Histories — Book 1 (Clio)

Herodotus · a new plain-English translation from the Greek

Herodotus of Halicarnassus, this is the display of his inquiry, so that neither what has happened among men may fade with time, nor great and marvelous deeds, some accomplished by the Greeks, some by barbarians, may become without fame — including, in particular, the reason why they waged war against each other. Now the learned men among the Persians say that the Phoenicians were the cause of the dispute. For these, having come from the sea called the Red Sea

to this sea, and having settled in this region which they still now inhabit, immediately took up long voyages, and carrying Egyptian and Assyrian cargo, arrived at various other places and in particular at Argos. Now Argos at that time surpassed all the peoples of the land now called Greece. And when the Phoenicians arrived

at this Argos, they set out their cargo for sale. On the fifth or sixth day from their arrival, when nearly everything had been sold, many women came down to the sea, among them the daughter of the king; her name, as the Greeks also say, was Io, daughter of Inachus. These women, standing by the stern of the ship, were buying

those of the goods for which they had the greatest desire. And the Phoenicians, urging one another on, rushed at them. Most of the women escaped, but Io, along with others, was seized. They put them into the ship and sailed away toward Egypt. Thus the Persians say Io came to Egypt, not as the Greeks say, and this was the first of the wrongs. After

this, they say that some Greeks (for they cannot give the name) put in at Tyre in Phoenicia and seized the king's daughter Europa. These would have been Cretans. So far these things were equal to equal, but after this the Greeks became the cause of the second wrongdoing: for sailing in a long ship to Aea in Colchis and to the river Phasis,

from that place, once they had finished the other business that had brought them there, Medea, the king's daughter, was seized and taken away by them. The king of the Colchians then sent a herald to Greece demanding compensation for the abduction and asking for his daughter's return. The Greeks replied that since the Colchians had never paid compensation for the abduction of Io of Argos, they in turn owed the Colchians nothing. They say that two generations later

Alexander, son of Priam, upon hearing this story, decided he wanted a wife carried off from Greece, being quite certain he would face no punishment for it, since no one else ever had. So once he had carried off Helen, the Greeks resolved to first send envoys demanding her return and compensation for the abduction. The Trojans, faced with this demand, threw back at them the abduction of Medea, arguing that the Greeks

themselves, having neither given satisfaction nor given her back when she was demanded, wished to receive satisfaction from others. Up to this point there had been only seizures on both sides; but from this point on the Greeks became greatly to blame, for they were the first to begin marching an army into Asia, before the Persians marched into Europe. Now to seize women is held to be the act of unjust men, but

to make a great effort to avenge women once seized is the act of foolish men, while to pay no heed at all to women who have been seized is the act of sensible men; for it is clear that if they themselves had not wished it, they would not have been seized. The Persians say that they, the people of Asia, made no account at all when their women were seized, but that the Greeks, for the sake of a Lacedaemonian woman, gathered a great expedition and then, coming into Asia, destroyed the power of Priam.

From that time on they have always regarded the Greek people as their enemy. For the Persians claim Asia and the barbarian peoples living in it as their own, but they consider Europe and the Greek people to be separate. This is how the Persians say it happened, and it is in the capture of Troy that they find the origin of their hostility toward the Greeks. But concerning Io, the Phoenicians do not agree

with the Persians in this way; for they say that it was not by seizure that they brought her to Egypt, but that while in Argos she had intercourse with the ship's captain, and when she realized she was pregnant, out of shame before her parents, she sailed away willingly with the Phoenicians, so that it would not become known. These, then, are the accounts given by the Persians and the Phoenicians; but I myself, concerning

on these matters I am not setting out to claim that events unfolded one way rather than another. Instead I will name the man I myself know to have been the first to commit injustice against the Greeks, and having pointed him out, move ahead with my narrative, covering the cities of men both small and great without distinction. Cities that were once great have mostly shrunk down small, while cities great in my own day were once

insignificant. Since I recognize that human fortune never stays fixed in one place, I will treat both kinds equally. Croesus was Lydian by descent, son of Alyattes, and lord over the peoples living within the river Halys, a river that flows from the south between the lands of the Syrians and the Paphlagonians and empties northward into the sea called the Euxine. This Croesus was the very first foreign ruler known to us

who forced part of the Greeks into paying tribute and won others over as allies. He forced the Ionians, Aeolians, and the Dorians settled in Asia into submission, and made allies of the Lacedaemonians. Before Croesus took power all Greeks were free, since the Cimmerian force that had earlier struck Ionia, arriving before Croesus's time, was not a conquest of cities at all but merely a raid conducted

an incursion. The rule passed in this way — belonging by descent to the Heraclids — into the family of Croesus, called the Mermnadae. There was Candaules, whom the Greeks call Myrsilus, ruler of Sardis, descendant of Alcaeus son of Heracles. For Agron, son of Ninus, son of Belus, son of Alcaeus, was the first of the Heraclids to become king of Sardis, and Candaules, son of Myrsus, was the last. Those who ruled this land before Agron

of this land were descended from Lydus son of Atys, the man from whom the entire people took the name Lydian, having earlier been called Meionian. From these people the Heraclids, given rule through an oracle, took power — sprung from a slave woman belonging to Iardanus together with Heracles — and they held power across twenty-two generations of men for five hundred and five years, each son inheriting from his

in the rule, down to Candaules son of Myrsus. This Candaules, then, fell in love with his own wife, and being in love he believed her to be by far the most beautiful of all women. Holding this belief — for among his spearmen Gyges son of Dascylus was the one who pleased him most — to this Gyges Candaules used to entrust his more serious business, and indeed he also praised excessively the beauty of

his wife. Not much time had passed (for it was fated that things should go badly for Candaules) when he said the following to Gyges: 'Gyges, since I do not think you believe me when I speak of my wife's beauty — for men's ears happen to be less trustworthy than their eyes — arrange to see her naked.' But he cried out and said, 'Master, what unsound thing are you saying, ordering me to look upon my mistress

naked? A woman, when she takes off her tunic, sheds her modesty along with it. Long ago fine things were discovered by men, from which one must learn; among these is this one: let each look to his own. I myself believe that she is the most beautiful of all women, and I beg you not to ask for what is unlawful.' Speaking thus he resisted, fearing that some

harm should come to him because of them. Candaules replied to him in these words: 'Have courage, Gyges, and do not be afraid, either of me — I only say this to test you — or of my wife, that some harm might befall you on her account. Right from the outset I will arrange matters so that she never even realizes you have looked at her. I will station you inside the chamber where we sleep, just behind

the open door. Once I have entered, my wife will come in as well to go to bed. Near the entrance stands a chair; she will remove her clothing piece by piece and set each garment on it, giving you ample opportunity to observe her at leisure. Then, once she leaves the chair and moves toward the bed with her back turned toward you, make certain

from that spot onward that she never spots you slipping out through the doorway.' Since escape was impossible, Gyges made himself ready. And when Candaules judged the hour for sleep had arrived, he brought Gyges into the chamber, and shortly afterward his wife came in too. Gyges watched her enter and set down her garments one by one. And once her back was turned as she moved

toward the bed, he crept out unseen, though the woman spotted him leaving. Realizing what her husband had done, she neither cried out from shame nor let on that she had noticed, already resolved to punish Candaules for it. Among the Lydians, and nearly all other non-Greek peoples besides, a man being seen naked counts as a source of deep disgrace. So at that moment

she gave no sign of it and kept quiet. But as soon as day came, she made ready those of her servants whom she saw to be most loyal to her, and summoned Gyges. He, thinking she knew nothing of what had happened, came when called, as he had been accustomed before, whenever the queen summoned him, to attend her. When Gyges arrived, the woman said the following: 'Now, Gyges, of two paths

that lie open to you I give you the choice, whichever you wish to take. Either kill Candaules and have me and the kingdom of Lydia, or you yourself must die right now, so that in the future, obeying Candaules in everything, you may not see what you should not. For either that man who devised this must perish, or you, who have seen me naked, and

"having done things not customary." Gyges for a time was amazed at what was said, but then he begged her not to compel him by necessity to decide on such a choice. He did not persuade her, but he saw that a real necessity lay before him: either to destroy his master or to be destroyed himself by others. He chose to survive himself, and asked her this: "Since you compel me to kill my master against my will, come,"

"let me hear by what means we shall attack him." She took this up and said, "The attack will be launched from the very place where he showed me naked, and it will come while he is asleep." When they had prepared the plot, and night had come — for Gyges was not released, nor was there any escape for him, but it was necessary either that he himself perish or Candaules — he followed

the woman into the bedroom, and she gave him a dagger and hid him behind that same door. Afterward, while Candaules was resting, Gyges slipped out, killed him, and took both the woman and the kingship — this Gyges whom Archilochus of Paros, who lived at the same time, mentioned in iambic trimeter. He took the kingship and had it confirmed by

the oracle at Delphi. Once the Lydians took Candaules's death hard and rose up in arms, an agreement was struck between Gyges's supporters and the remaining Lydians: if the oracle named him king of Lydia, he would rule; but if not, power would revert to the Heraclids. The oracle did name him king,

and so Gyges became king. Yet the Pythia said this much besides: that vengeance for the Heraclids would come in the fifth generation after Gyges. Of this pronouncement the Lydians and their kings took no notice until it was fulfilled. In this way the Mermnadae took the tyranny away from the Heraclids and held it. Gyges, once tyrant, sent no small number of offerings to Delphi — as many

silver offerings as he sent, they are the most numerous at Delphi belonging to any one man; and besides the silver he dedicated a vast quantity of gold, among other things one especially worth remembering: six golden mixing-bowls are dedicated there. These stand in the treasury of the Corinthians, weighing thirty talents; though, to speak the truth, the treasury does not belong to the Corinthian state but to Cypselus son of

Eetion. Of all the non-Greeks known to us, this Gyges was the earliest to send dedications to Delphi — after Midas son of Gordias, king of Phrygia. For Midas too dedicated the royal throne on which he used to sit and give judgment, a thing worth seeing; this throne stands in the same place as the mixing-bowls of Gyges. This gold and silver that Gyges

dedicated is called by the Delphians "Gygian," after the name of the man who gave it. Once he became king, he too led an army into Milesian and Smyrnaean territory, and took the city of Colophon; but no other great deed was accomplished by him in his thirty-eight-year reign, so we will pass over him having mentioned this much, and I will make mention of Ardys son of Gyges, who reigned after Gyges.

This man took Priene and invaded Miletus; and it was during his tyranny over Sardis that the Cimmerians, driven from their homelands by the nomadic Scythians, came into Asia and took Sardis except for the acropolis. Ardys reigned forty-nine years and was succeeded by Sadyattes son of Ardys, who reigned twelve years; Sadyattes was succeeded by Alyattes. This man made war on Cyaxares,

the descendant of Deioces, and on the Medes; he drove the Cimmerians out of Asia, took Smyrna, which had been founded as a colony from Colophon, and invaded Clazomenae. From these campaigns he did not come off as he wished, but suffered a great defeat; but other deeds he accomplished in his reign are most worth relating, as follows. He waged war against the Milesians, having inherited the war from his father. Advancing against them, he laid siege to

Miletus by this method: whenever the crops in the land had ripened, he would launch his invasion, marching his army to music from pipes, harps, and flutes played by both women and men. Once he reached Milesian land, he left the farmhouses standing untouched, neither tearing them down nor burning them nor ripping off their doors, letting them remain in place; yet

whenever he had destroyed the trees and the crop in the land, he withdrew again. For the sea was in the Milesians' control, so that a blockade by his army was pointless. The Lydian did not tear down the houses, for this reason: so that the Milesians, using them as a base, could go on sowing and working the land, and he, while they worked it, might have something to

damage each time he invaded. Doing this, he waged war for eleven years, in which two great defeats befell the Milesians, once when they fought at Limeneion in their own territory, and once on the Maeander plain. During six of those eleven years the Lydians were still under Sadyattes son of Ardys, and it was he who was then leading the army into Milesian land; for it was this Sadyattes who had

begun the war. The following five years after the six were fought by Alyattes son of Sadyattes, who, having inherited the war from his father, as I have already shown, pursued it intensely. None of the Ionians eased this war for the Milesians except the Chians alone. These repaid like with like in giving aid, for earlier the Milesians had joined with the Chians

in their war against the Erythraeans. In the twelfth year, when the standing grain was being burned by the army, it happened that the following thing occurred: as soon as the grain caught fire, driven by the wind it caught the temple of Athena called the Assesian, and the temple, having caught fire, burned down. At the time no notice was taken of it, but afterward, when the army had returned to Sardis, Alyattes fell ill. As

his illness dragged on longer, he sent envoys to Delphi to consult the oracle, whether on someone's advice or because he himself decided to send and ask the god about the illness. When they arrived at Delphi, the Pythia refused to give an oracle until they should rebuild the temple of Athena which they had burned at Assesos in Milesian territory. I know that this is how it happened, as I have heard it from the Delphians; but the Milesians

add the following to this account: that Periander son of Cypselus, being on the closest terms of guest-friendship with Thrasybulus, then tyrant of Miletus, learned of the oracle given to Alyattes and sent a messenger to tell him, so that, knowing it in advance, he might plan for the situation accordingly. So the Milesians say it happened. Alyattes, when this news was reported to him, immediately sent a herald to Miletus wishing to make a truce with Thrasybulus

and the Milesians for as long as he was building the temple. So the mission went to Miletus; but Thrasybulus, having already learned the whole story clearly and knowing what Alyattes intended to do, devised the following scheme: whatever grain there was in the city, both his own and privately owned, he had it all gathered into the marketplace, and he told the Milesians that when he gave the signal, they should all drink

and hold revelry with one another. Thrasybulus did this and proclaimed it for the following reason: so that the herald from Sardis, seeing a great heap of grain piled up and the people in a state of enjoyment, would report it to Alyattes — which is indeed what happened. For when the herald had seen those things and had told Thrasybulus the Lydian king's

instructions, and had gone back to Sardis, as I learn, nothing else brought about the reconciliation. For Alyattes, expecting there to be a severe grain shortage in Miletus and the people worn down to the utmost extremity of misery, heard from the herald returning from Miletus the opposite report from what he himself had supposed. After this the reconciliation between them came about on

the terms that they should be guest-friends and allies with one another, and Alyattes built two temples for Athena at Assesos instead of one, and he himself recovered from his illness. So it went with Alyattes concerning the war against the Milesians and Thrasybulus. Periander, who revealed the oracle to Thrasybulus, was the son of Cypselus, and this Periander was tyrant

of Corinth. To him, the Corinthians say (and the Lesbians agree with them), the greatest wonder of his life happened: Arion of Methymna was carried to Taenarum on a dolphin — a man who was second to none of the lyre-singers of his time, and who was the first man we know of to compose, name, and teach the dithyramb at Corinth. This Arion, they say, who spent much of his time with

Periander, desired to sail to Italy and Sicily, and having made great wealth there, wished to return to Corinth. Setting out from Tarentum, and trusting no one more than Corinthians, he hired a ship crewed by Corinthian men. But once at sea, they plotted to throw Arion overboard and keep his money. Realizing this, he pleaded with them, offering them the money, and

begging only for his life. But this plea did not move them; the sailors ordered him to choose: do away with himself, so as to get burial on land, or leap into the sea without delay. Driven to this extremity, Arion begged them, since this was their decision, to let him stand in full costume on the deck and sing; and once he had sung, he promised he would make an end of himself. And

the sailors, delighted at the prospect of hearing the finest singer alive, moved back from the stern toward the ship's middle. Arion then dressed himself in his full performance costume, picked up his lyre, stood on the deck, and sang the Orthian melody all the way through; and when the song ended, he flung himself into the sea exactly as he stood, costume and all. And the

sailed on to Corinth, but the dolphin, they say, took him up and carried him to Taenarum. He disembarked and made his way to Corinth with his gear, and on arriving related everything that had happened. Periander, disbelieving the story, kept Arion under guard and let him go nowhere, while keeping close watch on the sailors. When they duly arrived, they were summoned and asked whether they had anything to report about Arion.

The sailors said Arion was safe in Italy, doing well, and that they had left him behind at Tarentum — whereupon Arion himself stepped forward, dressed just as he had been when he dove overboard, and the astonished men, caught out, could no longer deny the truth. This account comes from the Corinthians and the Lesbians alike, and there stands a small bronze monument to Arion at Taenarum, showing a man mounted on a dolphin. Alyattes,

Lydian, after finishing the war against the Milesians, later died, having reigned fifty-seven years. Having recovered from his illness, he dedicated at Delphi, the second of this house to do so, a great silver mixing-bowl and an iron stand welded together, a sight worth seeing among all the offerings at Delphi, the work of Glaucus of Chios, who alone of all men discovered the welding of iron. On the death of

son of Alyattes, Croesus took over the throne at thirty-five years old. Among the Greeks, he attacked the Ephesians first. Under siege from him, the Ephesians dedicated their city to Artemis by running a rope from her temple all the way to the city wall. Seven stadia separate the old city under siege from the temple. Against these people first

then Croesus made his attack, and afterward, in turn, against each of the Ionians and Aeolians, bringing different charges against different ones—against those where he could find a greater charge, alleging something greater, and against others even bringing trivial accusations. When the Greeks in Asia had been subdued to the payment of tribute, from then on he conceived the plan of building ships and attacking the islanders. But when everything

was ready for the shipbuilding, some say that Bias of Priene came to Sardis, others that it was Pittacus of Mytilene, and when Croesus asked if there was any news from Greece, he said the following and made him stop the shipbuilding: "O king, the islanders are buying up countless horses, intending to march against Sardis and against you." Croesus, hoping he was speaking the truth,

said, "Would that the gods put this into the minds of the islanders, to come against the sons of the Lydians with horses!" And the man replied, "O king, you seem to me to be praying eagerly to catch the islanders on horseback on land, and reasonably so you hope. But what do you think the islanders are praying for, other than that, as soon as they learned you were planning to build ships against them, they prayed to catch the Lydians at sea, so that they might

take vengeance on you for the Greeks living on the mainland, whom you hold enslaved?" Croesus was greatly pleased with this conclusion, for it seemed to him aptly spoken, and, persuaded, he stopped the shipbuilding. And so he made a bond of friendship with the Ionians who lived on the islands. As time went on and nearly all the peoples living within the Halys river had been subdued—except for the Cilicians and the Lycians—

