11 Atys and Adrastus (§§34-45)

After Solon’s departure, a great vengeance from the god visited Croesus, says Herodotus, most likely because he thought himself the most prosperous of humans (ἔλαβε ἐκ θεοῦ νέμεσις μεγάλη Κροῖσον, ὡς εἰκάσαι, ὅτι ἐνόμισε ἑωυτόν εἶναι άνθρώπων ἀπάντων ὀλβιώτατον). He was visited by a dream that correctly foretold the death of his good son. It is possible to interpret the passage in two ways. On the one hand, it is possible that the historian has in mind as the punishment the actual death of the son.^[1] On the other hand, it could be that the vengeance is the dream itself, and it is this latter interpretation that I think is correct. Croesus’s mistake in thinking himself the most prosperous person in the world is an intellectual error; only insofar as it manifests itself in outrageous conduct will it also be a moral error, but in fact we generally see Croesus behaving with reasonable decency and moderation. True, he does wish to conquer as much territory as possible, but he never engages in the sheer madness shown by Cambyses and Xerxes later on. Even Cyrus later will recognize that Croesus is a good man (1.87). So it would seem to be appropriate for divine justice to take the form of some intellectual difficulty, and, as we shall see, the dream presents Croesus with an enormous intellectual challenge. For a son to die because his father thought himself prosperous seems not in keeping with the justice attributed by Herodotus to the divine.^[2] It was fated for the son to die regardless of whether Croesus thought himself happy or not. It is the foreshadowing of the future death, it is the dream about it, that comprises the “vengeance from the god.”^[3] The syntax of the sentence confirms this interpretation, for the next words indicate the close connection of the vengeance: “and immediately a dream stood over him as he slept” (αὐτίκα δε οἱ εὔδοντι ἐπέστη ὄνειρος).

It is here that we learn of Croesus’s two sons, one deaf and dumb, and Atys, the one who surpassed his fellows. The dream showed Croesus that Atys would be slain with an iron spearpoint. Upon awaking, Croesus considered alone what the dream meant, and then he took action: he had his son marry, and he no longer allowed his son to lead the Lydians in military combat. He also no longer allowed the weapons that had hung on the walls of the men’s quarters to remain there; so that they not fall on Atys he piled them in the bed-chambers.^[4] Here lies the heart of the vengeance on Croesus-the confusion into which the dream plunges him. The monarch’s reflective and lonely reaction to the dream is stressed by Herodotus; Croesus did not consult soothsayers or augurs, he thought the matter over by himself: ἑωυτῷ λόγον ἔδωκε.

Now how should Croesus have reacted? If he believed the dream, he believed in its truthfulness and would have realized that any precaution would be in vain since the prophecy in the dream would come to pass. If he did not believe the dream, it would have been unnecessary to take any precautions against it. As he takes precautions against the dream, he must believe it to be provisional: if he does not take precautions, the dream will come to pass. But prophecies are provisional only if they are made provi­sional in the giving of them. So Croesus must neither fully believe the dream nor fully disbelieve it; he is somewhere in between: he must both believe it and disbelieve it. As this position is a violation of the principle of non-contradiction and is irrational, the dream has placed him in an impos­sible situation. To be entirely rational and religious he should believe the dream completely, and, as we have said, if he believed the dream, he would do nothing to avert its fulfillment. But who would not have even a worry about its truthfulness? Who would argue that the moral thing for Croesus to do as a father is wholly to ignore the dream, to stand by and let his son meet his fate?^[5] It would be as unthinkable as for Oedipus, receiving the oracle that he will kill his father and marry his mother, to rush back to his putative parents and carry out the prophecy. Like Oedipus, Croesus does the morally right thing, namely, attempt to avoid the prophecy; like  Oedi­pus, he must engage in an irrational act to do so.^[6] There is deep irony in the intellectual confusion in which the master of the Sphinx must grope; there is poetic justice in Croesus’s similar affliction: all his wealth and prosperity cannot protect him from the dream.^[7]

All attempts to avert an oracle involve the same kind of intellectual error.^[8] All involve a simultaneous belief and disbelief in the oracle. Yet we must try to avert the disaster, though doing so means that we must willingly choose to act irrationally. Here, perhaps, we see a just cause for the pessimism that pervades Greek thought.

If it is fated that Atys will die, what value for Croesus is there in the dream? The dream stirs the natural response to try to save his son, but if the death is certain, all actions in his behalf will be in vain. Thus the dream is superfluous. It cannot avert what is fated; all it can do is generate anxiety in the king before his son’s death and, afterwards, guilt for the actions he did not take. And so it is the complete superfluity of the dream, its useless­ ness and horror, that seem to me to be the real vengeance from the god (ἐκ θεοῦ νέμεσις μεγάλη).

