaps Herodotus mentions Midas for the very reason of stirring up wonder—what miseries led Midas to his gifts. Perhaps Herodotus is foreshadowing the warning that his Solon will give shortly—that great wealth, even when combined with immense generosity to Apollo, is no guarantee against the vicissitudes of fortune.

Gyges attacked Miletus and Smyrna, taking even the city of Colophon, but did little else in a reign of thirty-eight years. Earlier (1.6), Herodotus had said that Croesus was the first to subdue Greeks and exact tribute from them (ὁ Κροὶσος βαρβάρων πρῶτος τὼν ἡμεῖς ἴδμεν τοὺς μὲν κατεστρέψατο ῾Ελλήνων ἐς φόρου ἀπαγωγήν); clearly, then, Gyges did not subdue them nor did he exact tribute. In fact, according to Strabo, he allowed Miletus to establish Abydos on the Hellespont, an indication of his friendly relations with the city. As for the capture of Colophon, perhaps Gyges reached some sort of rapprochement with that city as well and did not altogether subdue it.