Croesus held everyone else under his own authority, having conquered them. They were: Lydians, Phrygians, Mysians, Mariandynians, Chalybes, Paphlagonians, Thracians (both Thynians and Bithynians), Carians, Ionians, Dorians, Aeolians, and Pamphylians. With these peoples brought under Lydian control and added to Croesus's domain, Sardis, then flourishing with wealth, was visited by every notable thinker from Greece then living, each

arriving there in his own time, among them the Athenian Solon, who, having drafted laws for the Athenians at their own request, then left home for ten years, sailing off under the guise of sightseeing so he would not be forced to repeal any law he had established. The Athenians themselves could not do this, since they were bound by weighty oaths to follow whatever laws Solon set for ten years. It was for

these reasons and for the sake of sightseeing that Solon left home and came to Egypt, to the court of Amasis, and also to Sardis, to Croesus. On his arrival he was entertained in the royal palace by Croesus, and then, on the third or fourth day, at Croesus's command, servants led Solon around the treasuries and showed him everything, all of it great and splendid. When he had

he had inspected everything as time allowed, Croesus put this question to him: 'My Athenian guest, plenty of talk about you has reached us here, concerning both your wisdom and your travels — how, driven by a love of learning, you have journeyed across much of the world just to see it. So now a longing has taken hold of me to ask whether you have yet come across anyone who is the happiest of all men.' He asked this expecting that he

the most fortunate of men. But Solon, without flattering him at all but speaking the truth, said, "O king, Tellus the Athenian." Astonished at what was said, Croesus asked sharply, "On what grounds do you judge Tellus to be the most fortunate?" He said that Tellus, in the first place, lived in a city that was prospering, and had sons who were fine and good, and he saw children born to all of them and all of them surviving; and also,

having lived well by the standards we have, he met a most glorious end to his life: for when the Athenians fought a battle against their neighbors at Eleusis, he came to the rescue, routed the enemy, and died most nobly, and the Athenians buried him at public expense on the very spot where he fell and honored him greatly." When Solon had thus provoked Croesus by telling him at length

of the many good things concerning Tellus, Croesus asked whom he had seen as second after him, expecting that he would surely win second place. But Solon said, "Cleobis and Biton. These were Argive by birth, and had a sufficient livelihood, and besides this such strength of body as follows: both alike were prize-winning athletes, and this story too is told of them. When there was a festival of Hera for the Argives,

it was absolutely necessary that their mother be conveyed to the temple by a yoked cart, but their oxen did not come in from the field in time. Since they were running out of time, the young men themselves put themselves under the yoke and pulled the wagon, with their mother riding upon it; and having drawn it forty-five stadia, they arrived at the temple. After they

had done this and been seen by the assembled festival crowd, the best end of life came upon them, and in this the god showed that it is better for a man to be dead than to live. For the Argive men, standing around, blessed the strength of the young men, and the Argive women blessed their mother for having such children; and the mother, overjoyed both at the deed and at the fame,

stood facing the statue and prayed that the goddess grant Cleobis and Bito, her own sons, who had honored her so richly, whatever is finest for a human being to receive. Once the sacrifice was made and the feast enjoyed following this prayer, the young men fell asleep inside the temple itself and never woke again, meeting their end there. The Argives had statues made of them and set them up at

Delphi, as of men who had proven themselves the best." Solon thus assigned second place in happiness to these men, but Croesus, angered, said, "My Athenian guest, has our happiness been so utterly cast aside by you as nothing, that you do not even count us worthy of ordinary men?" Solon said, "Croesus, you ask me about human affairs, though I know that the divine is entirely jealous and prone to trouble. For

in the long span of time there is much to see that one would not wish to see, and much to suffer as well. I set the limit of a man's life at seventy years. These seventy years provide twenty-five thousand two hundred days, not counting an intercalary month. But if one wishes to make every other year longer by a month, so that the seasons

may come round as they should, then over the seventy years there will be thirty-five intercalary months, and from these months a thousand and fifty additional days. Of all these days making up the seventy years—twenty-six thousand two hundred and fifty in all—not one brings with it anything exactly like another. So you see, Croesus,

man is entirely a creature of chance. As for you, you seem to me to be very wealthy and to be king of many men, but as to what you asked me, I cannot yet call you that, until I learn that you have ended your life well. For the very rich man is no more fortunate than the man who has enough for his day, unless fortune attends him so that he ends his life well, having kept all good things to the end of his

life. For many very wealthy men are unfortunate, while many with moderate means are fortunate. The man who is very rich but unfortunate surpasses the fortunate man in only two respects, while the fortunate man surpasses the rich and unfortunate one in many. The rich man is more able to satisfy his desire and to bear a great disaster that befalls him, but the other has this advantage over him: he is not so able to bear disaster and desire as the rich man is,

but good fortune wards these things off from him, and he is free of deformity, free of disease, untouched by misfortune, blessed with fine children, good-looking. And if besides all this he also ends his life well, then this is the man you are seeking, the one worthy to be called fortunate. But before he dies, hold back and do not yet call him fortunate, but only lucky. Now it is impossible for a human being to possess all these things together

just as no single country is self-sufficient in providing everything for itself, but has one thing while lacking another—the one which has the most is the best; so too no single human body is self-sufficient: it has one thing but lacks another. Whoever continues to possess the most of these advantages, and then ends his life graciously, that man, O king,

"It is right for me, king, to bear that name. One must look to the end of every matter, to see how it will turn out; for the god shows a hint of prosperity to many, and then destroys them root and branch." By saying this to Croesus he gave him no pleasure at all, and Croesus sent him away without a further thought, considering him a great fool, since he disregarded the good things at hand and told him to look to the end of every matter.

But after Solon had gone, a great retribution from the god seized Croesus, presumably because he supposed himself to be the most fortunate of all men. At once, as he slept, a dream stood over him which revealed to him the truth of the evils about to happen concerning his son. Croesus had two sons, one of whom was ruined, being deaf and mute, while the other,

in every respect, was by far the first among those of his age; his name was Atys. It was this Atys whom the dream signified to Croesus, showing that he would lose him, struck by a spear of iron. When Croesus awoke and considered the matter with himself, in dread of the dream, he brought a wife for his son, and though the young man had been accustomed to lead the Lydians in war, he no longer sent him out on any such undertaking.

Every javelin, spear, and similar weapon that men use in warfare he had carried out of the men's quarters and stacked away in storage rooms, worried that something hung up might fall on his son. Now while he had his son's wedding under arrangement, a man arrived at Sardis burdened by misfortune and with blood-stained hands, Phrygian by birth, and from the royal

family. This man came to Croesus's house and asked, according to the customs of the country, to obtain purification, and Croesus purified him. The purification among the Lydians is much the same as among the Greeks. When Croesus had performed the customary rites, he asked where the man was from and who he was, saying, "Fellow, who are you, and from what part of Phrygia have you come to be my suppliant at the hearth?

And what man or woman did you kill?" He answered, "King, I am the son of Gordias son of Midas, and my name is Adrastus. I killed my own brother unintentionally, and I am here, banished by my father and deprived of everything." Croesus answered him thus: "You happen to be the offspring of men who are my friends, and you have come to friends, where you will lack for nothing, so long as you stay

in my house, and by bearing this misfortune as lightly as possible you will gain the most." So he lived in Croesus's household. Now at this same time, on Mysian Olympus, there arose a great boar, which, setting out from that mountain, kept destroying the crops of the Mysians. Often the Mysians went out against it, but did it no harm,

while suffering harm from it themselves. At last messengers from the Mysians came to Croesus and said this: "King, a huge boar has appeared in our land, which is destroying our crops. Eager as we are to catch it, we cannot. Now therefore we ask you to send your son along with us, together with picked young men and dogs, so that we may drive it out of our land." They

asked this of him, but Croesus, remembering the words of the dream, said this to them: "Do not mention my son again, for I would not send him with you; he is newly married, and that is his concern now. But I will send picked men of the Lydians and the whole hunting pack, and I will urge those who go to be as eager as possible in helping you to destroy the beast from

your country." That was his reply. Though the Mysians were satisfied with this answer, Croesus's son came forward, having overheard what the Mysians were requesting. When Croesus refused to send his son along with them, the young man addressed him thus: 'Father, once upon a time the noblest and finest pursuits open to us were earning distinction through campaigns and hunting expeditions; but now'

you keep me shut out of both of these, though you have not seen in me any cowardice or lack of spirit. With what face must I now show myself, going to and from the marketplace? What sort of man will I seem to the citizens, and what sort to my newly wedded wife? What kind of man will she think she lives with? So you must either allow me to set out for the hunt, or

persuade me by argument that it is better for me that these things be done this way." Croesus answered him thus: "My son, it is not because I have seen cowardice in you, or anything else unpleasing, that I do this, but a dream-vision came to me while I slept and warned that your life would be cut short, for you would perish by a spear of iron. On account of this vision I hastened this marriage of yours, and

I do not send you out on undertakings, but keep watch, in hopes that I might somehow steal you away from death during my own lifetime. For you happen to be my only son; the other, being ruined in hearing, I do not count as mine." The young man answered him thus: "Father, you may be forgiven, having seen such a vision, for keeping watch over me; but what you do not understand, what has escaped you about

the dream, it is right for me to point out. You say the dream told you I would die by a spear of iron. But what hands does a boar have, what iron spear that you fear? If it had told you I would die by a tusk, or by anything else resembling one, you would be right to do as you do; but as it is,

it said by a spear. Since then our battle is not against men, let me go." Croesus answered, "My son, in this you win me over, by revealing your judgment about the dream. So then, being defeated by you, I change my mind and allow you to go to the hunt." Having said this, Croesus sent for Adrastus the Phrygian, and when he arrived, said to him: "Adrastus,

when you were struck by grievous misfortune, for which I do not reproach you, I purified you and took you into my house, providing for all your expenses. Now then, since you owe it to me for the good I did you first, to repay me with good, I ask you to become the guardian of my son as he sets out for the hunt, in case some wicked robbers appear on the road to do you harm. Besides this, it is also right for

you to go where you may distinguish yourself, for this is your ancestral pursuit, and moreover you have the strength for it." Adrastus answered, "King, otherwise I would not have gone to such a contest; for it is not fitting that one afflicted by such misfortune should go among companions faring well, nor is there any wish in me for it, and in many ways I would have restrained myself. But now, since you are pressing me,

and I must gratify you (for I owe it to you to repay your kindness), I am ready to do this, and as for your son, whom you bid me guard, expect him to return to you unharmed, so far as his guardian is concerned." When he had answered Croesus thus, they set out afterward equipped with picked young men and dogs. On arriving at Mount Olympus they searched for the beast, and having found it and surrounded it

they hurled javelins at it in a circle. Then the stranger, this man who had been purified of bloodshed, called Adrastus, throwing his javelin at the boar, missed it and instead struck the son of Croesus. He, struck by the spear, fulfilled the word of the dream, and someone ran to bring word to Croesus of what had happened, and arriving at Sardis reported to him

the fight and the fate of his son. Croesus, thrown into turmoil by his son's death, lamented all the more bitterly that the one who had killed him was the very man he himself had purified of murder. Overwhelmed with grief at the misfortune, he called terribly upon Zeus of Purification, calling him to witness what he had suffered from the stranger, and he also called upon Zeus of the Hearth and Zeus of Comradeship, naming the same god by these titles, calling him god of the hearth because

he had unknowingly taken into his house and fed the murderer of his son, and god of comradeship because, having sent him as a guard, he had found him to be his greatest enemy. After this the Lydians arrived carrying the body, with the killer walking behind it. He stood before the corpse and gave himself up to Croesus, holding out his hands and telling him to slay him over the body, recounting his former

misfortune, and how on top of that he had destroyed the man who had purified him, and that life was not worth living for him. Croesus, hearing this, took pity on Adrastus, even though he himself was in so great a private grief, and said to him, "I have from you, stranger, the full penalty, since you condemn yourself to death. But you are not the cause of this evil for me, except

insofar as you brought it about unwillingly, but rather some god, one who long ago foretold to me what was going to happen." Croesus then buried his own son as was fitting; but Adrastus son of Gordias son of Midas, this man who had become the killer of his own brother and the killer of the one who had purified him, when the people had left the tomb in quiet, aware that he was of all men he knew

the most heavily burdened by misfortune, killed himself over the tomb. Croesus sat in great mourning for two years, deprived of his son. But afterward the rule of Astyages son of Cyaxares, overthrown by Cyrus son of Cambyses, and the growing power of the Persians, put an end to Croesus's mourning, and turned his thoughts to whether he might, if possible, catch the growing power of the Persians before they became great,

before their strength grew further. With this plan in mind, he at once set about testing the oracles, both those in Greece and the one in Libya, sending different men to different places, some to go to Delphi, others to Abae in Phocis; a further group he directed to Dodona, while yet others he dispatched to Amphiaraus, to Trophonius, and to the Branchidae in Milesian territory.

These, then, were the Greek oracles to which Croesus sent to inquire. And to Libya he sent others to consult the oracle of Ammon. He dispatched them around to make trial of what the oracles knew, intending, if any were found to speak the truth, to send again with a second question — whether he should march against the Persians. He gave the Lydians these instructions when he sent them out to test the oracles: that from whatever

day they set out from Sardis, counting the days from that one, on the hundredth day they were to consult the oracles, asking what King Croesus of Lydia, son of Alyattes, happened to be doing at that moment; and whatever answer each oracle gave, they were to write it down and bring it back to him. As for what the remaining oracles pronounced, no source reports it; but at Delphi, as soon as

the Lydians entered the hall to consult the god and asked the question they had been charged with, the Pythia spoke these words in hexameter verse: 'I know the number of the grains of sand and the measure of the sea, I understand the mute and hear the one who does not speak. The smell has come to my senses of a hard-shelled tortoise being boiled in bronze together with lamb's meat, with bronze laid beneath it and bronze

laid over it.' When the Pythia had given this oracle, the Lydians wrote it down and went off back to Sardis. And when the others who had been sent around also arrived bringing their oracles, Croesus then unrolled each of the writings and examined them; none of the others satisfied him, but when he heard the one from Delphi, at once he offered prayer and accepted it, believing that the only true oracle was the one at

Delphi, because it had discovered what he himself had done. Once he had dispatched the envoys to the oracles and was watching for the appointed day, this is the scheme he devised: having thought of something impossible to discover or guess at, he chopped up a tortoise together with a lamb and boiled them with his own hands in a cauldron of bronze, setting a lid of bronze on top. This, then, was the answer given from Delphi to Croesus. As for

the response of the oracle of Amphiaraus, I cannot say what it gave to the Lydians when they performed the customary rites at the shrine (for that is not reported either), except that he too believed he had acquired this as an oracle that spoke no falsehood. After this he sought to win the favor of the god at Delphi with great sacrifices: he sacrificed three thousand head of every kind of sacrificial animal, and he burned

on a great pyre couches overlaid with gold and silver, golden bowls, purple garments and tunics, hoping thereby the more to win over the god; and he ordered all the Lydians to sacrifice to the god whatever each of them had. When the sacrifice was over, he had a huge quantity of gold poured and cast into ingots, the longer ones six palms in length, the

shorter ones three palms, and a palm's breadth in height. Of these there were a hundred and seventeen, and of them four were of refined gold, each weighing two and a half talents; the other ingots were of white gold, weighing two talents each. He also had a figure of a lion made of refined gold, weighing ten talents. This lion, when the temple at Delphi burned down, fell from the ingots (for it had

been set upon them), and now it lies in the treasury of the Corinthians, where its weight comes to six and a half talents, for a half-talent of it melted away. When Croesus had finished all this, he sent it to Delphi, along with these other things besides: two very large mixing bowls, one gold and the other silver; the gold one stood on the right as you entered the temple, the silver one on the left. These too were

moved when the temple burned; and the golden one now lies in the treasury of the Clazomenians, its weight eight and a half talents plus twelve minae, while the silver one stands in the corner of the forecourt, holding six hundred amphorae; for the Delphians mix wine in it at the Theophania festival. The Delphians say it is the work of Theodorus of Samos, and I think so too, for it does not seem to me

an ordinary piece of work. He also sent four silver jars, still standing today in the treasury kept by the Corinthians, and he dedicated two sprinkling vessels, one of gold and one of silver, on the golden one of which is inscribed the claim that it is a dedication of the Lacedaemonians — wrongly, for this too is Croesus's; one of the Delphians inscribed it so, wishing to please the Lacedaemonians, though I know his name and will not mention it.

But the boy figure from whose hand water pours really was a Lacedaemonian gift, though neither of the sprinkling vessels was. Along with these Croesus also sent many other unremarkable offerings, including round silver basins, and a golden statue three cubits tall depicting a woman, said by the Delphians to be a likeness of Croesus's baking-woman. Besides this, Croesus also dedicated the necklaces and belts of his own

wife. These, then, he sent to Delphi; and to Amphiaraus, having learned of his virtue and his suffering, he dedicated a shield entirely of gold and a spear all of solid gold, both the shaft and the point alike golden. Both of these still lay, in my own time, in Thebes,

and Thebes, in the temple of Apollo Ismenius. To the Lydians who were about to carry these gifts to the shrines, Croesus gave instructions to ask the oracles whether he should campaign against the Persians, and whether he should add any allied army as a friend. Once they reached the destinations to which they had been dispatched, the Lydians dedicated the offerings and consulted the oracles, saying, 'Croesus,

ruler of the Lydians and of other nations, believing that these alone among all oracles known to men speak truly, has given you gifts worthy of your discoveries, and now he asks you whether he should campaign against the Persians, and whether he should add any army of men as an ally.' This is what they asked, and the judgments of both oracles agreed on the same answer, foretelling to Croesus that if he campaigned against the Persians, he would destroy a great

empire; and their counsel was that he should discover who among the Greeks were strongest and attach them to himself as friends. When Croesus heard the oracles reported back to him, he was overjoyed at the responses, and fully expecting to bring down the kingdom of Cyrus, he once more sent to Delphi and, having learned the number of its citizens, gave gifts to them, two gold staters to each man.