Of the actions that Croesus takes to protect his son, prohibiting participation in military exercises and removing weapons from the men’s quarters are self-evident in their effects on Atys’s safety. The question of Atys’s marriage is somewhat more puzzling, but is, I think, supportive of the conclusions we have reached about Croesus’s intellectual condition. The marriage cannot be a way of involving Atys in feminine activities so that he will be safe, or more happily refrain, from dangerous tasks.^[9] Plenty of married people, not least Croesus himself, engage in combat. Marriage did not hold back any of the warriors at Troy; it will not hold back any of the warriors in the Persian Wars. In conversation with Croesus, Atys will himself indicate that his wife actually expects him to engage in such masculine activities (1.37). No, Croesus must be marrying off his son to assure himself that an heir will be born as quickly as possible from his only son “worthy of account.” Thus the act of compelling his son to marry is a sign that he fears lest the dream come true. The wedding plan is a further indication of the torment that Croesus experiences.

In order to link the Adrastus with Croesus’s with Croesus’s anxiety, Herodotus specifies the time of arrival as the period when Croesus had his hands full with his son’s marriage. There then came to Sardis a Phrygian held in the grip of misfortune, a man whose hands were impure. He asked for a purification in the manner of Lydia, a process that does not interest the historian as it was the same as the Greek process. Without asking questions, Croesus performs the appropriate rites—another characterization of him as decent and pious—and then asks the stranger who he is and what he has done.^[10] He explains that he is Adrastus, son of Gordius the son of Midas, and that and that having unwillingly killed his brother, he was banished from Phrygia. The names of these Phrygians resonate, for they figured in the story of Gyges (1.14); this family, like Gyges, was one of the first barbarian families to make extravagant gifts to Delphi. So now the stories of the families are coming together again, and we can sense that Croesus’s fate is closing in upon him. We can only guess what prompted Midas to give presents to Delphi, and we can only wonder whether he too received some sort of warning about the fifth generation; no matter: it is enough for Herodotus to let this nexus of relationships form the background of his tale.^[11] We are never told the circumstances of the death of Adrastus’s brother, but we can assume that it was the same kind of accident that occurred to Atys.

The key word in the story is συμφορή, “misfortune.” The word literally means “bringing together,” an etymology that confirms Aristotle’s definition of “chance” as the confluence of independent chains of causality, that is, two actions that because of different intentionality lead to unexpected results (Physics 195b30-197a36). Aristotle’s example is of a man who digs in his garden and finds treasure (Metaphysics 1025a13-29): here the intentions of the farmer and of the treasure-hider were not that the farmer find the treasure, but they were “brought together,” and this “bringing together” results in the συμφορή. As most human luck is bad, the word generally carries a negative connotation. The word recurs throughout the story.^[12]

The names of the principals in the story, Atys and Adrastus, have been much noted as meaning respectively “the man judicially blind” and “the doomed.”^[13] While the meanings in the names may lend a bit of piquancy to the story, they are not essential. And, of course, in reality it is unlikely that anyone would choose to name one’s sons with names bearing these meanings (can one imagine a mother calling, “Hey, Doomed, hurry and finish your corn flakes”?).^[14] As with other names in Greek literature and Herodotus, the implicit puns might not be immediately apparent.^[15] As in the tale of Oedipus, the story gains only a little by the meaning of the heroes’ names.

Croesus treats Adrastus in a most friendly fashion, welcoming him into his palace and assuring him that he will lack nothing. He also gives Adrastus advice: “with respect to your misfortune, bearing it as lightly as possible you will most profit” (συμφορήν τε ταύτην ὡς κουφότατα φέρων κερδανέεις πλεῖστον). It is, perhaps, consistent with Croesus’s character and vision of the world that he should use a metaphor for doing well derived from financial profit (of the occurrences of the verb κερδαἰνω in the History only here is it used metaphorically for the lack of financial gain).^[16] The good advice is another of the proto-Stoic sentiments we find in Herodotus.^[17] What is outside our power to change we must endure.

