Topic: the Greek tradition (1)

• PersonCroesus

  Croesus (Greek Kroisos; reigned c. 560–547/546 BCE) was the last king of Lydia, ruler of the wealthy kingdom of western Anatolia from his capital at Sardis, the subjugator of the Ionian Greek cities of the coast, and, in the Greek imagination, the archetype of the fabulously rich king undone by his own confidence. His defeat by Cyrus the Great and the fall of Sardis in 547/546 BCE ended the Mermnad dynasty and the last great independent kingdom west of Persia, and carried the Achaemenid frontier to the shore of the Aegean, where it met the Greek world: the conquest of Lydia is the beginning of the long entanglement of Persia and the Greeks that runs through the Ionian Revolt to Marathon and Salamis. Croesus matters to this compendium in two registers at once. He is a real king, richly documented for his fall by the contemporary Babylonian [[the-cyrus-cylinder|record]] and by the archaeology of Sardis; and he is a Greek literary construction, the hero of the most famous moral tale in [[herodotus|Herodotus]] (1.26–94): Solon's warning to 'count no man happy until he is dead,' the Delphic oracle he misread, the pyre from which Apollo or Cyrus's pity delivered him. Between the man and the legend, and between the sources that say Cyrus killed him and those that say Cyrus kept him as a counsellor, lies the difficulty of reading him at all.