In return for this the Delphians gave Croesus and the Lydians the right to consult the oracle before others, exemption from taxes, front seats at the games, and the right for any of them who wished to become a citizen of Delphi for all time. Having given gifts to the Delphians, Croesus consulted the oracle a third time; for once he had accepted the oracle's truthfulness, he made full use of it. This time he asked whether his monarchy would be long-lasting. The Pythia gave him this answer:

'But whenever a mule becomes king of the Medes, then, tender-footed Lydian, flee beside the pebbly Hermus and do not stay, and do not be ashamed to be a coward.' When these words came to him, Croesus was pleased by them more than by anything else, expecting that a mule would never rule the Medes in place of a man, and that therefore neither he nor his descendants would ever cease from power. After this he turned his thought to inquiring who were the most powerful of the Greeks, so that he might win them

as friends. In his inquiry he found that the Lacedaemonians and the Athenians stood out above the rest, the former of Dorian stock, the latter of Ionian. These were indeed the peoples marked out from of old, one being the Pelasgian nation and the other the Hellenic. The one never migrated anywhere, while the other wandered a great deal. For in the time of King Deucalion it inhabited the land of Phthiotis, and in the time of Dorus, son of

Hellen, the country beneath Ossa and Olympus, called Histiaeotis; and when it was driven out of Histiaeotis by the Cadmeans, it dwelt in Pindus, being called Macedonian; from there it moved again to Dryopis, and from Dryopis it came at last into the Peloponnese, where it was called Dorian. As for what language the Pelasgians spoke, I cannot say for certain. But if

one must judge by conjecture from those Pelasgians still existing today, who live above the Tyrrhenians in the city of Crestona — who were once neighbors to those now called Dorians (they dwelt then in the land now called Thessaliotis) — and from the Pelasgians who settled Placia and Scylace on the Hellespont, who became fellow-inhabitants with the Athenians, and all the other Pelasgian towns that changed their name: if

one must judge by these, the Pelasgians spoke a barbarian tongue. If then the whole Pelasgian people was of this kind, the Attic nation, being Pelasgian, must have changed its language too when it changed over to become Greek. For indeed the people of Crestona are not of the same speech as any of those now living around them, nor are the Placians, but they are of the same speech as each other — which shows that

they still preserve the form of language they brought with them when they resettled in those regions. As for the Hellenic people, it seems clear to me that it has always used the same language since it first came into being; but being weak when it split off from the Pelasgians, starting from small beginnings it grew into a multitude of nations, chiefly because many Pelasgians joined themselves to it, along with many other

barbarian peoples besides. Before that, it seems to me, the Pelasgian nation, being a barbarian one, never grew to any great size. Of these nations, then, Croesus learned that the Attic one was held down and divided, at that time being under the tyranny of Pisistratus, son of Hippocrates, over the Athenians. For Hippocrates, while he was still a private citizen watching the Olympic games, had a great portent occur to him: when he had performed the sacrifices,

the cauldrons standing there, full of meat and water, boiled and boiled over without any fire beneath them. Chilon the Lacedaemonian, who happened to be present and witnessed the portent, counseled Hippocrates that he should first refrain from bringing a child-bearing wife into his home, and if he already had one, to send her away, and if he happened to have a son, to disown him. Hippocrates, however, did not

Hippocrates was willing to be persuaded by Chilon. From him afterward was born this Peisistratus, who, when the Athenians of the coast and the Athenians of the plain were in factional strife—the former led by Megacles son of Alcmeon, the latter by Lycurgus son of Aristolaides—conceived a contempt for tyranny and raised up a third faction. Gathering partisans and posing in speech as champion of the men beyond the hills, he contrived the following scheme. Having wounded himself

and his mules, he drove his team into the marketplace as though fleeing from enemies who, by his own account, had tried to murder him on his way out to his fields, and he asked the people to grant him some guard for his person, having earlier won good repute in his generalship against the Megarians, having taken Nisaea and performed other great deeds. The Athenian people, deceived, gave him

men chosen from the citizens, who did not become spearmen for Peisistratus but club-bearers—for they carried wooden clubs and followed behind him. These men rose up together with Peisistratus and seized the acropolis. There Peisistratus ruled the Athenians, disturbing neither the existing offices nor changing the laws, but administering the city on the basis of the established order, governing it well and fairly. But after

not much time had passed, the partisans of Megacles and those of Lycurgus came to the same mind and drove him out. Thus Peisistratus held Athens the first time, and, his tyranny not yet firmly rooted, he lost it. Those who had driven out Peisistratus then fell again into strife with one another. Hard pressed by the factional struggle, Megacles sent word to Peisistratus asking whether he wished to have his daughter

as wife on condition of the tyranny. Peisistratus accepted the proposal and agreed to these terms, and then they contrived, for his return, a scheme most simple-minded, as I find it, by far—since the Greek people had long since been set apart from the barbarian race as being both cleverer and more free of foolish simplicity—if indeed these men, among the Athenians who were said to be foremost of the Greeks

in wisdom, contrived a plot of this sort. In the deme of Paeania there was a woman named Phya, lacking three fingers' breadth of four cubits in height, and otherwise well formed. This woman they equipped in full armor, mounted on a chariot, and having arranged for her a posture such as would appear most fitting, they drove her into the city, sending heralds ahead of them, who, on arriving in the

city, proclaimed as they had been instructed, saying: "Athenians, receive Peisistratus with good will—him whom Athena herself, having honored above all men, is bringing back to her own acropolis." So they went about saying this; and at once a report reached the demes that Athena was bringing Peisistratus back, and the people in the city, believing the woman to be the goddess herself, prayed to the human being

and received Peisistratus. Having recovered the tyranny in the manner described, Peisistratus, in accordance with the agreement made with Megacles, married Megacles' daughter. But since he already had grown sons and the Alcmeonidae were said to be under a curse, not wishing children to be born to him from his newly-wed wife, he had intercourse with her not in the customary manner. At first

the woman kept this hidden, but afterward, whether she was questioned or not, she told her own mother, and the mother told her husband. In his anger as it was, he reconciled his quarrel with his fellow partisans. When Peisistratus learned what was being done against him, he departed from the country altogether, and arriving at Eretria he took counsel together with his sons. The opinion of Hippias prevailing, that they should recover

the tyranny back again, they then set about gathering gifts from the cities, whichever of them owed them some favor. Many gave large sums, but the Thebans surpassed all in the amount of money given. After that, not to speak at length, time passed and everything was prepared for their return; for Argive mercenaries came from the Peloponnese, and a Naxian man had arrived as a volunteer, whose name

was Lygdamis, who showed the greatest zeal, bringing both money and men. Setting out from Eretria, they returned in the eleventh year, and first took Marathon in Attica. While they were encamped in that place, their partisans from the city arrived, and others streamed in from the demes, men for whom tyranny was more welcome than freedom. These then

gathered together; but the Athenians from the city, so long as Peisistratus was collecting money, and afterward when he took Marathon, paid no attention; but when they learned that he was marching from Marathon against the city, then indeed they went out to help against him. Both this force marched out in full strength against the returning men, and Peisistratus' party, once they had set out from Marathon and were marching toward

the city, coming together to the same point, arrived at the shrine of Athena of Pallene, and set their arms opposite each other. There, by divine guidance, there came to Peisistratus a soothsayer named Amphilytus of Acarnania, who, approaching him, prophesied in hexameter verse, saying as follows: "The cast is thrown, the net is spread wide, the tunnies will dart through the moonlit night." This he prophesied to him

in a state of divine possession; and Peisistratus, grasping the oracle and declaring that he accepted what was prophesied, led on his army. The Athenians from the city had by that time turned to their midday meal, and after the meal some of them turned to dice, others to sleep. Peisistratus' men, falling upon the Athenians, routed them. As they fled, Peisistratus then devised a most clever plan,

so that the Athenians might not gather together again but remain scattered: he had his sons mount on horses and sent them ahead, and they, overtaking the fugitives, spoke the words Peisistratus had instructed them to say, telling them to take courage and to go each to his own home. The Athenians obeyed, and thus Peisistratus, holding Athens for the third time, rooted his tyranny firmly, with many mercenaries and with revenues of money,

some gathered locally, others coming in from the river Strymon; and taking as hostages the sons of the Athenians who had remained and had not fled at once, he settled them in Naxos (for this island too Peisistratus had subdued by war and entrusted to Lygdamis); and in addition to these things, he purified the island of Delos according to the oracles, purifying it in this manner: as far as the view of the sanctuary extended, from

that entire area he dug up the dead and carried them to another part of Delos. And so Peisistratus was tyrant of Athens, while of the Athenians, part had died in the fighting, and the rest, together with the Alcmeonidae, went into exile from their own land. Such, then, was the condition in which Croesus learned that the Athenians were, at that time, being held; but the Lacedaemonians, having escaped great troubles

and being now superior in war to the Tegeans—for under the kingship of Leon and Hegesicles in Sparta, while succeeding in their other wars, the Lacedaemonians met with failure only against the Tegeans. Still earlier than this they had been about the worst-governed of almost all the Greeks, both among themselves and in dealings with strangers, with whom they had no contact; but they changed to good order in this way. When Lycurgus, a man of repute among the Spartiates, went to

Delphi to consult the oracle, as soon as he entered the temple, the Pythia at once said this: "You come, Lycurgus, to my rich temple, dear to Zeus and to all who hold Olympian homes. I am in doubt whether to declare you a god or a man in my prophecy. But I am inclined rather still to believe you a god, Lycurgus." Beyond this, certain accounts also hold that the Pythia went on to tell him

the order of government now established for the Spartiates. But as the Lacedaemonians themselves say, Lycurgus, when he was guardian of Leobotes, his own nephew and king of the Spartiates, brought these things from Crete. His very first act as guardian was to overhaul all the established customs, and he made sure these were not transgressed; and afterward he established the arrangements pertaining to war—the enomotiai, the triacads, and the common messes—and in addition to these he set up the ephors and the elders,

did Lycurgus. Thus, by this change, they attained good order, and when Lycurgus died they built him a shrine and honor him greatly. And since they were in a good land and had no small number of men, they quickly flourished and prospered, and were no longer content to remain at peace, but, holding the Arcadians in contempt as inferior to themselves, they consulted the oracle at Delphi concerning the whole land of the Arcadians. The Pythia gave them

this response: "You ask me for Arcadia: you ask for much; I will not grant it. There are many acorn-eating men in Arcadia who will prevent you. Yet I do not begrudge you everything: Tegea I will grant you — a floor to beat with dancing feet — and her lovely plain to portion out by the measuring cord." When the Lacedaemonians heard this reported to them, they kept away from the rest of the Arcadians, but carrying fetters, they marched against the Tegeans, relying on the deceptive oracle, as

expecting to enslave the Tegeans. But they were defeated in the encounter, and as many of them as were taken alive worked the plain of the Tegeans wearing the very fetters they had brought with them, and measured it out with a line. These fetters in which they had been bound were still, even to my own time, preserved safe at Tegea, hanging around the temple of Athena Alea. In the earlier war, then, they had continually

fared badly against the Tegeans, but by the time of Croesus and the reign of Anaxandrides and Ariston in Lacedaemon, the Spartiates had by then become superior in the war, having come to this by the following means. Since they were continually being defeated in the war by the Tegeans, they sent sacred envoys to Delphi to ask which god they should propitiate to become superior to the Tegeans in the war. The Pythia told them

to bring back the bones of Orestes son of Agamemnon. But since Orestes' resting place proved impossible for them to find, they sent to the god a second time to inquire where Orestes lay buried. When the sacred envoys asked this, the Pythia said the following: "There is a Tegea in a level place of Arcadia, where two winds blow under strong compulsion, and blow answers blow, and there is a form

"counter-blow, and woe is laid upon woe. There the earth that gives life holds the son of Agamemnon; bring him home and you will be Tegea's master." When the Lacedaemonians heard this too, they were no closer to the discovery, search as they might, until at last Lichas, one of the so-called "benefactors" among the Spartiates, found it out. The benefactors are citizens who, being the eldest to retire each year from the cavalry, are dispatched by the Spartan state, five

each year: for that year, when they retire from the cavalry, they are sent about on public business and must not sit idle in one place. It was one of these men, Lichas, who made the discovery in Tegea, by a stroke of luck and cleverness together. At that time there was free intercourse between Sparta and Tegea, and he went into a smithy and watched iron being forged, marveling at what he saw being done.

The smith noticed him marveling and said, stopping his work, "Well, Spartan stranger, if you had seen what I have seen, you would be marveling in earnest, since you make such a wonder now of the working of iron. I wanted to dig a well in this courtyard here, and digging I came upon a coffin seven cubits long. Since I could not believe that men were ever

bigger than they are now, I opened it and saw the corpse lying there, equal in length to the coffin. I measured it and then covered it over again." So the smith told him what he had seen, and Lichas, turning the words over, reckoned that this must be Orestes, in keeping with the oracle, reasoning it out thus: seeing the smith's two bellows, he took them for the winds, and the anvil and

the hammer for the blow and the counter-blow, and the iron being forged for the woe laid upon woe — guessing at it this way, that iron had been discovered to men's harm. Having worked this out, he went back to Sparta and told the Lacedaemonians the whole matter. They, framing a false charge against him, drove him out. He, arriving in Tegea and telling

his misfortune to the smith, tried to rent the courtyard from him, but the man would not give it up. In time he persuaded him, and moved in; he dug up the grave, gathered the bones, and went off carrying them to Sparta. And from that time on, whenever the two sides put each other to the test, the Lacedaemonians got much the better of it in war; and by then most of the Peloponnese had already been subdued by them. All this

Croesus learned, and he sent messengers to Sparta bearing gifts and asking for an alliance, having instructed them what they must say. On arriving, they declared, "We come sent by Croesus, who rules as king over the Lydians and other peoples, with this message: Lacedaemonians, since the god has decreed that I make the Greek my friend — for I learn that you stand at the head of Greece —

I now call upon you, in accordance with the oracle, wishing to become your friend and ally, without deceit or trickery." Thus Croesus made his overture through messengers, and the Lacedaemonians, who had themselves already heard of the oracle given to Croesus, welcomed the arrival of the Lydians and swore oaths of friendship and alliance; for indeed they were bound to Croesus by certain kindnesses done to them earlier.

For the Lacedaemonians had sent to Sardis to buy gold, wishing to use it for a statue — the one of Apollo that now stands at Thornax in Laconia — and Croesus, when they came to buy it, gave it to them as a gift. For these reasons, then, the Lacedaemonians accepted the alliance — and also because, judging them above every other Greek people, he had singled them out to be his friends. And they were ready, for their part, to answer his call; and further, they made

a bronze mixing-bowl, covered on the outside around the rim with figures, and holding, in size, three hundred amphorae, and they brought it, wishing to give it to Croesus in return. This bowl never reached Sardis, for two reasons that are given: the Lacedaemonians say that when the bowl, being carried to Sardis, came near Samos, the Samians, learning of it, sailed out with warships and seized it; but the Samians

themselves say that when the Lacedaemonians carrying the bowl were delayed, and learned that Sardis and Croesus had been taken, they sold the bowl in Samos, and private men bought it and dedicated it in the Heraion. It may be that the sellers, on returning to Sparta, would say that they had been robbed of it by the Samians. So much, then, for the bowl. Croesus,

for his part, having misread the oracle, made an expedition against Cappadocia, hoping to bring down Cyrus and the power of the Persians. As Croesus made ready to take the field against the Persians, a certain Lydian already reputed wise, whose opinion had earned him no small renown among the Lydians, offered Croesus this counsel — his name was Sandanis: "O king, you are preparing to march against men of such a kind

who wear leather trousers and all their other clothing of leather, and who eat not what they wish but what they have, since they hold a rugged country. Moreover they do not indulge in wine but drink water, and have no figs to eat, nor any other good thing. So then, if you win, what will you take from men who have nothing at all? But if you are defeated,

consider all the good things that will slip from your grasp: let them once taste what we enjoy, and they will cling to it and never be driven off. For my part, I am grateful to the gods for not putting it into the Persians' heads to march against the Lydians." With these words he did not persuade Croesus. For before they subdued the Lydians, the Persians had nothing of luxury or good. Now the Cappadocians are called Syrians by the Greeks; and these

Syrians, before the Persians ruled, had been subject to the Medes, and then to Cyrus. For the river Halys formed the frontier between the Median empire and the Lydian; rising in the mountains of Armenia, it runs through Cilicia, and then keeps the Matieni on its right as it flows, and on the other side the Phrygians; and passing these and flowing on northward

it forms the boundary on one side between the Syrians of Cappadocia and, on the left, the Paphlagonians. In this way the river Halys marks off nearly the whole lower part of Asia, from the sea opposite Cyprus to the Euxine Sea. This is the neck of all that land; its length, for a man traveling light, takes five days to cross. Croesus made his expedition against Cappadocia for these reasons: because

of a desire for land, wishing to add it to his own portion, and above all because he trusted the oracle and wished to avenge Astyages on Cyrus. For Cyrus son of Cambyses had conquered and held Astyages son of Cyaxares, who was Croesus's brother-in-law and king of the Medes, and had become Croesus's brother-in-law in this way: a band of nomadic Scythians, in revolt, had withdrawn into Median territory. At that time

the ruler of the Medes was Cyaxares son of Phraortes son of Deioces, who at first treated these Scythians well, as being suppliants; and holding them in high regard, he handed over boys to them to learn their language and the art of the bow. In time, as the Scythians kept going out constantly to hunt and always brought something back, it happened once that they caught

nothing at all; and when they came back empty-handed, Cyaxares — for he was, as he showed, sharp-tempered — treated them very harshly and with insult. The Scythians, having suffered this from Cyaxares, since they had been treated in a way they did not deserve, resolved to cut up one of the boys being taught among them, and to prepare him just as they were accustomed to prepare game, and to bring him to Cyaxares as if it were a catch from the hunt; and having given it,

they resolved to reach Sardis and Alyattes son of Sadyattes with all possible speed. This is indeed what happened: Cyaxares and the guests present with him tasted of this meat, and the Scythians, having done this, became suppliants of Alyattes. After this, since Alyattes refused to surrender the Scythians even though Cyaxares demanded it, war broke out between the Lydians and the Medes and continued for five years, in

the course of which the Medes often defeated the Lydians, and often the Lydians defeated the Medes; and among these there was also a kind of night battle. As they carried on the war on equal terms, it happened, in the sixth year, when a battle had been joined, that during the fighting the day suddenly became night. This change of the day Thales of Miletus had foretold to the Ionians,

having set as its limit the very year in which the change actually occurred. When the Lydians and the Medes saw day turned into night, they stopped fighting, and both sides were the more eager that peace should be made between them. Those who brought about their reconciliation were these: Syennesis the Cilician and Labynetus the Babylonian. It was they who were eager that the

oath be made, and they also brought about an exchange of marriages: for they resolved that Astyages son of Cyaxares would receive Aryenis, Alyattes' daughter, in marriage. For without a strong compulsion, strong agreements are not apt to hold firm. These nations make their oaths in the same manner as the Greeks, and in addition to this, when they cut their arms to the same depth, they lick up each other's blood. This

Astyages, then, was the one whom Cyrus, though he was his own mother's father, conquered and deposed, for a reason I shall explain in a later part of my account. Croesus, holding this against Cyrus, sent to the oracles to ask about marching against the Persians, and once a misleading response arrived, believing it favorable to himself, he marched into Persian territory. When Croesus

reached the river Halys, from that point on, as I say, he brought his army across by the bridges that existed there; but according to the common account of the Greeks, Thales of Miletus brought the army across for him. For Croesus could not work out how to get his army over the river — since these bridges, it is said, did not yet exist at that time — it is said that Thales, being present in the camp

He had the river made to flow on the left hand of his army and on the right as well, and he did it this way: beginning above the camp he had a deep canal dug, carrying it in a crescent shape, so that it would come around behind the camp as it stood, and there, turned aside along the canal from its old bed, it would pass by the camp and again discharge into the old channel. So that as soon as

the river was split, it became fordable on both sides. Some say too that the old channel was completely dried up, but this I do not accept, for how then did they cross it on their way back? Croesus, once he had crossed with his army and arrived in Cappadocia at the place called Pteria (Pteria is the strongest part of that country, lying roughly opposite the city of Sinope

on the Euxine Sea), encamped there and ravaged the farms of the Syrians. He took the city of the Pterians, enslaving its people, and he took all the towns around it as well, driving the Syrians from their homes though they had done him no wrong. Cyrus meanwhile gathered his own army, and taking along all the peoples who lived between them, marched to meet Croesus. But before

setting his army in motion, he sent heralds to the Ionians, trying to detach them from Croesus's side. The Ionians, however, would not be persuaded. When Cyrus arrived and encamped opposite Croesus, there in the land of Pteria the two put each other to the test with all their strength. A fierce battle was fought, and many fell on both sides, but in the end neither side won, and they parted when night came on. Thus did the two armies contend. Croesus,

finding fault with the size of his own force (for the army that had met Cyrus was far smaller than Cyrus's), and blaming this, and since Cyrus did not attempt to attack the next day, marched back to Sardis, intending to call on the Egyptians in accordance with their sworn alliance (his pact with Amasis, Egypt's king, having in fact been made before the one with the Lacedaemonians),

and to summon the Babylonians too (an alliance existed with them as well, and at that time Labynetus was king of the Babylonians), and to send word to the Lacedaemonians to be present by a set time. Having gathered these together and assembled his own army, he had resolved to let the winter pass and then, with the coming of spring, march against the Persians. With this in mind, once he had arrived at

Sardis, he sent heralds to his allies proclaiming that they should gather at Sardis within five months. But the army he had with him, the one that had fought the Persians, which was made up of foreign mercenaries, he dismissed entirely and disbanded, never expecting that Cyrus, after fighting so evenly matched a battle, would then march on Sardis. While Croesus was thinking this over, the whole area around the city filled up with snakes,

and when they appeared, the horses left off grazing in their pastures and went out of their way to eat them up. Seeing this, Croesus judged it to be, as indeed it was, a portent, and at once sent envoys to the interpreters at Telmessus. The envoys arrived, and the Telmessians explained to them what the omen portended; but they had no chance to report it to Croesus, for before they could sail back to Sardis, Croesus had already been captured. The Telmessians, however, concluded

that a foreign army was to be expected against Croesus's land, and that when it arrived it would subdue the native people, saying that the snake is a child of the earth, while the horse is an enemy and an invader. This is the answer the Telmessians gave concerning Croesus, though he was already captured, knowing nothing yet of what had happened to Sardis or to Croesus himself. As for Cyrus, as soon as Croesus had marched away after the battle fought at

