23 Croesus’s Offerings and Lydian Customs (§92-94)

The tale of Croesus concluded, Herodotus adds a coda, a paragraph enumerating the gifts to temples other than Delphi, and he reveals for the first time a plot that had been made against Croesus. Some have concluded that the passage “clearly comes from another source. As it is not likely to be a later addition, it is probably a fragment of Herodotus’s original material, which he has not worked into harmony with his narrative.”^[1]

It is possible and, I think, likely, however, that the passage is here not for reasons of ineptitude or carelessness on the author’s part but for good literary reasons. Having concluded his account of the fall of Lydia with our sympathies stirred in Croesus’s favor, he wants to accentuate the notes of caution that he has introduced. Yes, when Croesus was on the pyre he learned about the gods, but he is much less than an Oedipus figure, for he lacks that unambiguous essential moral goodness of the Theban king. Moreover, the passage on the customs of Lydia, coming at the end of the Lydian story, is similarly meant to diminish our identification with her.

In addition to the offerings to Delphi and Amphiaraus we have heard earlier (50-52), we now hear of offerings made by Croesus to Ismenian Apollo in Thebes and in Ephesus, and at Branchidae in Miletus. The offerings to Delphi and Amphiaraus came from Croesus’s own estate; all the others came from the property of Pantaleon, who had led a conspiracy against him. Thus Croesus anticipated the advice of Machiavelli (The Prince ch. 16) to be liberal with the property of others. It is important to remember that Amphiaraus and Delphi received gifts for the accurate knowledge about his tortoise cooking and for the encouraging oracles they gave him about attacking Persia. We can only imagine the cause for the other oracles; perhaps they gave him advice concerning the conspiracy of Pantaleon.

The conspirator turns out to have been Croesus’s half-brother, born to Alyattes from an Ionian woman, and he conspired to become king instead of Croesus. We are given no details about the conspiracy, except that when Alyattes had given Croesus the rule, Croesus killed Pantaleon by drawing him across a carding comb (κνάφος). As we are told that Alyattes gave the rule to Croesus, the conspiracy in all likelihood was a palace intrigue to win the throne, not some kind of armed uprising. The torture of a half-brother surely renders an ugly picture of the Oriental monarch; the strife that must have wracked the family surely makes us see what a superficial character Croesus had been: even before the incident with Atys he had already killed his half-brother. How under these circumstances could he have considered himself the happiest of all men?

The historian now (93) turns to Lydia’s geography, the most remarkable feature of which is the gold dust carried down from Mount Tmolus. As Lydia is intimately associated with wealth, this geological fact will have contributed to the nation’s destiny. The greatest man-made structure in the country is the tomb of Alyattes, inferior in size only to the monuments of Babylon and Egypt. The tomb was made by three classes, whose contributions are recorded on marking stones. The greatest share of the work, Herodotus records, was completed by young prostitutes (παιδίσκαι). And now the historian explains that all the daughters of common people practice prostitution to collect dowries for their marriages. The description of the mound is resumed with an account of its huge dimensions, and we are meant to think of the great number of prostitutes involved in the construction. Herodotus leaves it to our imagination to ponder at all these young women who contributed to the actual construction of the tomb. Near the tomb, he concludes, is the Gygaean Lake, whose waters the Lydians say are always full. There is surely irony in this last statement, for if anything is true about the story of Gyges, it is that “always” is a term not properly applied.

The prostitution of daughters is, the historian continues, the custom in which the Greeks most differ from the Lydians, and thus will serve to distance Herodotus’s listeners from any close identification with them.^[2] Herodotus discusses the sexual habits of many non-Greek tribes through­ out the History.^[3] The emphasis is very frequently on the normality of the promiscuity that is practiced; the very matter-of-fact tone will surely have titillated while at the same time surprised his listeners, who would have been careful to protect the chastity of their own wives and daughters.^[4] As he both begins and ends his entire History with stories of sexual intrigue, he is aware of the power of sexuality in human life.^[5]

The Lydians were also the first to use currency and the first to have shopkeepers. The invention of money is of course one of the great inventions that made civilization of any size possible, for it made different things commensurable (Aristotle, Nic. Eth. 1133a6-b27). The attribution of its primacy to Lydia and the identification with the country of retail trade both contribute to the aura of materialism and wealth that it enjoys. The invention of money may have led to Croesus’s confusion about happiness, in much the same way that the confusion is still made. What makes money useful is, of course, that it is a medium of exchange, that is, that vastly different items may all be converted into the coin of the realm. Thus shoes, chickens, oranges, speeches, sexual activity, carpentry, singing, and policing are all convertible into money. Why not, Croesus could reason, could also an intangible, like happiness? If, in fact, money and happiness were convertible, he would, as the richest man, be the happiest.^[6] Unfortunately, the goods of the soul and those of the material world do not so easily convert!

Contrasting with the great wealth is the remembrance of a famine that occurred in the era of King Atys, of the same name as Croesus’s son. During his reign there was a severe famine throughout Lydia. By devoting themselves to games on alternate days, the Lydians were able to put off thoughts of food and thus let the food last longer. For eighteen years they ate and played on alternate days. When at length the famine grew still worse, half were selected by lot for emigration. (Perhaps their games, in which there would have been an element of chance, habituated them to making decisions, even those of grave moment, by lot.) These latter went under his son Tyrrhenus to Italy, where they established cities and called themselves, after Tyrrhenus, Etruscans. The story is quite remarkable; not only does it account for the games the Greeks play (except for draughts, which the Lydians do not claim to have invented), but it also accounts for the mysterious Etruscans. The account concludes with a reiteration of the Lydians’ own enslavement by the Persians. Thus this last story also shows the ubiquity of the principle of vicissitude. The “lucky” descendants of the ancient Lydians, who remained in Asia, are now reduced to slavery; the “unlucky’’ ones, who fled to Etruria, are prospering in freedom.

The Lydian games are not, of course, to be confused with athletic competition; the games are specified as dice, bones, and ball games. Even here it is not clear exactly what kind of ball games they invented, for some kind of ball game is played by Nausicaa in the Odyssey. The games were mentally absorbing and non-strenuous. That they succeeded for eighteen years in distracting from the famine testifies to how completely the Lydians devoted themselves to play. The passage gives one much to wonder about: Who was producing food for the population? How much pleasure could there be in games whose purpose was to distract from starvation? How exactly were the games played? What were the psychic effects on the popu­lation of so widespread a dedication to gaming? Nor does Herodotus give us many details about the Lydians who went to Italy, which again, as in the aftermath of the Trojan War, serves as a refuge for displaced Asians. In general, Herodotus’s purpose appears to be to show earlier vicissitudes in the historical life of this now vanquished and enslaved country.