At this same time, a great monster of a boar appeared on Mysian Olym­pos, a mountain in Croesus’s empire. The Mysians, unable to do anything successfully against the boar, appeal to Croesus to send his son and some chosen men and dogs to drive the boar out of the land. Croesus agrees to most of the help they ask, but, remembering his dream, declines to send his son. He keeps the matter of his son hidden from the Mysians, claiming that his newly married son is too busy with his marriage to go. It is perhaps odd that Croesus keeps the dream to himself. Why does he do so? An omen from the gods would have been an acceptable excuse. Indeed, when Nestor and Patroclus ask Achilles to rejoin the battle at Troy, both suggest as a plausible excuse the possibility that Achilles has received some dream or other prophecy—the idea being that such an excuse would provide ample justification for his continued withdrawal (Iliad 11.793-95 and 16.36-38). Can Croesus be too proud to share with mere subjects an anxiety so intimate? That he is driven to the ignoble practice of prevaricating, of inventing excuses for his son, is surely part of νέμεσις.

Croesus’s son hears about the Mysian request and about his father’s refusal to let him participate in the hunt. He points out to his father that earlier he had been allowed to engage in the noblest achievements “for us” (it is not clear whether “for us” [ἡμῖν] refers to members of his family or to the young men of his status) and that he has never shown himself to be cowardly. Then, reminiscent of Hector to Andromache (Iliad 6.440-46), or, perhaps more aptly, when Hector is alone and outside the wall of Troy and resolves to fight Achilles (Iliad 22.99-110), he asks what his compatriots will think of him. What, asks Atys, will his new wife think of him? What kind of man will she think she lives with? He concludes by asking either to be allowed to go on the hunt or to be given a good reason. It is apparent that as of this moment Atys does not know of Croesus’s dream, that Croesus has shared his pain with no one. To Westerners Atys’s protestations seem normal and legitimate. When, however, we compare the response of Croesus to that of other Oriental potentates in the History, we see how great a gulf of decency distinguishes him from them. Xerxes might well have had someone who questioned him punished severely; Cambyses might lightly have had him killed. But Croesus replies with paternal kind­ ness, praising his son and fully explaining his motive.

Croesus explains that while his son has always been courageous he has kept Atys from all dangerous enterprises on account of a fearsome vision: “in order that I might be able to steal you through in my lifetime.” The verb for “steal” is διακλέψαι, the connotations of which involve various kinds of cheating and thievery. Croesus’s use of the verb in connection with his actions perhaps shows a self-consciousness of how greatly the dream has diminished his royal person: now he is aware of involving himself in low-life trickery. Still, most parents would warmly approve of the love Croesus shows. What father would not similarly try to steal his son from death were it in his power?

Croesus concludes, however, with a sentiment that diminishes his paternal glory: ‘‘You see, you happen to be my only son; the other, his hearing wrecked, I do not count as mine.” This sentence does not help Croesus’s case. Would the king not try to save Atys if his brother were not handicapped? It serves no purpose in furthering the narrative. Herodotus includes it, I think, to remind the reader that Croesus does not measure up to the prosperity of Tellus or the mother of Cleobis and Bito in terms of children—one of the elements of happiness. In fact, in the main, the current story shows that when it comes to family all the money in the world does not ensure one’s well-being. Money did not preserve the hear­ing of the other son; money did not avert Atys’s destiny; money did not ward off the dream. Croesus’s last statement also is ironic: the son’s physical hearing may have been blighted by some corporeal disorder, but what good is Croesus’s hearing when he could neither hear the wisdom of Solon nor, as we shall see, reject the feeble arguments of Atys?

Atys now tells his father that he has misinterpreted the dream. After all, a boar does not have hands with which to throw a spear; since the fight is with men, he should be allowed to go. It hardly needs to be pointed out to a man who removed weapons from the walls of the men’s quarters lest one fall on the prince that accidents can happen. If a wall can kill without hands, surely a group of hunters, who have hands, are a bigger threat. Even in antiquity, long before the invention of blaze orange, there must have been hunting accidents. Yet, despite the monumental feebleness of the boy’s argument, Croesus relents and lets him go on the hunt. For a man who has taken so many precautions he does seem to give in rather quickly. Perhaps his paternal affection overwhelms him. Or perhaps Atys’s wife is already pregnant, thus diminishing Croesus’s anxiety about an heir. In the complete absence of evidence, we can but wonder why he so easily gives in. Croesus summons Adrastus, reminds him of the good he has received, and asks him to accompany Atys on the hunting expedition to protect him from robbers. Adrastus agrees to go, though first advising the king that if it were up to him he would not go, for there is something unseemly about so unfortunate a person as he accompanying the young and fortunate. He promises to protect the prince. “As far as I can,” he concludes, “your son will come back safe.” Croesus says that Adrastus has physical ability, and we may assume he has had the kind of training normally given to royalty. Moreover, to the degree that Adrastus intends to be extra careful (in view of his previous unintentional slaying of his brother, probably by an “accident”), Atys should be safe. Having performed the ritual purification for Adrastus, which established a very close bond between them, Croesus has every reason to expect Atys to be a devoted servant. There is also the additional guest-friendship(xenia) enjoyed between the two families.