Pteria, learning that Croesus intended, once he had withdrawn, to disband his army, he considered it in his interest to march on Sardis as fast as he could, before the Lydian forces could be gathered a second time. Once he had decided this, he acted on it swiftly: he marched his army into Lydia and so arrived himself as the messenger of his own coming to Croesus. At this Croesus, thrown into

great perplexity, since matters had turned out contrary to what he had expected, nevertheless led the Lydians out to battle. At that time there was no people in Asia more courageous or more valiant than the Lydians. Their way of fighting was on horseback; they carried great spears and were skilled riders. They came together on the plain

that lies before the city of Sardis, a great and open plain, through which flow the river Hyllus and others, all joining the greatest of them, called the Hermus, which flows down from the sacred mountain of the Mother Dindymene and empties into the sea near the city of Phocaea. There Cyrus, when he saw the Lydians drawn up for battle, fearing their

cavalry, did as the Median Harpagus suggested: he gathered together all the camels that followed his army carrying food and baggage, took off their loads, and mounted men dressed in cavalry gear upon them. Having equipped them this way, he ordered them to advance ahead of the rest of the army against Croesus's cavalry, and he commanded the infantry to follow the camels, while behind

the infantry he stationed the whole of his cavalry. When all were arranged in this order, he instructed them that as for the rest of the Lydians, they should kill without mercy anyone who stood in their way, but they were not to kill Croesus himself, even if he resisted when seized. This is what he instructed, and he set the camels facing the enemy cavalry for this reason: a horse is afraid of a camel and cannot bear either the sight of it

or the smell of it. This was the very reason for his stratagem, so that Croesus's cavalry, on which he had placed some hope of shining, would be useless to him. And when they joined battle, as soon as the horses caught scent and sight of the camels, they turned back, and Croesus's hope was destroyed. Yet the Lydians for their part were not

cowards for all that, but when they saw what was happening, they leapt down from their horses and fought the Persians on foot. In time, with heavy losses on both sides, the Lydians were routed, and driven back within the wall, they were besieged by the Persians. So the siege was set in place. Croesus, thinking the siege would last a long time, sent out from the wall further messengers

to his allies. For the earlier ones had gone out proclaiming that they should gather at Sardis within five months, but these he now sent out with all speed, begging for help, since Croesus was under siege. So he sent to all his allies, and in particular to Lacedaemon. At that very time it happened that the Spartans themselves were engaged in a dispute with the Argives over

a place called Thyreae; for the Lacedaemonians had cut off this district of Thyreae, which belonged to the territory of the Argives, and held it. The Argive territory also extended, to the west, as far as Malea, both on the mainland and including the island of Cythera and the rest of the islands. When the Argives came to defend their territory being cut off, the two sides met and came to an agreement that three hundred from each side should fight,

and whichever side prevailed, to them the land should belong; but the main body of each army was to withdraw to its own country and not remain to watch the contest, for fear that, with the armies present, one side, seeing its own men getting the worse of it, would come to their aid. Having agreed on this, they withdrew, and picked men from each side, left behind, joined battle. As they fought, matched evenly, out of six hundred men there remained three: of the Argives

Alcenor and Chromius, and of the Lacedaemonians, Othryades; these were the ones left when night came on. The two surviving Argives, believing they had won, ran off to Argos, but the Lacedaemonian Othryades stripped the armor from the Argive dead, carried it to his own camp, and kept his post in the line. On the second day both sides arrived to learn the outcome. For a time

each side claimed the victory for itself, the one side saying that more of their own men survived, the other pointing out that the enemy's men had fled while their own man had stayed at his post and stripped the enemy dead. In the end, out of this dispute, they fell to fighting again, and with heavy losses on both sides, the Lacedaemonians won. From that time the Argives cut their hair short, though before this they had been required by law to grow it long; the Lacedaemonians, by contrast, made

a law and a curse that no Argive should grow his hair long, nor should their women wear gold ornaments, until they should recover Thyreae. The Lacedaemonians for their part made the opposite law: whereas before this they had not worn their hair long, from that time they did. As for the one man of the three hundred left alive, Othryades, they say that, ashamed to return to Sparta when all his comrades in arms had been killed, he

took his own life there at Thyreae. With affairs standing thus among the Spartans, the herald from Sardis arrived begging them to help Croesus, who was under siege. They, nonetheless, once they had heard the herald, set about preparing to help. And just as they were ready, with their ships prepared, another message arrived, that the wall of the Lydians had fallen and Croesus had been taken alive. So then, counting this a great misfortune, they gave up the undertaking. Sardis

fell in this way. When it was the fourteenth day of Croesus's siege, Cyrus sent horsemen through his army proclaiming that he would give gifts to the first man to mount the wall. After this, when the army made an attempt and it did not succeed, and the rest gave up, a man of the Mardians named Hyroeades kept trying to climb up at a point of the acropolis where no guard had been stationed, for it

was not thought dangerous there that the place should ever be taken. For the acropolis is sheer and unassailable at that point; there not even Meles, the former king of Sardis, had carried around the lion that his concubine bore him, though the Telmessians had judged that if the lion were carried around the wall, Sardis would be unconquerable. Meles had carried it around the rest of the wall, at the point that was vulnerable

the site of the acropolis, he disregarded it as being unassailable and sheer; it faces the Tmolus side of the city. This Hyroeades the Mardian, seeing on the previous day one of the Lydians come down there from the acropolis after a helmet had rolled down from above and he had picked it up, took note of it and laid it to heart. And now he himself climbed up,

and after him other Persians climbed up as well; and once a good number had mounted in this way, Sardis was captured and the whole city was sacked. As for Croesus himself, this is what happened. He had a son, whom I mentioned before, in other respects a fine young man, but mute. In his former prosperity Croesus had done everything he could for him, devising various measures, and in particular

he had sent to Delphi to ask an oracle about him. The Pythia told him this: "Lydian by birth, king of many, o very foolish Croesus, do not wish to hear in your halls the long-prayed-for sound of your son's voice. It is far better for you that it remain absent, for he will speak for the first time on a day of misfortune." Now when the wall was being taken, one of the Persians, not recognizing Croesus, was coming at him meaning to kill him,

and Croesus, seeing him approach, in his present calamity paid him no heed, nor did it matter to him whether he died from the blow. But this mute son of his, seeing the Persian coming toward them, from fear and distress burst into speech, and said, "Man, do not kill Croesus." This was the first thing he ever uttered, and after this he continued to speak for the rest of his

life. So the Persians took Sardis and captured Croesus himself alive, after he had ruled fourteen years and been besieged fourteen days, and, in accordance with the oracle, had put an end to his own great empire. The Persians took him and brought him before Cyrus. Cyrus had a great pyre built and set upon it Croesus, bound in fetters, and twice seven Lydian

boys along with him, intending either to burn these as first-fruits to some god, or wishing to fulfill a vow, or perhaps because he had heard that Croesus was god-fearing and for this reason set him up on the pyre, wanting to know whether some divine power would save him from being burned alive. He did this; and to Croesus, standing on the pyre,

there came, even in such dire trouble, the memory of Solon's words, spoken as if by some god's prompting, that no one among the living is fortunate. As this thought came over him, they say, he heaved a deep sigh and groaned, breaking a long silence, and spoke the name "Solon" three times. When Cyrus heard this, he ordered the interpreters to ask Croesus whom he was invoking, and they came up and asked him.

Croesus at first kept silent when questioned, but afterward, when he was pressed, he said, "One whom I would have paid a great sum of money to have converse with, before all the rulers of the earth." Since this answer was obscure to them, they asked again what he meant. As they pressed him and grew insistent, he told them how Solon, an Athenian, had once come, and after surveying the whole of his wealth had dismissed it as nothing, saying such-and-such,

and how everything had turned out for him just as Solon had said, though Solon's words applied not so much to him in particular as to all mankind in general, and especially to those who seem to themselves to be prosperous. While Croesus was relating all this, the pyre had already been lit and the outer edges were burning. And when Cyrus heard from the interpreters what Croesus had said, he had a change of heart,

reflecting that he too was a man, and was delivering another man, who had been no less fortunate than himself, alive to the fire; and besides this, fearing retribution, and considering that nothing among human affairs is secure, he ordered the burning fire to be put out as quickly as possible, and Croesus and those with him brought down. But those attempting this were no longer able

to master the fire. At this point, so the Lydians say, Croesus, learning of Cyrus's change of heart, when he saw everyone trying to put out the fire but no longer able to check it, cried out, calling upon Apollo, that if any gift of his had ever been pleasing to the god, he should stand by him and rescue him from the present evil. Weeping, he called upon the god, and then, out of a clear and windless sky,

clouds suddenly gathered and a storm broke, and it rained with the heaviest of downpours, and the pyre was put out. So Cyrus, learning thereby that Croesus was beloved of the gods and a good man, had him taken down off the pyre and put this question to him. "Croesus, who among men persuaded you to march against my land and become my enemy instead of my friend?" And he said, "O

king, I did this for your good fortune and my own misfortune, and the one responsible for it was the god of the Greeks, who spurred me on to make war. No one, after all, is foolish enough to prefer war to peace; in peace sons bury their fathers, but in war fathers bury their sons. But I suppose it was pleasing to the gods that this should

come about so." So he spoke. Cyrus then had him unbound and seated him near himself, and treated him with great consideration, and both he and all those around him looked on him with wonder. Croesus, sunk in thought, was silent; but then, turning and watching the Persians sack the Lydians' city, he said, "O king, should I say to

you what I happen to be thinking, or must I keep silent for now?" Cyrus told him to take courage and say whatever he wished. So he asked him, saying, "This great crowd, what is it doing with such energy?" And Cyrus said, "It is plundering your city and carrying off your wealth." But Croesus replied, "It is not my city

nor my wealth that it is plundering; none of this belongs to me any longer; it is your property they are carrying and taking away." Cyrus was troubled by what Croesus said, and having sent the others away, he asked Croesus what he saw in what was being done. Croesus said, "Since the gods have given me to you as your slave, I think it right, if I see anything further, to point it out to you. The Persians, being by nature

"they are violent men without money. If you allow them to plunder and hold on to great wealth, expect this to follow from it: whoever of them holds the most, expect that man to rise up against you. Now do as follows, if what I say pleases you: station guards from your spearmen at every gate, and let them tell those carrying out the goods, taking it from them, that

it is necessary for these to be tithed to Zeus. In this way you yourself will not become hateful to them by seizing the goods by force, and they, recognizing that you are acting justly, will give it up willingly." Hearing this, Cyrus was overjoyed, since it seemed to him good advice; and praising it greatly, and instructing his spearmen to carry out what Croesus had suggested, he said to Croesus: "Croesus, since you, a man who was king, are resolved to do and say

good things, ask for whatever gift you wish to be granted to you at once." And he said, "Master, the greatest favor you could do me is to let me send these fetters to that god of the Greeks — the one I honored beyond every other god — and to ask him whether it is his custom to deceive those who do good to him." Cyrus then asked what he was reproaching him for that he made this request. And Croesus recounted to him

his whole intent, and the responses of the oracles, and above all the offerings, and how, elated by the oracle, he had made war on the Persians; and as he told this he came back again to asking to be allowed to reproach the god with this. Cyrus laughed and said, "You shall have this from me, Croesus, and anything else you may need at any time." When Croesus

heard this, he sent some of the Lydians to Delphi, instructing them to lay the fetters on the threshold of the temple and ask whether the god was not ashamed to have urged Croesus with his oracles to make war on the Persians, as though he would put an end to Cyrus's power, from which such firstfruits as these fetters had come to him -- showing the fetters -- and to ask this too, whether it was the custom of the Greek gods to be ungrateful. When the

Lydians arrived and said what they had been instructed, the Pythia is said to have spoken as follows: "Not even a god can escape what fate has ordained. Croesus has paid for the offense of his ancestor five generations back, who, being a bodyguard of the Heraclids, followed a woman's treachery and killed his master, and took for himself that man's honor, which belonged to him not at all. Though Loxias was eager that the fall of Sardis should come in the time of Croesus's sons

and not upon Croesus himself, turning the Fates aside proved impossible. But so far as they yielded, he accomplished it and did Croesus a favor: for he put off the capture of Sardis for three years, and let Croesus know this, that he was captured three years later than was fated. And second, the god came to his aid when he was being burned. As for the oracle that was given, Croesus

is wrong to complain. For Loxias had told him beforehand that a campaign against the Persians would mean the destruction of a mighty empire. In the face of that, if he had wished to deliberate well, he ought to have sent and asked whether the empire meant was his own or Cyrus's; but he neither grasped what was said nor asked further, so let him consider himself responsible. Nor, the last time he consulted the oracle, did he grasp what Loxias told him about a mule. For

that Cyrus was indeed the mule: for he was born of two people not of the same nation, of a better mother and a lesser father. For she was a Mede, and daughter of Astyages the king of the Medes, while he was a Persian and subject to them, and though inferior in every way, he was married to his own mistress." This is what the Pythia answered to the Lydians, and they carried it back

to Sardis and reported it to Croesus. And he, hearing it, acknowledged that the fault lay with himself, not with the god. So this is how matters stood regarding Croesus's reign and the first subjugation of Ionia. Croesus has many other offerings in Greece besides those already mentioned. For at Thebes in Boeotia there is a golden tripod, which he dedicated

to Ismenian Apollo; and at Ephesus stand the cows of gold and the greater number of the columns; and at the temple of Athena Pronaia at Delphi there is a great golden shield. These things were still surviving even down to my own time, while others of the offerings have perished; but the offerings at Branchidae among the Milesians, dedicated by Croesus, are, as I learn, equal in weight and similar

to those at Delphi. Those at Delphi and at the shrine of Amphiaraus he dedicated as his own property and from the firstfruits of his father's wealth; but the other offerings came from the property of a man who was his enemy, who before he became king had been his political rival, striving to secure the kingship of Lydia for Pantaleon. Pantaleon was a son of Alyattes, but Croesus's brother, not

by the same mother: Croesus's mother was a Carian woman married to Alyattes, while Pantaleon's was an Ionian. And when Croesus, given the throne by his father, took control of the kingdom, he had the man who had opposed him dragged over a carding-comb and put to death, and having beforehand consecrated his property to a god, he then dedicated it in the manner described to the places named. So much let be said about the offerings. As for marvels, the land

of Lydia does not have very much to write about, such as another land might have, except for the gold dust that comes down from Mount Tmolus. But it does offer one work by far the greatest, apart from the works of the Egyptians and the Babylonians: there is there the tomb of Alyattes, the father of Croesus, whose base is of great stones, and the rest of the tomb is a mound of earth. It was built

by the market people and the craftsmen and the working girls. Five boundary markers were still standing on top of the tomb even in my time, and inscriptions had been carved on them showing what each group had done, and when measured, the work done by the girls proved to be the greatest. For the daughters of the Lydian people all prostitute themselves, gathering dowries for themselves, until

they marry, doing this; and they give themselves away in marriage. As for the tomb, its circuit measures six stadia and two plethra, and its width comes to thirteen plethra. There is a large lake adjoining the tomb, which the Lydians say never runs dry: it is called the Gygaean lake. So much for that. The Lydians follow customs very similar to those of the Greeks,

except that they prostitute their female children. So far as our knowledge goes, they were the earliest to strike gold and silver coinage and put it to use, and the earliest to turn retail traders. The Lydians themselves say that the games now established among both themselves and the Greeks were their own invention: and they say that the games were devised there right around the time they sent out the colony to Tyrrhenia, telling the story

as follows. In the reign of Atys son of Manes there was a severe famine throughout all Lydia, and for a while the Lydians endured it patiently, but afterward, when it did not stop, they sought remedies, and different people devised different things. It was then that the forms of dice, knucklebones, the ball, and every other kind of game were invented, except for draughts,

for the invention of that the Lydians do not claim as their own. What they did against the famine, having made these inventions, was this: on one of the two days they would play games all day, so as not to seek food, and on the next day they would stop playing and eat. In this way they carried on for eighteen years. But when the trouble did not let up but pressed on even more, the

king of the Lydians then divided all the Lydians into two groups and cast lots between them, one to remain and the other to leave the country; and over the group whose lot fell to remain he set himself, the king, in charge, and over the group that was to depart he set his own son, whose name was Tyrrhenus. Those of them to whom the lot fell went down to Smyrna

and built ships, in which they loaded all the goods they had that were useful, and sailed off in search of a livelihood and a land, until, after passing by many peoples, they came to the Ombrici, where they founded cities and have lived to this day. Instead of Lydians they were renamed after the king's son who had led them out, taking their

name from him and being called Tyrrhenians. So the Lydians were enslaved by the Persians. From this point our account seeks out both who this Cyrus was who destroyed the empire of Croesus, and by what means the Persians came to lead Asia. As some of the Persians tell it -- those who do not wish to glorify the story of Cyrus but to tell it as it really was -- I shall write it accordingly, though I know of

three other paths of the story about Cyrus that could be told. When the Assyrians had ruled upper Asia for five hundred and twenty years, the first to begin to revolt from them were the Medes, and somehow these, fighting the Assyrians for their freedom, proved themselves brave men, and having thrown off servitude, they became free. Following their lead, the other nations did the same thing. With everyone now self-governing

throughout the continent, they came round again to monarchy in the following way. There was among the Medes a clever man whose name was Deioces, son of Phraortes. This Deioces, desiring tyranny, did as follows. The Medes being settled in villages, he, being already a man of standing in his own village, applied himself even more eagerly and zealously to the practice of justice; and he did this though there was much lawlessness

throughout all Media, knowing that injustice is hostile to justice. And the Medes of his own village, seeing his ways, chose him as their judge. And he, since indeed he was aiming at rule, was straight and just, and doing this he won no small praise from his fellow citizens, so much so that when those in other

in the other villages, that Deioces was a man who alone judged rightly, then, since they had previously suffered from unjust verdicts, when they heard this they came gladly, going to Deioces themselves to have their cases judged, and in the end they entrusted themselves to no one else. As the number of people coming to him kept growing, since they learned that the verdicts turned out in accordance with the facts, Deioces, realizing that everything now depended on him, was no longer willing to sit

where he had previously sat and given judgment, and he said he would judge no longer; for it did not profit him, he said, to neglect his own affairs and spend the whole day judging those of his neighbors. Since robbery and lawlessness were now far more rampant throughout the villages than before, the Medes gathered together in one place and took counsel with one another about the present state of affairs. As I suppose,

it was above all Deioces' friends who said, "Since we cannot go on living in this land under the present conditions, come, let us set up a king for ourselves; that way the country can be properly governed and we can return to our own work, instead of being driven from our homes by lawlessness." Speaking in some such way, they persuaded themselves to be ruled by a king. At once, when they put forward candidates for whom they should set up as king, Deioces was proposed and praised

by everyone by a wide margin, until at last they settled on him as king. He then ordered them to build him a house worthy of his kingship and to strengthen him with a bodyguard of spearmen. And the Medes did so. They built him a great and strong house wherever in the land he indicated, and they allowed him to select bodyguards for himself from among all the Medes. And he,

once he had gained power, compelled the Medes to build a single city and to devote their attention to fortifying and adorning this one, giving less care to the others. Since the Medes obeyed him in this too, he built great and strong walls, the ones now called Ecbatana, one circle standing within another. This wall has been so contrived that each successive circle rises above the one before it only by the height of its battlements alone

