21 The Fall of Sardis Resumed (§§84-85)

The city of Sardis itself embodies the Herodotean themes of vulnerability and vicissitude. One of Cyrus’s soldiers, a Mardian named Hyroeades, inspired by a royal promise made after two weeks of siege to reward the first man to mount the fortress, tries to approach the fortress city in a place unprotected by a guard. The particular spot lacked a guard because of its apparent invincibility. The historian tells us that one-time king Meles of Lydia did not pass this place carrying a lion born to him by one of his concubines. The Telmessians, whose prophetic abilities Herodotus has already described, had given their judgment that once this lion cub was carried around the walls of Sardis, the city would be impregnable. Meles, thinking it unnecessary to protect this part of the walls (since its sharp slope rendered it inaccessible), deliberately neglected the one spot. The story, which Herodotus does not in any way question, is most like the story of Thetis dipping Achilles into the river Styx, conferring invulnerability on all places but the heel. It too shows how presumption can lead to disaster and how even things believed most certain are uncertain. But nothing human comes with a 100 percent warranty.

After seeing a Lydian retrieve his helmet that fell from this unprotected place, Hyroeades tries the place on the next day, followed by some Persians, and in this way, Herodotus concludes, Sardis was sacked. Again he shares no details of the battle; instead, he chooses to focus on what befell Croesus, incidents that show yet another example of peripety.

In addition to Atys, Croesus had another (unnamed) son, who was dumb. Among other help Croesus had sought for the lad was advice from Delphi. Delphi warned Croesus not to wish to hear the boy speak, that the day he spoke would be a day of great destruction. A Persian soldier, not recognizing Croesus, attacked the king, who no longer cared whether he lived or died and resignedly awaited the sword. Just at the critical moment the dumb son cried, “Man, do not kill Croesus.” Then, either because Croesus bestirred himself to move out of the way or because the Persian was of a mind to follow Cyrus’s orders to take Croesus alive, the Lydian king was captured. The boy, we are told, spoke for the rest of his life.

The oracle about the son is very suggestive: it does not, it is true, explicitly state any kind of causal connection between the fall of Sardis and the lad’s speaking, yet it would be hard not to infer one. The oracle, moreover, cruelly put Croesus in the terrible position (for a father) of not wishing his son to be hale and hearty. It is, in fact, reminiscent of the chorus in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, when the chorus ask how they could ever dance or worship if the terrible oracles about Oedipus turn out to be false-in effect, an expression of their wish that he suffer (Oedipus Rex 898-910).^[1] This prophecy ought to have raised some doubts in the mind of Croesus about his happiness as well as about his ability to manage events. We are not told when this oracle was delivered to the king, but it is clear that it must have caused intense suffering long before the empire falls: it gave him the Hobson’s choice of wishing either that his son remain infirm or that his kingdom suffer destruction.

The story’s seemingly happy ending, that the boy spoke for the rest of his life, thus becomes a dreadful conclusion, embodying in the reversal of fortune the principle of vicissitude.