Atys, Adrastus, and a group of hounds and chosen young men go off to Mount Olympos, find the beast, form a circle around him, and throw their long spears at it. Herodotus’s sentence is carefully wrought:

ἔνθα δὴ ὁ ξεῖνος, οὗτος δὴ ὁ καθαρθεὶς τὸν φόνον, καλεόμενος δὲ Ἄδρηστος, ἀκοντίζων τὸν ὗν τοὖ μὲν ἁμαρτάνει, τυγχάνει δὲ τοὺ Κροίσου παίδος, ὅ μὲν βληθεὶς τῇ αἰχμῇ ἐξέπλησε τοῦ ὀνείρου τὴν φήμην.

Then indeed the guest-friend, the one who had been purified for slaying, the one called Adrastus, throwing his spear at the boar, on the one hand, misses, on the other, he chances upon Croesus’s son. The one struck by the spear-point fulfilled the statement of the dream.

The choice of verb forms reflects the complexity of the moral dilemma. Adrastus is twice referred to in passive verbs: “he was purified,” “he was called”; then the active verb: he “misses.” Yet the question of responsibility remains; how much to blame is Adrastus for the death? The next verb, also active, is “chances upon.” In Greek the two verbs are juxtaposed, achieving an effect not duplicable in English, containing in the juxtaposition the nub of the problem. Atys too is referred to in the passive: “the one being struck”; and then in the active: “and he fulfilled.” How much responsibility does he bear?

As the hunters surrounded the boar in a ring, Adrastus must have been in a spot where he could both protect Atys and kill him. The irony is enor­ mous: for Adrastus successfully to protect Atys he—Adrastus- must be elsewhere (not on the hunt at all, behind Atys, or alongside of him); he will not then be actively protecting Atys but will have protected him. For Adrastus to guard Atys actively, from himself, Atys must be where Adrastus poses a danger to Atys. We do not know whether the two men are where they are by chance or design. I do not think that Adrastus knows of Croesus’s dream; if he did, it seems that he would take extra precaution in hurling his javelin. Involved as he was in the hunt and having been given specific instructions by Croesus to guard Atys against robbers, he surely suspected nothing to happen from his participation in the hunt.

When Adrastus throws his spear, his primary intention is to hit the boar. We may assume that his secondary intention, even if it is subsumed, is to avoid hitting anyone or anything else. While in the woods, we expect hunters to observe extra precautions so as not to hit each other. The hunter’s control over the possible recipients of his shots that miss is, of course, very small. We distinguish—or try to do so—between trigger­happy hunters and those who, although observing due precautions, still do damage, say with a “spent bullet” which hits a long distance away from the animal being aimed at and hidden by trees, or the victim of a “freak’’ accident, e.g., a ricocheting bullet hitting a hard object that was not visible or predictable. Now in general, when a hunter misses his target but does not hit another hunter, we do not regard the not-hitting as good luck; we consider it a neutral act. When the hunter does hit another person, then we view it in two ways. If the hunter was negligent, we hold him responsible, and we do not regard the outcome as “luck.” If the hunter is not negligent, we may again view the action in two ways. First, it is possible that some outside event caused the failure to achieve the secondary aim of not hitting another person; for example, perhaps Atys ran into the flight of the spear. Second, we may not be able to detect any force outside the control of the hunter. In this case we may attribute the failure to achieve the secondary aim to be bad luck (ἀτυχία), which Aristotle calls “incalculable” (παράλογος). The killing of Atys by Adrastus would be an example. We do not in general blame someone for missing his secondary aim when he was not negligent; instead, we call it bad luck and we call the man “unlucky.” Now the more unlikely it is that missing the primary aim (hitting the boar) will also result in missing the secondary aim (not hitting anyone else), the less we call missing the secondary aim a mistake (ἁμαρτία). Herodotus points to this kind of analysis in his juxtaposing the verbs ἁμαρτάνει and τυγχάνει in the death of Atys. The question, then, is whether Adrastus is responsible for missing his secondary aim. He thinks he is, and—to the degree that his family “jinx” is operating—he may be right. Croesus tends to agree with him, for Croesus, after Adrastus condemns himself, says that the mere wish to die is sufficient justice (ἔχω, ὦ ξεῖνε, παρὰ σεῦ πᾶσαν τὴν δίκην, ἐπειδὴ σεωυτοῦ καταδικάζεις θάνατον).