and nothing more. The nature of the site, being a hill, contributes something to making it so, but more than that it was deliberately designed this way. There are seven circles in all, and within the innermost one lie the royal palace and the treasuries. The largest of these walls is about the size of the wall around Athens. Of the first circle

the first circle's battlements are white, the second's black, the third circle's crimson, the fourth's dark blue, the fifth's orange. Thus the battlements of five circles are colored with dyes; but the last two have their battlements plated, one with silver and the other with gold. All these fortifications Deioces built for himself and around his own dwelling, and he

ordered the rest of the people to live around the outer wall. When all the building was complete, Deioces was the first to establish the following order: that no one should be admitted to the king's presence, but that everything should be done through messengers, and that no one was to lay eyes on the king, and further, that it should be shameful for anyone to laugh or spit in his presence. He surrounded himself with this solemnity for the following reason,

so that his agemates, who had been raised with him and were of no lesser family, nor inferior to him in manly virtue, should not, by seeing him, feel resentment and plot against him, but instead, by not seeing him, should think him a different sort of being altogether. When he had arranged all this and secured himself in his tyranny, he was strict in guarding justice: people wrote out their cases and sent them in to him, and he, after deciding on the cases

submitted to him, sent them back out. This is what he did concerning legal cases; but he had also arranged other matters as follows: if he learned that anyone was committing an outrage, he would summon that person and punish him according to the seriousness of each offense, and he had spies and eavesdroppers throughout the whole land he ruled. Deioces, then, united only the Median nation and ruled over it. Now the tribes of the Medes are these: the Busae,

the Paretaceni, the Struchates, the Arizanti, the Budii, and the Magi. These, then, are the tribes of the Medes. Deioces had a son, Phraortes, who, when Deioces died after ruling for fifty-three years, succeeded to the rule. Having taken it over, he was not content to rule the Medes alone, but campaigned against the Persians and attacked them first of all, making them the first people subject to the Medes. Then, having these two nations, both of them

strong, he brought Asia under his control, moving from nation to nation, until he campaigned against the Assyrians, that is, those Assyrians who held Nineveh and had formerly ruled over all, but who at that time were left isolated by their allies, who had revolted from them, though otherwise their own affairs were in good order. Against these Phraortes campaigned, and he himself was destroyed, having ruled twenty-two years, and

so was the greater part of his army. When Phraortes died, he was succeeded by Cyaxares, son of Phraortes, son of Deioces. This man is said to have been far more warlike than his ancestors, and he was the first to organize the peoples of Asia into companies, and the first to arrange separately each group, the spearmen, the archers, and the cavalry; before this all had been mixed together indiscriminately

in confusion. This is the man who fought against the Lydians when day turned to night for them during the battle, and who brought together under himself all of Asia beyond the Halys river. Having gathered together all those under his rule, he marched against Nineveh, both to avenge his father and wishing to take that city. And when, having joined battle, he defeated the Assyrians, while he was besieging Nineveh

a great army of Scythians came upon him, led by their king Madyes, son of Protothyes. These had invaded Asia after driving the Cimmerians out of Europe, and pursuing them in their flight, they thus arrived in the land of the Medes. A traveler going light needs thirty days to pass from Lake Maeotis to the river Phasis and the land of the Colchians, and from Colchis

it is not far to cross over into Media—only one nation lies between them, the Saspires, and once past this one, one is already in Media. However, the Scythians did not invade by this route, but turned aside onto the upper road, much longer, keeping the Caucasus mountains on their right. There the Medes met the Scythians in battle, and having been defeated in the battle, they

were deprived of their empire. The Scythians occupied all of Asia. From there they marched on Egypt. And when they had reached Palestinian Syria, Psammetichus, king of Egypt, met them with gifts and entreaties and turned them back from advancing further. And when, on their way back, they reached the Syrian city of Ascalon, the bulk of the Scythian force passed through causing no harm, but a few stragglers left behind plundered

the temple of the heavenly Aphrodite. This temple, as I have learned by inquiry, is the oldest of all the temples of this goddess; for the one in Cyprus originated from it, as the Cyprians themselves say, and the one in Cythera was founded by Phoenicians who came from this same land of Syria. On those Scythians who plundered the temple at

Ascalon, and on their descendants forever after, the goddess inflicted a female sickness; so that the Scythians say they suffer from this affliction for that reason, and that visitors to the land of Scythia can see for themselves how those whom the Scythians call the Enarees are afflicted. Now the Scythians ruled Asia for twenty-eight years, and everything was thrown into disorder by their

violence and negligence; for besides exacting tribute from each people, which they imposed on each, they also plundered, riding about and seizing whatever each people had. Most of these Scythians Cyaxares and the Medes invited to a feast, made drunk, and slaughtered, and thus the Medes recovered their empire and gained mastery over the same peoples as before, and they

took Nineveh (how they took it I will explain in another account) and made the Assyrians subject to them, except for the portion belonging to Babylon. After this Cyaxares died, having ruled forty years including the years the Scythians ruled, and Astyages, son of Cyaxares, succeeded to the kingship. A daughter was born to him, and he gave her the name Mandane; Astyages dreamed that she urinated so much that

it filled his own city and flooded all of Asia besides. He related this dream to those of the Magi who interpreted dreams, and he was frightened when he learned the details from them. Later, when this Mandane was of age for marriage, he gave her to no Mede of rank equal to his own, fearing the vision, but gave her instead to a Persian called Cambyses, a man he judged

to be of good family but of a quiet disposition, ranking him far below a Mede of middle rank. While Mandane was living with Cambyses, in that first year, Astyages had a second vision: he dreamed that from his daughter's genitals grew a vine, and that this vine covered the whole of Asia. Having seen this and related it to the dream-interpreters, he sent for

his daughter from the Persians, she being pregnant, and when she arrived he kept her under guard, wishing to destroy whatever should be born of her; for the dream-interpreters of the Magi had indicated to him from his vision that his daughter's offspring was destined to become king in his place. Guarding against this, Astyages, when Cyrus was born, summoned Harpagus, a man of his household, most trusted among the Medes and overseer

of all his affairs, and said to him the following: "Harpagus, do not mishandle in any way the matter I am about to lay before you, nor betray me by choosing others afterward and thereby falling into trouble yourself: take the child that Mandane bore, carry it to your own house, and kill it, then bury it in whatever manner you yourself wish." He answered, "O king, never before have you found this man to be lacking in obedience"

"nothing wrong, and we are on guard not to commit any offense against you, now or in time to come. But if this is truly what you wish to happen, then it is my duty to serve you properly in the matter." Having answered in these terms, Harpagus, once the child had been handed over to him dressed for death, went off weeping toward his house; and when he arrived he told his wife the whole speech Astyages had spoken.

She said to him, "So now what do you intend to do?" He answered, "Not what Astyages ordered — not even if he goes out of his mind and rages worse than he rages now will I fall in with his purpose or serve him in a murder of this kind. There are many reasons I will not kill him: first, that the boy is my own kinsman,

and also that Astyages is old and has no male offspring. If, after he dies, the throne should pass to this daughter of his — whose son he is now having me kill — what is left for me afterward but the greatest of dangers? No, for my own safety this child must die, but it must be one of Astyages' own men

who becomes his murderer, and not one of mine." So he said, and at once sent a messenger to one of Astyages' herdsmen whom he knew to pasture his flocks in ground most suitable for the purpose, in the wildest of the mountains. The man was called Mitradates, and sharing his home was a fellow slave, a woman known in the Greek tongue as Cyno, and in the Median as Spako; for "dog"

the Medes call spaka. The foothills where this herdsman kept his cattle-pastures lie to the north of Agbatana, toward the Euxine Sea; for in that direction the Median territory borders on that of the Saspires and is very mountainous, high, and thickly wooded, while the rest of Media is entirely

flat. When the herdsman arrived, summoned in great haste, Harpagus spoke to him thus: "Astyages orders you to take this child and leave it in the loneliest region of the mountains, there to die as swiftly as possible. He further ordered me to tell you this: if you do not kill it but preserve it by some means, you will be put to the worst of deaths. I myself am appointed to see that it is exposed." Hearing this,

the herdsman took up the child and went back the same way he had come, arriving at his steading. Now it happened that his own wife, who had been due to give birth any day, that very day, by some divine chance, gave birth while the herdsman was gone to the city. Both of them were anxious about the other: he fearing for his wife's delivery, and she wondering

why Harpagus, so unusually, had sent for her husband. When he returned and stood before her, she, seeing him unexpectedly, asked first what had made Harpagus send for him so urgently. He said, "Wife, I saw and heard, when I went to the city, what I wish I had neither seen nor ever happened to our masters. The whole house of Harpagus

was overcome with weeping, and I, astonished, went inside. As soon as I entered, I saw an infant lying there, kicking and crying, adorned with gold and embroidered clothing. When Harpagus saw me, he ordered me to take up the child at once and carry it off and set it where the mountains are most infested with wild beasts, saying it was Astyages who had laid this task on me, and threatening many things if I did not

do it. And I took it up and carried it, thinking it belonged to one of the household servants; for I could never have guessed where it really came from. But I was astonished to see it decked out in gold and fine clothes, and moreover the plain weeping going on in Harpagus' house. Then presently, on the road, I learned the whole story from a servant who had escorted me out of the city and put the infant into my hands: that

it was the child of Mandane, daughter of Astyages, and of Cambyses son of Cyrus, and that Astyages ordered it killed. And now here it is." While speaking these words the herdsman drew back the covering and showed her the child; noticing at once how large and well-formed the boy was, she burst into tears, and clasping her husband's knees, begged him by no means to expose it. But he

said he could not do otherwise; for spies would come from Harpagus to check on it, and he would die a most terrible death if he did not do as ordered. Since she could not persuade her husband, the woman then said this: "Since I cannot persuade you not to expose it, then do this — since it is altogether necessary that a child be seen exposed. I too have given birth, and I have given birth

to a dead child. Take this one and expose it, and let us raise the daughter of Astyages' son as if it were our own. In this way you will not be caught wronging our masters, nor will we have planned badly for ourselves; for the dead child will receive a royal burial, and the living one will not lose his life." The herdsman thought his wife spoke very well for their present circumstance, and

he did just as she said: he handed over to his wife the child he had been carrying to kill, and taking his own dead child, he laid it in the receptacle in which he had carried the other, and, dressing it in all the finery of the other child, carried it out and set it in the most desolate part of the mountains. On the third day after the infant had been exposed, the herdsman went

to the city, leaving one of his herdsmen to watch over it, and going to Harpagus' house he said he was ready to show the body of the child. Harpagus sent the most trusted of his own bodyguard, and through them he both viewed and buried the herdsman's child. That one was buried, but the other, who was afterward named Cyrus, was taken and raised by the

herdsman's wife, who gave him some other name, not Cyrus. By the time the boy had reached his tenth year, an incident revealed who he truly was. He was playing in that village where these herdsmen's steadings were, playing alongside other children his age out on the road. In their game the children picked this very boy to be their king—the one who passed as the

herdsman's son. He then assigned some of them to build houses, others to be bodyguards, one of them, I suppose, to be the King's Eye, and to another he gave the honor of carrying messages, assigning each a task. Now one of these boys taking part in the game, the son of Artembares, a man of standing among the Medes, since he did not do as

Cyrus ordered, Cyrus told the other boys to seize him, and when the boys obeyed, Cyrus handled the boy very roughly, flogging him severely. As soon as he was released, feeling he had suffered indignities unworthy of himself, he was all the more resentful, and going down to the city he complained to his father of what he had suffered at Cyrus' hands — though he did not yet call him Cyrus, since that

was not yet his name — but called him the son of Astyages' herdsman. Artembares, in the anger he felt, went to Astyages, bringing his son with him, and said he had suffered outrageous treatment, saying, "O King, we have been so grossly insulted by your slave, the herdsman's son," showing the boy's shoulders. Hearing and seeing this, Astyages, wishing to avenge the boy for the sake of

Artembares' rank, sent for the herdsman and the boy. When both had arrived, Astyages, looking at Cyrus, said, "You, the son of such a man as this, dared to treat so outrageously this man's son, who ranks first with me?" He answered thus: "Master, I did this to him justly. For the boys of the village,

among whom he too was one, in their play made me their king; for they thought me the most fit for it. Now the other boys did what was assigned to them, but this one refused to listen and paid no heed, until he got his punishment. If for this I deserve any harm, here I am, ready." While the boy was speaking,

a recognition of him came over Astyages, and it seemed to him that the features of the boy's face resembled his own, and that his manner of answering was too free for a slave, and that the time of the exposure seemed to match the boy's age. Struck by these things, he was speechless for a while; and with difficulty, when he had recovered himself, he said, wishing to send Artembares away so that he might question the herdsman alone,

"Artembares, I will see to it that you and your son have no cause for complaint." So he sent Artembares away, and the attendants led Cyrus inside at Astyages' command. When the herdsman was left alone by himself, Astyages asked him this: where he had gotten the boy, and who had given him to him. He said the boy

had been born of himself, and that the woman who bore him was still with him. Astyages said he was not planning well in wishing to bring himself to such extremities, and as he said this he signaled to his bodyguards to seize him. And as he was led away to torture, the herdsman then revealed the true account: beginning from the start he went through it faithfully, and ended by falling to entreaty

and begging Astyages to forgive him. Astyages, once the herdsman had revealed the truth, now made little of the matter regarding him, but blaming Harpagus greatly, he ordered his bodyguards to summon him. When Harpagus came before him, Astyages asked him, "Harpagus, by what death did you dispose of the child I gave over to you, born of my daughter?" He

When Harpagus saw that the herdsman was there, he did not turn to a false account, so as not to be caught out if tested, but said this: "O king, once the child was in my hands, I thought over how I might do as you wished and yet, in dealing with you, be free of blame and not be the one who killed either your daughter's child or you yourself. I did as follows: I called the herdsman

and handed over the child to this man, telling him that it was you who ordered it killed. And in saying that I did not lie, for you had indeed commanded it. But I gave it to him with these instructions: to expose it on a deserted mountain, remaining there to keep watch until it died, threatening him with every punishment if he did not carry this out. And when he had done as ordered and the child

had died, I sent the most trustworthy of the eunuchs and through them saw and buried it. So it stands, O king, concerning this matter, and such was the fate the boy met." Harpagus, then, told the straightforward account; but Astyages, hiding the anger he held against him for what had happened, first, just as he had heard the matter from the herdsman himself,

repeated it back to Harpagus, and afterward, once it had been gone over again, he came around to saying that the boy was alive and that things had turned out well. "For over what was done to this child," he said, "I suffered greatly, and being at odds with my own daughter was no light thing for me. Now that fortune has turned out well, first send your own son to

the newly arrived boy, and second — for I intend to sacrifice thank-offerings for the child's survival to the gods, to whom this honor is due — come to me for dinner." When Harpagus heard this, he bowed low and, thinking it a great thing both that his error had turned out for the best and that he had been invited to dinner on so happy an occasion, went to his house. And entering as quickly as he could, since

he had one only son, about thirteen years old, he sent him off, telling him to go to Astyages and do whatever he might order; and he himself, overjoyed, told his wife what had happened. But Astyages, when Harpagus's son arrived, slaughtered him and cut him limb from limb, roasting some of the meat and boiling

the rest, and having it prepared, kept it ready. When the hour of dinner came and the other guests were present along with Harpagus, tables laden with mutton were set before the others and before Astyages himself, but before Harpagus was set everything of his own son except the head and the extremities of the hands and feet — these lay apart on

a covered basket. And when Harpagus seemed to have had enough of the food, Astyages asked him whether he had enjoyed the feast. Harpagus replied that the meal had pleased him greatly, and then those whose task it was brought forward the covered head of the boy, and his hands and feet, and told Harpagus to step up, uncover them, and take whichever of them he wished. Harpagus obeyed, and

uncovering it, he saw the remains of his son; seeing them, he was not overcome, but kept himself in hand. Astyages asked him whether he recognized what animal's meat he had eaten. He said that he did recognize it, and that whatever the king did was pleasing to him. Having answered thus, he collected the leftover meat and made his way home, intending, I suppose,

to gather it all together and bury it. Such was the punishment Astyages inflicted on Harpagus. But concerning Cyrus, in deliberating about him, he called the same Magi who had interpreted the dream for him in that way. When they arrived, Astyages asked them how they had interpreted the vision. They said the same as before, that the boy was fated to become king, if he had lived and not died earlier.

He answered them thus: "The boy exists and is alive, and the village boys set him up as their king while he was living out in the country. And he carried out all the things that true kings actually do: he appointed spear-bearers and door-keepers and message-bearers and all the rest, and ruled with these arrangements in place. Now, what do you think this points to?"

The Magi said, "If the boy is alive and has become king without any design behind it, then take courage on that account and keep a good heart, for he will not rule a second time. Even some of our prophecies come to fulfillment in trivial ways, and matters concerning dreams especially tend to come to nothing significant." Astyages answered them thus: "I myself, O Magi,

am very much of that same opinion — that once the boy was named king the dream was fulfilled, and that he is no longer in any way dangerous to me. Nevertheless, consider carefully and advise me what will be safest for my household and for you." To this the Magi said, "O king, it matters greatly to us as well that your rule

stand secure. For otherwise it passes away over to this boy—a Persian—and becomes foreign to us, and we, being Medes, would be enslaved and counted for nothing by the Persians, as foreigners; but while you remain established as king, being one of our own people, we too rule our share and receive great honors from you. So in every way we must look out for you and for your rule. And now

if we saw anything to fear in this, we would have told you everything beforehand. But since the dream has come to nothing significant, we ourselves take courage, and we urge the same courage on you. Send this boy out of your sight, off to the Persians and to those who bore him." Hearing this, Astyages was glad, and calling Cyrus, said to him: "My boy, I wronged you because of

a dream-vision that came to nothing, but by your own destiny you survive. Now go, then, rejoicing, to the Persians, and I will send an escort with you. When you get there you will find a father and mother quite different from Mitradates the herdsman and his wife." Having said this, Astyages sent Cyrus away. When he returned to Cambyses's house, he was received by

his parents, and having received him, once they learned who he was, they welcomed him warmly, since they knew that he had died at that time long before, and they asked him by what means he had survived. He explained to them that until then he had been ignorant and greatly mistaken about it, and that on the road he had learned the whole story of his own fate: that he knew he was said to be the son of Astyages's herdsman, but that on the journey from there he had

learned the whole account from those escorting him. He said he had been raised by the herdsman's wife, and he praised her constantly throughout his account, and in his telling everything centered on Cyno. His parents took up this name, so that it might seem to the Persians all the more marked by divine favor that their son had survived, and they put about the story that Cyrus, when exposed, had been suckled by a dog. From there this

story has spread. As Cyrus grew to manhood and became the most manly and best-liked of his peers, Harpagus attached himself to him, sending him gifts, desiring to take vengeance on Astyages; for he himself, being a private man, saw no way that vengeance could come upon Astyages, but seeing Cyrus growing up, he made him his ally, likening Cyrus's own sufferings to his. And even before this he had accomplished the following: since Astyages

was harsh toward the Medes, Harpagus, meeting with each of the leading Medes individually, persuaded them that they must put Cyrus forward and stop Astyages from ruling. When this had been accomplished by him and all was ready, then, since Cyrus was living among the Persians, Harpagus, wishing to reveal his own intent to him, had no other way of doing so, since the roads were guarded, and so he contrived the following: preparing a hare,

and slitting open its belly without plucking out any of the fur, just as it was he inserted a written scroll, having written on it what seemed best to him; then, sewing up the hare's belly again, and giving nets to the most trustworthy of his servants as though he were a huntsman, he sent him off to the Persians, instructing him by word of mouth, in handing over the hare to Cyrus, to tell him that he must open it himself, with his own hands, allowing nobody to be with him while he did it.

