7 Gyges’s Successors (§§15-22)

The same sort of military engagements with the Greeks may have been organized by Ardys, Gyges’s successor. Here the verbs describing Ardys’s actions are “took’’ (εἷλε) and “attacked” (ἐσέβαλε). Now King Ardys escaped total destruction by the skin of his teeth, for during his reign the Cimmerians took all of Sardis except the citadel. Despite what might be exciting circumstances, the story of Ardys must have little to contribute to the historian’s purpose, for Herodotus tells us nothing more about Ardys’s reign of forty-nine years. When we reflect how many things can happen in one day, how even more can happen in half a century, we must conclude that Herodotus is sticking to his themes. He gives even less attention to Sadyattes, whose reign lasted twelve years.

Alyattes, son of Sadyattes and father of Croesus, is, however, developed as an important figure. Like Ardys, Alyattes “took” (εἷλε) a Greek city, here, Smyrna; the verb “take” (αἱρέω) seems to be much weaker than “subdue” (καταστρέφομαι), and thus Croesus’s priority as the one “who subdued and exacted tribute” from the Greeks stands.^[1] Yet we learn from other sources that he did destroy Smyrna (Strabo 646). Perhaps Herodotus is deliberately downplaying Alyattes’s destruction of Smyrna: it was but one small town in comparison to the major revolution effected by Croesus.

Alyattes inherited a war with Miletus from Sadyattes. He and his army attacked Milesian lands to the music of pipes, flutes, and harps, destroying only the crops and leaving intact the farmhouses so that the people might continue to grow crops for him to destroy again. In the twelfth year of these attacks, after the grain was set ablaze, the fire spread and burned the temple of Athena of Assesos. As he did earlier, Herodotus directs us to the inattention paid the event at the time and to the attention paid later. When Alyattes returned to Sardis, he became sick, and, either by himself, or following the counsel of another, he sent to Delphi to inquire after the illness. The priestess replied that she would give no oracle until the burned temple had been rebuilt. This parenthesis of Herodotus’s, that Alyattes either thought of sending to Delphi by himself or because someone advised him to it, is a way of telling us that Alyattes was an intelligent person.^[2] As Hesiod sings in the Works and Days (293, 295-97):

That man’s completely best who of himself
Thinks of all things… and he is also good
Who trusts a good advisor; but the man
Who neither for himself can think, nor, listening,
Takes what he hears to heart, this man is useless.

The lines are quoted by Aristotle in the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics when he discusses the kind of people who can learn ethics (1095b10-14). The sentiment contrasts starkly with Candaules, who neither conceived good advice nor listened to his advisor.

Herodotus tells us that he learned of the oracle from the Delphians themselves. He then proceeds with the tale of the unauthorized use of the information in the oracle by the tyrants of Corinth and Miletus. Periander, tyrant of Corinth, hearing of the oracle, informed his friend Thrasybulus, tyrant of Miletus. Alyattes sent to Thrasybulus to make a truce for the length of time necessary to rebuild the temple of Athena. While the envoy was there, Thrasybulus contrived that all the grain in the city be brought to the marketplace and that the people engage in revelry so as to deceive the envoy into the belief that the city was not undergoing any hardship at all.^[3] When it was reported to the Lydian monarch that Miletus did not seem in the least to be suffering, he was surprised that the condition of the city was so different from what he expected after so many years of invasions. So he made peace with Miletus, becoming allies and guest-friends with Thrasybulus. He also built two temples to Athena. His generosity was rewarded: not only did he recover from his illness, but he had the longest reign of any of his dynasty-fifty-eight years.

The relationship of Periander and Thrasybulus is described by Herodo­ tus much later in the History (5.92), in Socles’s story (discussed previously) about the evils of tyranny. When Periander first took over after Cypselus, he was gentler than his father. Then he wrote to his friend Thrasybulus of Miletus asking how he might most safely give the best administration to the city. Thrasybulus did not say anything to the envoy, but walked in a cornfield lopping off the high stalks of corn that stood taller than the others. Periander (very much like Sextus Tarquinius in the story told later by Livy) understood the gesture to mean that he should murder the most prominent of his citizens. Periander followed the advice. It was with this Thrasybulus that Alyattes became friend and ally. Can Herodotus be suggesting that there is not so very much difference between a Greek tyrant of the Periander-Thrasybulus ilk and an Oriental potentate?

There are two other related matters that suggest themselves in the story of Alyattes, and both will recur in the History. First is the operation of what seems to be chance; next is the way that that very chance helps to carry out the wishes of the gods.

The Delphic Oracle, in its ruling concerning Gyges, had given a certain measure of safety to Gyges’s immediate successors, even if they were unaware of it—for the dynasty was not destined to fall until the fifth generation. Thus, as we have observed, the Cimmerians did not take the citadel of Sardis where Gyges’s son Ardys was hiding. Similarly, though Alyattes was unsuccessful in his invasion of Clazomenae (1.16), and though the army suffered a great disaster there (προσπταίσας μεγάλως, Alyattes emerged unhurt. One can only wonder whether the loss was kept deliberately limited so that Alyattes would survive. The operation of chance may be seen in the fire that burned down the Temple of Athena of Assesos. That he took no account of the temple he destroyed speaks poorly for the piety of Alyattes. Desecration of temples and mistreatment of divine prerogatives are very frequently punished by illnesses of one sort or another. Thus the Greeks at Troy suffer illness for Agamemnon’s seizure of Chryses’s daughter; so too the Thebans suffer for the unatoned guilt of Oedipus. Later on (2.11), Pheros will pay with blindness for his affront to the god Nile. The oracle’s refusal to advise Alyattes until the temple was rebuilt and the manipulation of the oracle by Miletus both contribute to the restoration of Alyattes’s health and to the postponement of the dynastic change until the time of Croesus.

Now we need to ask how the gods might least obtrusively intervene in the affairs of humans. There is no neater way for such intervention to occur than in what appear to be operations of chance. That this belief was common in antiquity is shown not only by such wonderful lines as Oedipus’s calling himself the child of chance (Oedipus Tyrannus 1080) but also in the Book of Ruth, a text that seems to have no operation of the deity except, upon investigation, in the single word “happened,” in an action that brings about all the successive events (Ruth 2:3). Such chance events occur frequently in Herodotus.