19 The Fall of Sardis, Part One (§§79-81)

Cyrus, thinking to deny Croesus the opportunity to marshal greater forces, marches on Sardis. Because things are turning out so differ­ently from his expectations, Croesus leads the Lydians into battle. Herodotus pauses to praise them as the most valiant soldiers in all Asia of that time, skillful fighters on horseback and carriers of great lances.^[1] The great battle takes place before the city on the plain of Sardis. Cyrus, on the advice of Harpagus (who will figure prominently in the story of Cyrus’s accession to power), organizes his line so that Croesus’s cavalry will first face a line of Persian camels, then the Persian infantry, and last the Persian cavalry. His aim is to render ineffectual the Lydian horse, since horses have a natural fear of the camel, both of its appearance and its smell. The strata­ gem is successful, and the engagement’s outcome is certain as soon as Croesus’s horses bolt in terror from the approaching camels. Herodotus reiterates his praise of Lydian courage, for the Lydians, when they see their horses useless, leap from them and engage the Persians on foot. Many die on both sides, and the victorious Persians lay siege to the city.

In a battlefield address to his soldiers before the engagement, Cyrus urges his men to kill all the Lydians before them except Croesus, whom they should capture alive, even if he resists. Cyrus’s orders are very emphatic, as Herodotus makes clear, for the Persian intends to burn Croesus on a pyre.^[2] The order sets the stage, of course, for the climactic scenes of Croesus’s discovery; had he been killed, there would be no great scene of discovery.

Harpagus’s stratagem is, as far as I know, the first example of a deliber­ate chemical (or biological?) maneuver to counter an enemy. Two centuries later, when Alexander encounters Porus and his elephants at the Hydaspes River, he will be alert to the need to circumvent the dangers posed by the sound and scent of elephants on his cavalry and will emerge successful (Arrian, 5.11-15). This first military application and exploitation of what must have been a fairly common occurrence in everyday life is, as Herodo­tus reports it, an anticipatory echo, so to speak, of the intelligence Harpa­gus has demonstrated in the rise of Cyrus.

Again Croesus miscalculates: he thinks that the siege will be long and that there is sufficient time for his allies to come to save the day. He sends a message asking them to come at once instead of, as originally requested, after a delay of some months.

A strange anomaly is present in the story of the Lydian attack upon Persia. Herodotus has gone to considerable lengths to report Croesus’s search for Greek allies, in the course of which he has given us the significantly descriptive stories of Athens and Sparta. The Lydian was told directly by the oracle to seek out the strongest of the Greeks as allies for the attack. And yet it appears that he invaded Cappadocia without the aid of the very same allies. Only after his defeat in Pteria by Cyrus does he send for his allies. Before setting out, why did he not enlist them-if not the Egyptians and Babylonians, at least the Greeks mentioned in the oracle? The History, alas, provides no clue, and we are left to speculate on our own. The solution lies perhaps in the extreme degree of confidence Croesus felt in his success. Having conquered the Ionians to the west, having been successful in all his battles, enjoying the height of his power, and confirmed by the oracle that told him he would destroy a mighty empire, he was unable to imagine the possibility of defeat. He had dismissed Solon, with his speech about the uncertainties of life, as an errant fool. I think that here Herodotus is true to life; as Boethius will observe a millennium later in reference to the story of Croesus (Consolation of Philosophy Book 2, prose 2), continued good fortune blinds those who suffer it to the realities of vicissitude.