This, then, was carried out, and Cyrus, taking the hare, cut it open; and finding the scroll inside it, he took it and read it through. The writing said this: "Son of Cambyses, the gods watch over you — for otherwise you would never have come to such good fortune — now take vengeance on Astyages, your murderer. For as far as his intent went,

you are dead, but as far as the gods and I are concerned, you live. This I think you have long since learned in full — both what was done concerning you, and what I suffered at the hands of Astyages because I did not kill you but gave you to the herdsman. Now, if you are willing to listen to me, you shall rule over all the land which Astyages now rules. Persuade the Persians to revolt, and lead an army

against the Medes. And whether I am appointed by Astyages as general against you, or some other of the notable Medes is, the outcome will be what you wish, for these men will be the first to revolt from him and come over to your side and try to bring Astyages down. Since matters here are ready, do this, and do it quickly." Hearing this, Cyrus considered

by what cleverest means he might persuade the Persians to revolt, and upon consideration he found the following to be most fitting; and this is what he did. Writing on a scroll what he wished, he called an assembly of the Persians, and then, unrolling the scroll and reading from it, he said that Astyages was appointing him general of the Persians. "And now," he said, "O Persians, I proclaim to you that each of you must present himself equipped with a sickle." Thus Cyrus made his proclamation. There is

...many tribes of Persians, and Cyrus brought some of these together and won them over to rebel against the Medes. These are the tribes from which all the other Persians are descended: the Pasargadae, the Maraphii, and the Maspii. Of these the Pasargadae are the noblest; among them is also the clan of the Achaemenids, from which the Perseid kings are descended. Other Persians are these: the Panthialaei, the Derusiaei, the Germanii. All these are farmers,

while the rest are nomads: the Daans, the Mardi, the Dropici, the Sagartii. When all had arrived bringing what had been ordered, then Cyrus—there was a certain place in Persia covered with thorn-bushes, about eighteen or twenty stadia in every direction—told them to clear this place in a single day. When the Persians had accomplished the task set before them, he told them a second time to be present on the following day

having bathed. Meanwhile Cyrus gathered together all his father's goats, sheep, and cattle in one place and sacrificed them, and made preparations to receive the Persian army, together with wine and food of the finest quality. When the Persians arrived the next day, he had them recline on the meadow and feasted them well. Once dinner was over, Cyrus put a question to them

whether they preferred what they had had the day before or what they had now. They said there was a great difference between the two: the previous day had held nothing but hardship for them, while the present day held nothing but good things. Taking up this remark, Cyrus laid bare the whole matter, saying, "Men of Persia, this is how things stand for you. If you are willing

to obey me, you will have this and countless other good things, with no toil that befits a slave; but if you are unwilling to obey me, you will have toils numberless, like the one of yesterday. So now, obey me and become free. For I believe I was born by divine fortune to bring these things about, and I consider you men no lesser than the Medes, either in other respects or in matters of war.

Since this is how things stand, revolt from Astyages as quickly as possible." The Persians, having found a champion, gladly threw off their bondage, since they had long resented being ruled by the Medes. When Astyages learned that Cyrus was doing this, he sent a messenger and summoned him. Cyrus told the messenger to report that he would come to Astyages sooner than Astyages himself would wish. Hearing this, Astyages

armed all the Medes, and, since he was struck with madness by the gods, he appointed Harpagus as their general, forgetting what he had done to him. When the Medes marched out and engaged the Persians, some of them fought—those who had had no part in the plot—while others deserted to the Persians, and most of them shirked their duty deliberately and fled. When the Median army was disgracefully dispersed, as

As soon as Astyages learned of this, he said, threatening Cyrus, "But even so, Cyrus will not rejoice." Having said this, he first impaled the dream-interpreters among the Magi who had convinced him to spare Cyrus's life, and then he armed those remaining in the city of the Medes, both young men and old. Leading these out and engaging the Persians, he was defeated, and he himself

was taken alive, and he lost the Medes he had brought out with him. When Astyages was a captive, Harpagus came up to him and gloated over him and mocked him, and among other painful words he spoke to him, he also asked him, referring to the dinner at which Astyages had feasted him on the flesh of his own son, what his own slavery felt like now in place of kingship. And Astyages

looked at him and asked in turn whether he claimed Cyrus's deed as his own. Harpagus replied that, having written the letter himself, the affair was indeed rightly his. Astyages then declared him to be, by that logic, the most foolish and most unjust of all men—most foolish, because if it was through his own doing that these things had come about, he could have become king himself, yet instead he set the power on another; and most unjust,

since it was that very dinner which led him to enslave the Medes. For if it was truly necessary to hand over the kingship to someone else and not keep it himself, it would have been more just to bestow this good fortune on one of the Medes rather than on the Persians. But as things stood, the Medes, who bore no responsibility for this, had become slaves instead of masters, while the Persians, who had once been enslaved to the Medes, had now become their masters instead. Astyages, then,

having reigned thirty-five years, was thus deposed from his kingship, and the Medes submitted to the Persians because of his harshness, after having ruled over Asia beyond the Halys river for one hundred and twenty-eight years, apart from the time during which the Scythians ruled. Later, however, they came to regret having done this and revolted from Darius, but having revolted they were again subdued, defeated in battle.

At that time, then, under Astyages, the Persians together with Cyrus revolted and overthrew Median rule, taking control of Asia from then on. Cyrus did Astyages no further harm but kept him with him until he died. Thus Cyrus, born and raised as he was, became king, and later subdued Croesus, who had begun the wrongdoing, as I have said before, and having subdued him he ruled

over the whole of Asia in this way. I know that the Persians observe customs such as these: it is not their custom to set up statues, temples, or altars; indeed they consider those who do so to be fools, because, as I think, they do not believe the gods to have human form as the Greeks do. They have a custom of going up to the highest peaks of the mountains and offering sacrifices to Zeus,

calling the whole circle of the sky Zeus. They also offer sacrifice to the sun and the moon, to earth, fire, water, and the winds; from ancient times these alone have received their sacrifices, but they have since learned also to sacrifice to Heavenly Aphrodite, having learned this from the Assyrians and the Arabians. The Assyrians call Aphrodite Mylitta, the Arabians call her Alilat, and the Persians call her Mithra. As for sacrifice,

the practice among the Persians regarding the gods I have mentioned is as follows: they build no altars and kindle no fire when they intend to sacrifice; they use no libation, no flute, no wreaths, no barley-groats. When a man wishes to sacrifice to one of these gods, he leads the animal to a clean spot and calls upon the god, wearing his tiara wreathed most often with myrtle. It is not permitted for the one sacrificing to pray for good things for himself alone,

but he prays for good things to come to all the Persians and to the king; for he himself is included among all the Persians. When he has cut the sacrificial victim limb from limb and boiled the meat, he spreads out the softest grass he can find, especially clover, and lays all the meat upon it. Once he has arranged it, a Magus stands by and chants over it a theogony, for such

is what they say the incantation is; for it is not their custom to make sacrifices without a Magus present. After waiting a short while, the one who has sacrificed carries away the meat and uses it as he sees fit. They consider the day on which each of them was born to be the one most worthy of honor of all days. On this day custom calls for laying out a feast more generous than usual: on it the wealthy among them

set out an ox, a horse, a camel, and a donkey roasted whole in ovens, while the poor among them set out the smaller kinds of livestock. They eat little in the way of solid food but much in the way of dessert courses, and not all at once; which is why the Persians claim that Greeks leave the table still hungry, since nothing worth mentioning follows their dinner; whereas if something more were served, they say, the Greeks

would not stop eating. They are very devoted to wine, and it is not permitted for them to vomit or to urinate in front of another person. These customs, then, are observed strictly. It is their habit to deliberate on the most important matters while drunk; and whatever decision they reach in their deliberations, whoever heads the household where the discussion took place lays it before them again the next day while they are sober, and if the decision still pleases them sober, they act on it; but if

it does not please them, they abandon it instead. And whatever they have deliberated first while sober, they reconsider while drunk. When they meet one another in the streets, one can tell whether those meeting are of equal rank by this: instead of greeting each other verbally, they kiss each other on the mouth; but if one is of somewhat lower rank, they kiss each other on the cheeks; and if one is much lower in rank, he falls down and prostrates himself before the other. They honor most

of all, after themselves, those who live nearest to them, and next those who live second nearest, and so on, honoring people in due proportion as they go further away; and they hold in least honor those who live farthest away from themselves, believing that they themselves are by far the best of all people in every respect, that other peoples partake of excellence in proportion to their nearness, and that those living farthest away are the worst. Under the rule of the Medes

the various nations also ruled over one another in this pattern: the Medes ruled over those nearest to them and those people in turn over their neighbors, and those neighbors over the ones next to them—and by this same reasoning the Persians too give honor, for the nation kept advancing as it ruled and governed. The Persians adopt foreign customs more than any other people.

For example, having decided that Median dress is more beautiful than their own, they wear it, and in war they wear Egyptian breastplates. They also take up all sorts of pleasures as soon as they learn of them, and indeed, having learned it from the Greeks, they have relations with boys. Each of them marries many lawful wives, and acquires even more concubines besides. Manliness is reckoned, after prowess in battle,

to consist chiefly in this: whoever can show the most sons. Each year the king sends gifts to the man who has the most to show. They believe that numbers make for strength. They educate their boys, beginning at five years old and continuing to twenty, in three things only: riding, archery, and telling the truth. Until a son turns five, he is kept away from his father's presence entirely and spends his days among the women. This is done for this reason

they do this so that, if the child dies while being raised, it will cause the father no grief. Now I praise this custom, and I praise this one too: that not for a single offense will the king himself put anyone to death, nor will any other Persian inflict irreparable harm on any of his own servants for a single offense; but only after reckoning up, if he finds the wrongs to be more numerous and greater

than the services rendered, does he then give way to his anger. They say that no one has ever yet killed his own father or mother, but that whenever such a thing has happened, it has always, upon investigation, been found without exception that the child was either a supposititious child or born of adultery; for they say it is not plausible that a true parent should die at the hands of his own child. Whatever their customs forbid them from doing,

it is also not lawful for them to speak of. The most shameful thing among them, by their reckoning, is lying, and second to that is owing a debt, for many reasons, but chiefly because they say it is necessary for a debtor to tell lies as well. Any citizen who has leprosy or a white skin disease does not come down into the city and does not mix with the other Persians; they say he has this

because he has sinned in some way against the sun. Many drive out of the country any foreigner who contracts these diseases, and they do the same with white doves, giving the same reason. They neither urinate nor spit into a river, nor wash their hands in one, nor do they allow anyone else to do so, but they hold rivers in the greatest reverence. And here is another thing that has happened to them, which has escaped the Persians themselves, but not us:

their names, which correspond to their bodily forms and to their grandeur, all end in the same letter, the one the Dorians call san and the Ionians call sigma. If you search for it you will find that the names of the Persians all end in this letter, without exception, not some but not others. This much I can say with certainty, knowing it for a fact about them; but the following is told as a secret

and not clearly, concerning the dead: that the corpse of a Persian is left unburied until a bird or dog has dragged it off. That the Magi do this I know for certain, for they do it openly. But the Persians coat the body in wax before laying it in the ground. The Magi are set apart greatly from other men, and also from the priests in Egypt. For the Egyptian priests

hold it a point of purity to avoid killing any living thing except what they sacrifice; but the Magi kill with their own hands everything except a dog and a man, and they make it a great point of competition, killing ants and snakes alike, and other creeping and flying things. Well, let this custom be as it was originally established, and let me return to my earlier account. Now the Ionians

and Aeolians, as soon as the Lydians had fallen to the Persians, dispatched envoys to Sardis to see Cyrus, wanting to be subject to him under the same terms on which they had been subject to Croesus. He, having heard what they proposed, told them a story: he said that a flute player, seeing fish in the sea, played his flute, expecting that they would come out onto the land; but when his hope was disappointed, he took

a casting net and gathered up a great multitude of fish within it and drew them out; and seeing them leaping about, he said to the fish, "Stop dancing for me now, since when I was playing you were not willing to come out and dance." Cyrus told this story to the Ionians and Aeolians for this reason: earlier, when Cyrus himself had asked them through messengers to revolt from

Croesus, they had not been persuaded, but now that matters had been settled, they were ready to obey Cyrus. He, in his anger, said this to them. When the Ionians heard this report carried back to their cities, they each built walls around their own cities, and the rest gathered at the Panionion, except for the Milesians; for with them alone did Cyrus make a treaty on the same terms the Lydian had made. As for the

remaining Ionians, they decided by common resolution to dispatch envoys to Sparta asking the Spartans for aid on behalf of the Ionians. Now these Ionians, to whom the Panionion belongs, happened to have founded their cities in the finest part of the sky and climate of all the peoples known to us; the districts lying above Ionia are not its equal, nor are those beneath it, nor the parts toward the

east nor those toward the west, are like it, some being oppressed by cold and wet, others by heat and drought. They do not all use the same language, but four different varieties of speech. Miletus lies first among their cities toward the south, and after it Myus and Priene. These are settled in Caria and speak

the same dialect to one another; the following are in Lydia: Ephesus, Colophon, Lebedos, Teos, Clazomenae, Phocaea. These cities share no common speech with those mentioned earlier, but speak the same as one another. There remain three more Ionian cities, of which two are situated on islands, Samos and Chios, and one, Erythrae, is settled on the mainland. The Chians

and the Erythraeans speak the same dialect, while the Samians alone speak their own. These make four distinct varieties of speech. Now of these Ionians, the Milesians were sheltered from fear, having made a treaty, and none of the islanders among them had anything to fear either; for the Phoenicians were not yet subjects of the Persians, nor were the Persians themselves seafarers. They had separated from the other Ionians

for no other reason than this: at that time, when the whole Greek race was weak, the Ionian people was by far the weakest of its branches and of least account; for apart from Athens there was no other city of note. So the other Ionians, and the Athenians too, shunned the label, preferring not to be called Ionians, and even now most of them seem to me

to be ashamed of the name; but those twelve cities gloried in the name and founded a sanctuary for themselves alone, to which they gave the name Panionion, and they resolved to share it with none of the other Ionians (nor did any others ask to take part except the Smyrnaeans): just as the Dorians of what is now the Pentapolis, though formerly called the Hexapolis, take care

to admit none of their Dorian neighbors into the Triopian sanctuary, and indeed excluded from participation even some of their own number who had transgressed against the sanctuary. For in the contest of Triopian Apollo they used to set out bronze tripods as prizes for the winners in ancient times, and those who won them were required not to carry them away from the sanctuary but to dedicate them there to the god. Now a man of Halicarnassus,

whose name was Agasicles, having won, disregarded this custom, and carrying the tripod off to his own house, nailed it up there. For this reason the five cities, Lindos, Ialysos, and Cameiros, along with Cos and Cnidos, shut the sixth city, Halicarnassus, out of the association. This is the penalty they imposed on the Halicarnassians. Now it seems to me that

the Ionians made twelve cities and were unwilling to admit more for this reason: that when they lived in the Peloponnese, they too were divided into twelve parts, just as now the Achaeans who drove the Ionians out are divided into twelve parts: first Pellene, next to Sicyon, then Aegira and Aegae, where the river Crathis flows perennially, from which the river in Italy took its name,

and Bura and Helice, to which the Ionians fled when they were defeated in battle by the Achaeans, and Aegium, Rhypes, Patrae, Pharae, and Olenus, where the great river Peirus is, and Dyme and Tritaeae, the only ones of these that lie inland. These are now the twelve parts of the Achaeans, and were then the parts of the Ionians. For this reason the Ionians too made

twelve cities: since to say that these Ionians are any more Ionian, or any nobler in origin, than the other Ionians would be great foolishness; for the Abantes from Euboea are no small part of them, though they have no share at all in the name of Ionia, and Minyans from Orchomenus have been mixed in among them, and Cadmeans, and Dryopians, and a scattered group of Phocians, and Molossians, and Arcadian Pelasgians, and Dorian

men from Epidaurus, and many other peoples besides have been mixed in; and those of them who set out from the Athenian prytaneum and consider themselves the noblest-born of the Ionians did not bring wives with them to the colony, but took Carian women, whose parents they had murdered. Because of this murder, these women established a custom among themselves and bound each other by oaths, which they handed down to their daughters, never

to eat at the same table as their husbands, nor ever to call their own husband by name, because the men had murdered their fathers, husbands, and children, and then, having done these things, took them as wives. This took place in Miletus. As kings, some of them set up men descended from Glaucus son of Hippolochus, of Lycian stock, others men of Caucon Pylian descent from Codrus son of Melanthus, and others

both together. But because they cling to the name more strongly than other Ionians do, let those who are of pure Ionian descent be called Ionians too. All are Ionians who trace their origin from Athens and who celebrate the festival of the Apaturia. All of them celebrate it except the Ephesians and the Colophonians; these alone of the Ionians do not celebrate the Apaturia, and that on account of some charge of murder. The Panionion is a sacred place belonging to

Mycale, facing north, set apart in common by the Ionians for Poseidon Heliconius. Mycale is a headland of the mainland facing west toward Samos, where the Ionians would gather from their cities and hold the festival to which they gave the name Panionia. It is not only the festivals of the Ionians that are affected this way, but likewise all the festivals of all the Greeks end in the same letter

end in the same way as the Persian names do. These, then, are the Ionian cities. The Aeolian cities are these: Cyme, which is called Phriconis; Larisae; Neonteichos; Temnos and Cilla; Notion and Aegiroessa; Pitane and Aegaeae; Myrina and Grynea. Eleven ancient Aeolian cities stand on this list, for one of their number, Smyrna, was taken from them by the Ionians; there had originally been twelve of them on the mainland as well. These

Aeolians happened to have settled a better land than the Ionians, but their climate does not compare as favorably. This is how the Aeolians lost Smyrna. They had taken in some men of Colophon who had been defeated in civil strife and driven out of their homeland. Afterward, these Colophonian exiles waited until the Smyrnaeans were celebrating a festival of Dionysus beyond the city walls, then barred the gates behind them and took possession of the city. When all the Aeolians came to help, terms were agreed upon:

the Ionians would give back the movable property, and the Aeolians would abandon Smyrna. When the people of Smyrna had done this, the eleven cities divided them among themselves and made them citizens of their own communities. These, then, are the mainland Aeolian cities, apart from those settled on Ida, for those are counted separately. Of the island cities, five share Lesbos between them (for the sixth city on Lesbos,