Someone runs to tell the king what has happened, and Croesus, grief­ stricken, calls out the more bitterly for having purified his son’s slayer. He calls on Zeus by three names, Zeus the Purifier, Zeus of the Hearth, and Zeus of Comradeship, believing that he has been betrayed in all three respects, for he had purified, given sanctuary to, and befriended Atys’s slayer. At this point he must not see the dream predicting the death as part of the incident, for he could as easily call on Zeus also as the sender of dreams. In calling on Zeus, Croesus is perhaps further demonstrating his arrogance. He must in some way believe that by doing what would find favor in the eyes of the god he assured himself of the god’s protection. It is rather a commercial view of one’s relationship with the god but is not unexpected of the wealthy king. He is to learn that divine prerogatives are much more complex.

The Lydians return bearing the corpse and followed by the slayer. Adrastus, before the body, stretching forth his hands to Croesus, asks him to slay him there, saying that having already been guilty of one misfortune he now has destroyed his purifier and isn’t fit to live. Croesus feels pity for him, which, as Aristotle tells us (Rhetoric 1385b10) is the feeling one has for another who is suffering unjustly. The act of pity, therefore, shows that Croesus does not hold Adrastus responsible.^[18] It is, for the king, retribution enough that Adrastus thinks himself worthy to die. ‘‘You are not responsible for my evil, except insofar as you have done it unwillingly, but someone of the gods is, who long ago showed me what would happen.” The king obviously thinks that to reveal the future is to be responsible for it. There is some slight support for this view in the Delphic pronouncement later, when we learn that Apollo was able to postpone the overthrow of Croesus’s kingdom (1.91); yet Apollo’s power was limited to postponement, not to altering what was fated. Of course, Croesus had not yet learned this operation of the divine plan, as his attribution of responsibility to the dream-god indicates.

Knowledge of the dream did, however, enable Croesus to feel pity for Adrastus. Had he not known of the dream, he might well have blamed Adrastus instead of the god; as it is, he is able to see that Adrastus is merely an instrument and not the agent of the misfortune. The dream can continue to work its woe on Croesus’s psyche: he can continue to worry whether there was something he could have done, whether he could have refuted his son’s arguments for setting out on the hunt. Most painfully of all, he can wonder why he received the dream since there was nothing he could do to avert its fu1fillment: the time between the dream and its fulfillment was all waste and suffering.

Croesus buried his son. Herodotus tells us what happened next in another magnificent sentence:

Ἄδρηστος δὲ ὁ Γορδίεω τοῦ Μίδεω, οὗτος δή ὁ φονεὺς μέν τοῦ ἑωυτοῦ ἀδελφεοῦ γενόμενος δὲ τοῦ καθήραντος, ἐπείτε ἡσυχίη τῶν ἀνθρώπων ἐγένετο περὶ τὸ σῆμα, συγγινωσκόμενος ἀνθρώπων εἶναι τῶν αὐτὸς ᾔδεε βαρυσυμφορώτατος, ἐπικατασφάζει τῷ τυμβῷ ἑωυτόν.

Adrastus, son of Gordias, son of Midas, this who was the slayer of his own brother and of the one who purified him, when there was quiet about the tomb, recognizing himself as the most heavily beset by misfortune of all the human beings he knew of, slew himself upon the tomb.^[19]

How has Herodotus linked this story with that of Solon’s conversation with Croesus? First there is the contrast between the most prosperous and the most unfortunate;^[20] then the judgment based on “those whom he had known”; then, unlike Tellus, who is buried on the spot where he died, the burial of Atys far from the place where he met his end; and ironically the death of Adrastus on the burial spot of the youth he had promised to protect. Solon, explaining to Croesus how many days—all different—there are in an average life, concluded with the words, “Thus, the whole of a human is accident (συμφορή),” using in the climactic position the very word that has recurred throughout the Atys-Adrastus tale. Adrastus must have started out his life with every possible advantage: kingly wealth, royal birth, at least one brother we know 0£ His should have been a happy, prosperous life; instead it was “most heavily set upon by misfortune” and punc­tuated by two big accidents. He is living proof of Solon’s wisdom, and his example provides Croesus another opportunity to learn the lesson.^[21] And not only Croesus! Could not Athens also benefit from still another reminder of the uncertainty of life? Alas, like Croesus, Athens will have to experience still more suffering firsthand before the lesson takes effect.