Arisba, was enslaved by the people of Methymna, though its people were their own kin); on Tenedos one city is settled, and on the islands called the Hundred Isles another. For the people of Lesbos and Tenedos, as for the Ionians who hold the islands, there was no danger at all; but the remaining cities agreed together to follow wherever the Ionians should lead. When the envoys of the Ionians

and Aeolians arrived at Sparta—for this business was being conducted with great speed—they chose to speak before all the others the man of Phocaea whose name was Pythermus. He wrapped himself in a purple cloak, so that as many Spartans as possible would hear of it and gather to listen, and standing before them he spoke at length, asking for aid on their behalf. But the Lacedaemonians would not listen at all; they decided against helping the Ionians. So the envoys departed,

but the Lacedaemonians, though they had turned away the Ionian envoys, nonetheless sent men in a fifty-oared ship, to spy out, as it seems to me, the affairs of Cyrus and of Ionia. When these men arrived at Phocaea, they sent to Sardis the most respected of their number, whose name was Lacrines, to declare to Cyrus the message of the Lacedaemonians: that he should do no harm to any city of Greek land, since they would not overlook it. When

the herald had said this, it is said that Cyrus asked those Greeks present with him who these Lacedaemonians were and what their numbers came to, that they should proclaim such a thing to him; and on learning the answer, he said to the herald, "Never yet have I feared the sort of men who keep a space marked out in the middle of their city where they gather to swear oaths and cheat one another. If I remain in good health, it will not be the sufferings of the Ionians

that they will have to talk about, but their own troubles." Cyrus flung these words at the Greeks generally, because they set up marketplaces and conduct business by buying and selling; for the Persians themselves are not accustomed to use marketplaces at all, nor do they have any marketplace whatsoever. After this, he entrusted Sardis to Tabalus, a Persian, and charged Pactyes, a Lydian, with bringing away the gold that had belonged to Croesus and to the other Lydians,

and he himself marched off to Ecbatana, taking Croesus with him and giving no thought at all to the Ionians for the present. Babylon stood in his way, as did the Bactrian nation, the Sacae, and the Egyptians; against these he intended to lead an army himself, and to send some other general against the Ionians. But when Cyrus had marched away

from Sardis, Pactyes caused the Lydians to revolt from Tabalus and from Cyrus. Going down to the coast, since he had all the gold from Sardis, he hired mercenaries and persuaded the people of the coast to join him on campaign. Marching then against Sardis, he laid siege to Tabalus, who had been penned inside the acropolis. When Cyrus learned of this on the road,

he said the following to Croesus: "Croesus, what will be the end of these things happening to me? It seems the Lydians will not stop giving trouble, both to themselves and to me. I am wondering whether it would be best to enslave them outright. For it now appears to me that I have acted just as if a man, having killed the father, had spared the children—so it is with me: I have taken you, who were more than a father

to the Lydians, and led you away captive, yet handed the city over to the Lydians themselves; and now I am surprised that they have revolted from me." So he spoke what he had in mind, and Croesus answered him thus, fearing that Cyrus might destroy Sardis utterly: "O king, what you have said is reasonable, but do not give way entirely to anger, nor destroy an ancient city that is innocent both of the former wrong and

of what is happening now. For the former wrong I committed myself, and I bear the consequences on my own head; and as for what is happening now, it is Pactyes who is doing the wrong, the man to whom you entrusted Sardis—let him pay the penalty for it. But show mercy to the Lydians, and lay upon them this command, so that they neither revolt nor become dangerous to you: send word barring them from owning any weapons of war, and command

them to wear tunics under their cloaks and to put on soft boots, and bid them teach their sons to strum the lyre and pluck the harp, and to take up shopkeeping. And quickly, O king, you will see them turn into women rather than men, so that you need fear no revolt from them." Croesus suggested this to him, finding it more acceptable for the Lydians than being sold into slavery, knowing that

unless he offered a sufficiently weighty reason, Cyrus would not be talked into changing his mind, and fearing also that the Lydians, if they should escape the present danger, might later revolt from the Persians and be destroyed. Cyrus was pleased with the suggestion, and relenting from his anger, said he would follow it. Calling Mazares, a Mede, he ordered him to proclaim to the Lydians what Croesus had proposed, and further

to enslave all the others who had joined the Lydians in the campaign against Sardis, but to bring Pactyes himself to him alive at all costs. Having given these orders on the road, he marched on toward the land of the Persians, but Pactyes, learning that an army was approaching against him, took fright and fled to Cyme. Mazares the Mede, marching against Sardis with

whatever portion of Cyrus's army he had with him, and finding that Pactyes and his followers were no longer in Sardis, first compelled the Lydians to carry out Cyrus's orders, and from that command the Lydians changed their entire way of life. After this Mazares sent messengers to Cyme demanding that Pactyes be handed over. The people of Cyme decided to refer the matter for advice to

the god at Branchidae, for there was an oracle established there from ancient times, which all the Ionians and Aeolians were accustomed to consult. This place is in the territory of Miletus, above the harbor of Panormus. The people of Cyme, then, sent sacred envoys to the Branchidae and asked what they should do concerning Pactyes to please the gods. When they asked this, the oracle's answer was to hand Pactyes over

to the Persians. When the people of Cyme heard this report brought back, they set about doing so; but while the majority were inclined this way, Aristodicus son of Heracleides, a man of standing among the citizens, prevented the Cymaeans from doing this, distrusting the oracle and thinking that the sacred envoys had not reported truly, until other envoys went a second time to inquire about Pactyes, among whom Aristodicus himself was included. When they arrived

at Branchidae, Aristodicus consulted the oracle on behalf of all, asking as follows: "Lord, Pactyes the Lydian has come to us as a suppliant, fleeing a violent death that the Persians intend for him; and they demand his surrender, ordering the Cymaeans to give him up. We, though fearing the power of the Persians, have not yet dared to hand over the suppliant, until it be made clear to us plainly by you which of the two we should do." So he asked,

but the god again gave them the same oracle, ordering them to hand Pactyes over to the Persians. In response to this Aristodicus did the following deliberately: going around the temple in a circle, he removed the sparrows and all the other kinds of birds that had made their nests in the temple. As he carried this out, a voice reportedly came from the inner sanctuary directed at Aristodicus, saying

"Most impious of men, how dare you do this? Do you tear my suppliants out of the temple?" And Aristodicus, not at a loss for an answer, replied, "Lord, do you yourself come to the aid of your suppliants in this way, yet command the Cymaeans to hand over their suppliant?" And the god answered him again, saying, "Yes, I command it, so that by committing this impiety you may perish all the sooner, and not come again to the

oracle in the future concerning the surrender of suppliants." When the people of Cyme heard this report brought back, unwilling either to perish by surrendering him or to endure a siege while he stayed among them, they packed him off to Mytilene. But when Mazares sent messages demanding that they hand over Pactyes, the Mytilenaeans prepared to give him up in exchange for a certain payment—I cannot say exactly how much, for the matter was never completed. For when the Cymaeans learned that this was being carried out by the Mytilenaeans,

they sent a boat to Lesbos and brought Pactyes away to Chios. From there he was dragged out of the temple of Athena Polias by the Chians and handed over; the Chians gave him up in exchange for Atarneus, a district of Mysia opposite Lesbos. The Persians, once they had received Pactyes, kept him under guard, intending to present him to Cyrus. And for a long time afterward,

no Chian would offer barley grains as a first-offering to any god from that district of Atarneus, nor bake sacrificial cakes from its produce, and everything grown in that land was excluded from all religious offerings. So the Chians handed over Pactyes. After this Mazares campaigned against those who had joined in besieging Tabalus, and he enslaved the people of Priene, and overran the whole plain of the Maeander,

he overran the whole country, plundering with his army, and did the same to Magnesia. After this he died shortly of illness. When he had died, Harpagus came down as his successor in command, a man who was himself Median by birth, the same Harpagus whom Astyages the king of the Medes had feasted at that unlawful banquet, and who had helped Cyrus win the kingship. This man, now appointed general by Cyrus, when he arrived in Ionia began taking

the cities by means of earthworks: whenever he had shut the defenders up behind their walls, he would then pile up mounds of earth against the walls and so storm them. The first city of Ionia he attacked was Phocaea. These Phocaeans were the first of the Greeks to make long sea voyages, and it was they who opened up the Adriatic, Tyrsenia, Iberia, and Tartessus; they sailed not in round ships but in fifty-oared galleys. When they arrived

at Tartessus they won the friendship of the Tartessian king, a man named Arganthonius; he had ruled Tartessus for eighty years and lived a hundred and twenty years in all. This man became so fond of the Phocaeans that at first he urged them to leave Ionia and settle wherever they wished in his own country; but afterward, when he

could not persuade the Phocaeans to do this, and learning from them how the Mede was growing in power, he supplied funds so they could raise a wall around their city, giving without stint: for the circuit of the wall is not a few stadia, and all of it is built of great stones well fitted together. In this way the wall was completed for the Phocaeans. Harpagus, when he

brought up his army, laid siege to them, but offered terms, saying it would satisfy him if the Phocaeans were willing to tear down just one bastion of the wall and consecrate just one house. The Phocaeans, indignant at the prospect of slavery, said they wished to deliberate for one day and would then give their answer; but while they deliberated, they urged him to pull his forces back away from the city wall. Harpagus said he knew well

what they intended to do, but nonetheless he would allow them to deliberate. So while Harpagus withdrew his army from the wall, the Phocaeans in that time launched their fifty-oared ships, put aboard their children, wives, and all their movable goods, and besides these the statues from their temples and the other dedications, except for whatever was of bronze

or stone or painting; loading everything else aboard and embarking themselves, they sailed for Chios. The Persians took possession of Phocaea now emptied of its men. But when the Chians would not sell the Phocaeans the islands called the Oenussae, even for payment, fearing that they might become a trading port and that their own island might thereby be shut out from trade, the Phocaeans for this reason set sail

for Cyrnus (Corsica): for on Cyrnus, twenty years before this, they had founded a city in accordance with an oracle, whose name was Alalia. Arganthonius by this time was already dead. As they set out for Cyrnus, they first sailed back to Phocaea and slaughtered the Persian garrison that had taken over the city from Harpagus and was guarding it. After they had accomplished this, they laid strong curses upon

on any of their own number who might be left behind by the fleet, and beyond these curses they also sank a lump of iron into the sea, swearing they would not come back to Phocaea until that lump of iron floated up again. Yet as they made for Cyrnus, more than half the citizens were overcome by longing and sorrow for their city and the customs of their homeland; breaking their oath, they turned their ships around and sailed back to Phocaea. The rest,

who kept the oath, weighed anchor from the Oenussae and sailed on. When they arrived at Cyrnus, they lived together with those who had come there earlier for five years, and they built temples. But since they were raiding and plundering all their neighbors, the Tyrsenians and Carthaginians made common cause and campaigned against them, each side with sixty ships. The Phocaeans, manning

sixty ships of their own, meeting them out in the sea men call the Sardonian. Once the fighting began, the Phocaeans came away with something like a Cadmean victory: forty of their vessels were wrecked, and the twenty ships left over were unfit for use, since their rams had been twisted out of true. Putting in at Alalia, they gathered up their children, their wives, and as much of their other belongings

their ships were able to carry, and then, abandoning Cyrnus, sailed for Rhegium. As for the men of the destroyed ships, the Carthaginians and Tyrsenians divided them by lot, and among the Tyrsenians the people of Agylla drew by far the largest share of them, and these they led out and stoned to death. Afterward, everything that passed by that place belonging to the Agyllaeans, where the stoned Phocaeans

lay, became distorted, crippled, and paralyzed—sheep, pack animals, and men alike. The Agyllaeans sent to Delphi, wishing to atone for their wrongdoing, and the Pythia bade them do what the Agyllaeans still perform to this day: they hold great funeral rites in their honor and establish athletic and equestrian contests. Such was the fate that befell these Phocaeans;

but others of them fled to Rhegium, and setting out from there they took possession of a city in the land of Oenotria which is now called Hyele; they founded this city after learning from a man of Poseidonia that the Pythia's oracle had meant Cyrnus the hero, not the island, when she told them to found a colony there. So it went for the Phocaea in Ionia. The people of Teos did much the same as these.

Once Harpagus had brought down their wall with a mound, they went aboard their vessels, every one of them, and sailed off toward Thrace. There they built the city of Abdera, a site that Timesius of Clazomenae had settled earlier without success — he was chased off by the Thracians, though nowadays the Teians of Abdera honor him as a hero. Of all the Ionians, these people alone refused to accept slavery and left

their homelands; the rest of the Ionians, except the Milesians, met Harpagus in battle just as those who left had done, and each fought bravely for his own city, but being defeated and captured they remained each in their own place and carried out what was commanded of them. The Milesians, as I have said before, having made a treaty with Cyrus himself, kept quiet. Thus for a second time

Ionia had been enslaved. When Harpagus had subdued the Ionians on the mainland, the Ionians who held the islands, in fear of this, gave themselves up to Cyrus. Now that the Ionians had been ill-treated but were nonetheless gathering at the Panionium, I am told that Bias, a man of Priene, put forward an opinion most useful to the Ionians, one which, had they followed it, would have allowed them to be the most prosperous of the Greeks: he urged that the Ionians should set out together with a common fleet

and sail to Sardinia, where they would found one single city for every Ionian, and by doing so escape their servitude and flourish, since they would be settling the largest of all islands and ruling over the rest; whereas if they remained in Ionia, he said, he could see no lasting freedom in store for them. That was the advice Bias of Priene gave, though only after the Ionians had already met ruin; a sound proposal, though, had likewise been offered before Ionia's fall, by Thales, a man from

Miletus, whose family was originally Phoenician; he urged that the Ionians should have a single council chamber, and that it should be at Teos, since Teos is the center of Ionia, and that the other cities, while still inhabited, should be regarded no differently than if they were mere districts of it. These, then, were the opinions these men put forward. Harpagus, having subdued Ionia, made an expedition against the Carians, the Caunians, and the Lycians,

bringing Ionians and Aeolians along with him. Among these peoples, the Carians had crossed over to the mainland from the islands. Long ago, as subjects of Minos, going by the name Leleges, they occupied the islands and paid no tribute at all, as far as I can trace the matter back by report; yet whenever Minos had need of them, they crewed his ships. Because Minos

had subdued much land and was successful in war, the Carian people were by far the most renowned of all peoples at that time. And three inventions came from them, which the Greeks adopted: it was the Carians who first taught the fastening of crests onto helmets and the putting of devices onto shields, and they were the first

to make handgrips for shields; before this, all who were accustomed to use shields carried them without handgrips, guiding them by means of leather straps slung around the neck and left shoulder. Long after the Carians, the Dorians and Ionians were driven out from the islands, and thus came to the mainland. Concerning the Carians, this is the account the Cretans

claim this happened; yet the Carians themselves tell a different story, holding that they are native to the mainland and have always gone by the very name they carry today. As proof they point to an old temple of Carian Zeus at Mylasa, where the Mysians and Lydians also take part, as being kin to the Carians, since, they say, Lydus and Mysus were brothers

with Car. So these groups share in the temple, but any people who, though foreign in origin, came to speak the Carian tongue, have no part in it. As for the Caunians, to my mind they are native to the land, though they themselves claim descent from Crete. Their language has drawn close to Carian — or Carian has drawn close to theirs (I cannot say for certain which); but their customs stand apart

from those of other peoples, and from the Carians as well. For among them it is considered most admirable to gather in drinking companies according to age and friendship, men, women, and children together. And when foreign cults had been established among them, afterward, when they came to disapprove of these and resolved to keep only their ancestral gods, all the Caunians of military age put on their armor and, striking the air with their spears, drove out the foreign gods all the way to the borders

of Calynda joined them and claimed they were driving out the foreign gods. Such are the customs these people follow. As for the Lycians, they came originally out of Crete (in those early days non-Greeks held the whole of Crete). A dispute arose in Crete over the throne between Europa's two sons, Sarpedon and Minos; Minos won out in the struggle and forced Sarpedon and his followers into exile

and the exiles made their way to the land of Milyas in Asia. The country the Lycians inhabit today was in old times Milyas, and the Milyans were then called Solymi. As long as Sarpedon ruled them, they went by the name they had brought with them — the name their neighbors still use for the Lycians today — Termilae. But when Lycus

son of Pandion, himself driven out of Athens by his brother Aegeus, came to the Termilae and joined Sarpedon, then in time they came to be called Lycians after Lycus. Their customs are partly Cretan, partly Carian. But they have one practice all their own, found among no other people in the world: they name themselves after their mothers, not their

fathers. Ask a Lycian who he is, and he will recite his descent on his mother's side, reckoning back through his mother's mothers. If a citizen woman lives with a slave, the children are considered legitimate; but if a citizen man — even the foremost man among them — takes a foreign wife or concubine, the children have no standing. The Carians, then, were enslaved

by Harpagus without a single notable deed to their credit — neither the Carians themselves nor any of the Greeks who live in that country. Among these are the Cnidians, colonists from Sparta. Their territory faces the sea and is called Triopium; it begins at the Bybassian peninsula, and all of Cnidian land except a small strip is surrounded by water (on

the north the Ceramic Gulf bounds it, on the south the sea off Syme and Rhodes). That small strip, about five stades across, the Cnidians set about digging through while Harpagus was subduing Ionia, wanting to turn their country into an island. The whole of it would then have lain inside; for where Cnidian territory ends at the mainland

is exactly the isthmus they were cutting. The Cnidians were working with a large force, but the workmen seemed to be getting injured more often, and more uncannily, than was natural — on other parts of the body but especially around the eyes as the rock splintered — so they sent envoys to Delphi to ask what was opposing them. The Pythia, as the Cnidians themselves tell it, gave them this answer

in iambic trimeter: Do not fortify the isthmus, do not dig; Zeus would have made an island, had he wished. When the Pythia delivered this, the Cnidians stopped their digging, and when Harpagus arrived with his army they surrendered themselves without a fight. There were also the Pedasians, who lived inland above Halicarnassus. Whenever anything unwelcome was about to happen to them or to their

neighbors, the priestess of Athena grew a long beard. This happened to them three times. These were the only people around Caria who held out against Harpagus for any length of time, and they gave him the most trouble, fortifying a mountain called Lide. In time the Pedasians were taken. As for the Lycians, when Harpagus marched his army into the plain of Xanthus, they came out to fight, few against many,

and performed feats of valor; but when they were beaten and penned into their city, they gathered their wives, children, property, and household slaves into the acropolis and set the whole acropolis on fire. Having done that, and having sworn terrible oaths, the men of Xanthus went out and died fighting, every one of them. Of the people who call themselves Xanthian Lycians today, most — all but

eighty households — are newcomers; those eighty households happened to be away from home at the time and so survived. That is how Harpagus took Xanthus, and he took Caunus in much the same way, for the Caunians for the most part copied the example of the Lycians. So Harpagus was laying waste to lower Asia, while Cyrus himself dealt with the upper country, subduing every nation

subduing it, sparing nothing. Most of what he did in this I will leave aside; but I will mention what cost him the greatest trouble and deserves telling above all. Once Cyrus had brought the whole mainland under his hand, he turned against the Assyrians. Assyria does have a number of other large towns, but the one most renowned and mightiest, the place where the royal residence stood once Nineveh had fallen —

the royal residence, was Babylon — a city of roughly this description. It stands on a broad plain, a square in shape, each side one hundred and twenty stades in length, so that the full circuit around the city comes to four hundred and eighty stades altogether. Such was the extent of the Babylonian city, and it was adorned unlike any other town known to us. First there was a ditch,

deep and wide and full of water, runs around it; then comes a wall fifty royal cubits thick and two hundred cubits high — the royal cubit being three fingers longer than the common cubit. I should explain, in addition, where the earth from the moat was used and how the wall

had been completed. While digging out the ditch, they shaped bricks from the soil brought up out of the trench, and once enough bricks had been fired in kilns, they set to building: using hot bitumen for mortar and laying woven reed mats between every thirtieth course, they first raised the banks of the trench, then the wall itself, in that same manner. Along the top of the wall, on

its edges, they built single-room chambers facing one another, leaving between the chambers room enough to drive a four-horse chariot around. Set in the circuit of the wall are a hundred gates, all of bronze, with bronze posts and lintels likewise. There is another city eight days' journey from Babylon; its name is Is. There is a river there, not a large one — the river too is called Is —

and its current empties into the river Euphrates. This river Is, together with its waters, also throws up a great many clumps of bitumen, and it was from there that the bitumen used on Babylon's wall was fetched. In this fashion, then, Babylon had been fortified. The city falls into two sections, split down the center by a river called the Euphrates, which runs

out of Armenia, a great, deep, swift river, and it empties into the Erythraean Sea. Each of the two walls has its arms carried down to the river, and from there a breastwork of baked brick runs bending along either bank of the river. The city itself, full of houses three and four stories high, is cut through with straight streets,

both the others and the cross-streets that run down to the river. At each of these streets there were wicket-gates in the breastwork along the river, as many in number as the lanes, and these too were of bronze, and they too opened onto the river itself. This outer wall is the city's armor, but a second wall runs around inside it,

not much weaker than the other wall, though narrower. In the middle of each of the two districts of the city a stronghold was built: in one, the royal palace within a great strong enclosure; in the other, the sanctuary of Zeus Belus with its bronze gates, still standing in my time, a square two stades on every side. In the middle of the sanctuary is built a solid tower,

a stade in length and breadth, and on that tower stands another tower, and yet another upon that, up to eight towers in all. The way up runs in a spiral outside, around all the towers. About halfway up the ascent there is a landing with seats for resting, where those making the climb sit down and take a rest. In

at the top of the final tower stands a great shrine, and inside it rests a large couch, handsomely made up, with a golden table set beside it. No statue stands there at all, nor does any person spend the night inside except for a single native woman, whichever one the god selects out of all of them — or so the Chaldaeans claim, they being priests of this god. These

same men also claim — though I find it hard to credit — that the god himself comes into the shrine and takes his rest on the couch, exactly as happens, they say, at Egyptian Thebes, according to the Egyptians: there too a woman sleeps in the shrine of the Theban Zeus, and in both cases the women are said to have no

intercourse with any man. The same is true of the prophetess of the god at Patara in Lycia, when there is one — for the oracle is not always active there — but when there is one, she is shut in with the god at night inside the temple. In the sanctuary at Babylon there is also another temple below, where there is a great seated image of Zeus, made of gold, and beside it

a great golden table; the pedestal and the throne are also gold. As the Chaldaeans told it, these things were made from eight hundred talents of gold. Outside the temple is a golden altar, and there is also another great altar, on which the full-grown sheep are sacrificed; for on the golden altar only unweaned animals may be offered, and on

of the greater altar, and every year the Chaldeans burn a thousand talents of frankincense on it, at the time when they hold the festival for this god. In that sacred precinct there was still standing, at that time, a solid gold statue twelve cubits high. I myself did not see it; I report what is said by the Chaldeans. Darius son of

Hystaspes plotted against this statue but did not dare to take it, though Xerxes son of Darius did take it, and killed the priest who forbade him to move the statue. This is how that temple is adorned, and there are also many private dedications. Of this Babylon there were, of course, many other kings as well, whom I will mention in my account of Assyrian affairs, kings who added to the walls

and the temples, and among them also two women. The first to rule, who lived five generations before the later one, was named Semiramis; she it was who left behind the embankments across the plain, a sight worth seeing—before that the river used to flood the whole plain. The second of these queens, named Nitocris, was even

more shrewd than the woman who had ruled before her. She left behind, for one thing, the monuments I shall describe, and for another, seeing that the empire of the Medes was great and restless, and that among other cities they had already taken Nineveh, she took every precaution she could. First, the Euphrates river, which used to flow straight and runs through the middle of the city, this

she made so crooked by digging channels above the city that it now reaches, in its course, one of the villages in Assyria three times over; the village which the Euphrates reaches is called Arderikka. And even now those who travel from this sea to Babylon, sailing down the Euphrates, arrive at this same village three times

and after three days. This is one thing she did; and she also built up an embankment along each bank of the river, remarkable for its size and height. Far above Babylon she dug out a basin for a lake, running a short distance out from the river, digging it always to the depth of the water table, and making its circumference twenty and

four hundred stadia. The earth dug out from this excavation she used, heaping it up along the banks of the river. When it had been dug out, she brought stones and built a coping around it all the way round. She did both of these things—made the river crooked and the whole excavation a marsh—so that the river would be slower as it broke around many bends, and so that the routes

to Babylon would be crooked, and after these winding routes there would follow a long circuit around the lake. She carried out this work on that side of the country where the entrances lay and the shortest routes from Media, so that the Medes, by mingling with her people, might not learn about her affairs. These defenses she built up from the depths of the ground, and she also added the following work to them. Since the city

was in two sections, with the river running between them, under the earlier kings, whenever anyone wished to cross from one section to the other, he had to cross by boat, which was, I suppose, a nuisance. But she foresaw this as well. For when she dug the basin for the lake, she left behind another monument from this same work: she had very long stones cut, and

once the stones lay ready and the basin had been dug out, she turned the whole current of the river aside into the hollow she had excavated; while that filled, the old riverbed dried up in the meantime, and during that time she rebuilt the river's banks along the city with fired brick, along with the stairways running down from the small gates to the river, matching

same plan as the wall, and then, roughly in the middle of the city, with the stones she had quarried, she built a bridge, binding the stones together with iron and lead. Across it she used to lay, whenever day came, squared timbers, on which the Babylonians made their crossing; but at night these timbers were removed, for this reason, so that people would not go back and forth in the

night stealing from one another. When the excavated basin had become a full lake fed by the river, and the work on the bridge had been finished, she brought the Euphrates back from the lake into its old channel, and so the marsh that had been dug turned out, as she had planned, to be useful, and the citizens had a bridge built for them. This same queen also devised

the following kind of trick: above the busiest of the city's gates she had a tomb built for herself, raised high above the gates themselves, and she had inscribed on the tomb letters saying this: 'If any king of Babylon after me is short of money, let him open this tomb and take as much money as he wishes; but let him not open it otherwise, unless he is in want—it will not be for the better.' This

tomb remained undisturbed until the kingship passed to Darius. To Darius it seemed a terrible thing to make no use of these gates, and, though money lay there and the inscription itself invited him, not to take it; he made no use of these gates for this reason, that the corpse would be over his head as he drove through. When he opened the tomb, he found

not money, but the body itself, together with an inscription reading: 'Had you not been greedy for wealth and shameless in your grasping, you would never have broken open the tombs of the dead.' Such, it is told, was the character of this queen. Now it was against the son of this very woman that Cyrus led his army — a son bearing his own father's name, Labynetus, along with the rule over the Assyrians.

When the Great King takes the field, he does so amply supplied from home with food and livestock, and along with these he carries water drawn from the river Choaspes, the stream that runs by Susa — the king drinks from no river but that one. This Choaspes water, once boiled, is hauled behind him by a great number of four-wheeled mule wagons bearing it in silver jars, following wherever

he happens to march at any time. Now when Cyrus, marching against Babylon, came to the river Gyndes—whose sources are in the Matienian mountains, and which flows through the country of the Dardanians and empties into another river, the Tigris, which in turn flows past the city of Opis and empties into the Red Sea—when Cyrus tried to cross this river Gyndes, since it was navigable by boats, then

one of the sacred white horses, in his wantonness, plunged into the river and tried to cross it, but the river swept him under and carried him off. Cyrus was furious with the river for this act of insolence, and threatened to make it so weak that in the future even women would cross it easily without wetting their knees. After this

threat, he set aside his campaign against Babylon and divided his army in two; having divided it, he marked out with cords and laid out a hundred and eighty straight channels running in every direction from each bank of the Gyndes, and having arranged his army along them he ordered them to dig. Since a great multitude was at work, the task was completed, yet even so they spent that entire summer working there. When

he had exacted his revenge on the river Gyndes by cutting it up into three hundred and sixty channels, and with the second spring now coming on, he then marched on Babylon. The Babylonians came out and took up positions, awaiting him. When his advance brought him near the city, the Babylonians engaged him in battle, but, beaten in the encounter, they were driven back and penned inside the town. Since they had long since realized that Cyrus was not

content to stay still, but saw him attacking every nation alike, they had stored up provisions for very many years. So they took no account whatsoever of the siege, while Cyrus was caught in perplexity, since a great deal of time was passing and his affairs were making no further progress. Whether someone else suggested it to him in his perplexity, or he himself understood what he had to do, he did the following. He stationed

his whole army at the point where the river enters the city, and behind the city he stationed others, at the point where the river flows out of it, and he told his troops that as soon as they saw the channel become passable, they should enter the city there. Having arranged his forces and given these instructions, he himself marched off with the useless part of his army.

Once he reached the lake, Cyrus carried out the very works the Babylonian queen had made along the river and around the lake: he cut a channel and led the river into the lake, at that time a marsh, so that the old bed became fordable as the water level fell. With this accomplished, the Persians stationed there for just this purpose,

at that very point, along the channel of the Euphrates, now that it had dropped to about the middle of a man's thigh, entered Babylon by this route. Now if the Babylonians had learned beforehand, or had found out, what Cyrus was doing, they would have let the Persians enter and then destroyed them most miserably; for by shutting all the little gates leading to the river and

climbing up onto the embankments raised along the riverbanks by the little gates, would have trapped the enemy as though in a net. As matters turned out, though, the Persians caught them off guard entirely. And owing to the sheer size of the city, so those who dwell there report, once the outer districts had already fallen, the Babylonians living at the center had no idea

learn that the city had been taken, but because they happened to be holding a festival at that very time, they went on dancing and enjoying themselves until they learned the full truth. And that is how Babylon was captured on that first occasion. As for the resources of the Babylonians, I will show how great they are by many other proofs, and also by this one: for the Great King himself and his army, the whole land under his rule is divided up for their support, apart from the tribute.

Now since there are twelve months in the year, the land of Babylon feeds him for four of those months, and the rest of Asia for the other eight. So the Assyrian land is a third as strong, in resources, as the whole of the rest of Asia. And the governorship of this land, which the Persians call a satrapy, is by far the strongest of all the governorships, seeing that Tritantaechmes son of Artabazus, who held this province from the King, received every single day a full artaba of silver. Now the artaba is a Persian measure, and holds three Attic choenixes more than an Attic medimnos. He also kept horses of his own, apart from the war-horses,

eight hundred stallions and sixteen thousand mares, since each stallion serviced twenty mares. And so vast a pack of Indian hounds was maintained that four large villages on the plain, freed from every other tax, were charged solely with feeding the dogs. Such were the resources available to the governor of Babylon. Now Assyria receives little rainfall, and it is that scant rain which feeds the grain's root;

but it is by being irrigated from the river that the crop is brought to fullness and the grain comes to maturity — not as in Egypt, where the river itself rises over the fields, but here it is watered by hand and by swing-beam devices. For the whole land of Babylon, like that of Egypt, is cut through by canals, and the largest of these canals

is navigable by ships; it runs toward the winter sunrise, and connects with another river, from the Euphrates to the Tigris, on whose banks the city of Nineveh once stood. This is, of all the lands we know, by far the best for producing the fruit of Demeter — indeed it does not even attempt to bear other trees at all, neither fig, nor vine, nor olive — but for producing the fruit

of Demeter it is so good that it regularly yields two hundredfold, and when it bears at its very best, it yields three hundredfold. There the blades of the wheat and barley plants grow easily four fingers broad. As for how tall a plant millet and sesame grow to, though I know well, I will not record it, being well aware that

to those who have not visited the land of Babylon, even what has already been said about its crops has met with a great deal of disbelief. They use no oil at all except what they make from sesame. They have date palms growing throughout the whole plain, most of them fruit-bearing, from which they make food, wine, and honey; they tend these

in the same way as figs, and in particular, as regards the palms the Greeks call male, they tie the fruit of these onto the fruit-bearing palms, so that the gall-insect may enter the fruit and ripen it, and so that the fruit of the palm does not fall off; for the male palms carry the gall-insect in their fruit just as wild figs do. But the greatest wonder of all among the things there, next to

concerning the city, I will now turn to describe: their boats, those that come down the river to Babylon, are round in shape and made entirely of hide. Cutting willow ribs among the Armenians settled farther upstream than the Assyrians, they stretch skins over the frame as an outer covering, forming something like a floor, without shaping a distinct stern or bow, but making the whole thing round like a shield; then, after loading it up,

the whole boat with straw, they let it drift down the river, loaded with cargo — most often with palm-wood jars full of wine. It is steered by two paddles and two men standing upright, one pulling his paddle inward and the other pushing his outward. These boats are made both very large and smaller; the largest of them

they set the whole boat loose to drift downriver, filled with cargo — mostly jars of palm wine brought down for sale. Two steering oars guide it, worked by two men standing upright, one pulling his oar inward while the other pushes his outward. These boats are made in sizes both very large and smaller; the biggest of them

can hold a cargo of five thousand talents. Each boat carries a live donkey aboard, and the larger ones carry several. So once they have sailed down and reached Babylon and sold off their cargo, they put the boat's ribs and all its straw up for sale, load the hides onto the donkeys, and drive back to the Armenians, since heading upriver is simply not

possible in any way, given how swift the current runs — which is exactly why the boats are built from hides rather than timber. Once they get back to Armenian country, driving their donkeys ahead of them, they build fresh boats the same way. Such, then, is the design of their boats. As for clothing, this is what they wear: a linen tunic that reaches down to the feet, and over

for anyone to carry a staff without an emblem. Such then is their arrangement as regards the body. As for their customs, they are established as follows. The wisest of them, in my judgment, is this one — which I understand the Eneti of Illyria also practice: in each village, once a year, they used to do the following. Whenever the girls reached marriageable age, they would gather all of them together and bring them to one place,

assembling them in a group; and around them stood a crowd of men, and a herald would stand each girl up in turn and put her up for sale — first the most beautiful of all of them; then, once she had been sold for a large sum of gold, he would announce another, the one who was next most beautiful, and they would be sold for marriage. As many of the wealthy Babylonians as were eligible for marriage would outbid one another

for the most beautiful girls; but as many as were of the common people and eligible for marriage had no need of good looks, since these men would take money along with plainer girls. For once the herald had gone through selling off the most beautiful of the girls, he would then stand up the ugliest one, or one who was crippled, if there were any, and put her up for sale as well, offering her to whoever was willing to take the least amount of gold and live with her, until

she went to whoever undertook to accept the least. And the gold for this came from the beautiful girls, so that in this way the good-looking girls provided dowries for the ugly and the crippled ones. But a man was not permitted to give his own daughter to whomever he wished, nor could the purchaser take the girl away without a guarantor; instead the buyer had to provide guarantors that he would indeed live with her, and only then take her away. And if the two did not get along, the law required

that the money be given back. It was also permitted for anyone who wished, coming from another village, to buy a wife in this way. Now this was the finest of their customs, but it does not continue to exist today; instead they have recently devised something else, so as to prevent the men from mistreating the women or taking them off to another city — for since they were conquered and reduced to hardship and their households ruined, everyone among the common people who is short of livelihood

now prostitutes his female children. Second in wisdom is this other custom established among them: they carry the sick out into the marketplace, since they have no physicians at all. People passing by approach the sick man and offer advice about his illness, if they themselves have ever suffered anything like what the sick man has, or have seen another person suffer it; approaching him in this way, they advise him and urge upon him whatever remedies they themselves used

sell their daughters into prostitution. A second custom they hold in high regard is this: they carry the sick out into the marketplace, since they have no use for physicians. Passersby then approach the sick person and offer advice about the illness, whether from having suffered something similar themselves or from having watched another go through it; they come forward with such counsel, urging whatever course they themselves followed

both of them bathe, for they will touch no vessel before they have bathed. The Arabians do this same thing as well. But the most shameful of the customs among the Babylonians is this one: every native woman is required, once in her life, to sit in the sanctuary of Aphrodite and have intercourse with a strange man. Many women, disdaining to mingle with the others because they are proud of their wealth, ride out to the sanctuary in covered carriages drawn by teams of horses

and stand there; a large retinue of attendants follows behind them. But most of the women do as follows: they sit in the precinct of Aphrodite wearing a wreath of cord around their heads — many women — for some are arriving while others are leaving. Rope-stretched passageways run in every direction through the midst of the women, along which the strangers pass and make their choice; and once a woman has taken her seat there,

she may not return home until one of the strangers has thrown silver into her lap and had intercourse with her outside the sanctuary. And as he throws the money he must say these words: "I call upon the goddess Mylitta on your behalf." The Assyrians call Aphrodite Mylitta. The amount of the silver may be whatever it happens to be, for she will certainly not refuse it — it is not lawful for her to do so, since this silver becomes sacred

once thrown. She follows the first man who throws it and rejects no one. But once she has had intercourse, having thus discharged her obligation to the goddess, she returns home, and from that point on you could not give her anything so large as to win her again. Now as many of the women as are endowed with good looks and stature are released quickly, but as many as are unshapely among them wait a long time,

unable to...

to fulfill the custom - for some remain apart for three or four years. There is a similar custom in parts of Cyprus as well. These, then, are the customs established among the Babylonians. There are also three of their tribes who eat nothing but fish, which they catch and dry in the sun, and then do as follows: they throw them into a mortar, pound them fine with pestles, and strain the pulp

through a linen cloth, and whoever wishes then has it as dough to knead, or bakes it in the manner of bread. Now when Cyrus had subdued this nation as well, he conceived a desire to bring the Massagetae under his rule. This people is said to be great and warlike, dwelling toward the east and the rising sun, beyond the river Araxes, opposite

the Issedones. Some say that this nation, too, is Scythian. The Araxes is said to be both larger and smaller than the Ister; in it there are said to be many islands about the size of Lesbos, and on them men who dig up all sorts of roots in summer for food, and who store away fruits found on trees, gathered in season, for provisions,

and eat these in winter. They have also discovered other trees bearing a certain kind of fruit, which, whenever the people gather together in companies and light a fire, they sit around in a circle and throw onto the fire; and as they smell the fruit burning as it is thrown on, they become intoxicated by the fumes just as the Greeks do by wine, and the more fruit is thrown on, the more intoxicated they become, until

get up and dance, breaking into song. Such, it is said, is how they live. As for the Araxes, its waters flow out of Matienian territory, the very source from which the Gyndes flows too — the same river Cyrus once split apart into three hundred sixty separate channels — and it pours out through forty mouths, all but one of which drain into marshland and shallow pools; in these

men are said to dwell who eat raw fish and are accustomed to wear the skins of seals as clothing. The one remaining mouth of the Araxes flows through open country into the Caspian Sea. The Caspian Sea stands by itself, not mingling with the other sea. For the sea the Greeks sail upon, the sea beyond the Pillars called Atlantic, and the Red Sea,

all happen to be one and the same sea. But the Caspian is a separate sea by itself, being, in length, a fifteen days' voyage for a ship under oars, and in width, at its widest point, eight days' voyage. Along the western side of this sea stretches the Caucasus, the largest of all mountain ranges in extent and the highest in height. Many and various peoples of men it holds

keeps to itself, the Caucasus, most of its people surviving entirely off the wild woods. Among them, trees are said to bear leaves of a particular kind that, when crushed and mixed with water, let people paint animal figures on their garments; these figures never wash away but age right along with the rest of the wool as if woven in from the beginning. Sexual union among these people, it is said, happens openly, just

as with sheep and cattle. So on the western side, this sea called the Caspian is bounded by the Caucasus, but on the eastern side, toward the rising sun, an endless plain stretches out as far as the eye can see. Of this great plain the Massagetae hold no small share, and it was against them that Cyrus had set his heart on making war. For many

there were also great things driving him forward and spurring him on: first, his lineage, the sense that he was more than merely human; second, the run of success he had enjoyed in war, for whatever nation Cyrus set his mind on attacking had no way of escaping him. At that time the Massagetae were ruled by a woman, her husband having died; Tomyris was her name. Cyrus sent envoys to court her,

claiming he wanted her as his wife. Tomyris, however, saw that it was not herself he sought but the throne of the Massagetae, and refused to let him approach. After that, once his trickery failed to work, Cyrus marched openly to the Araxes and launched his campaign against the Massagetae in plain sight, joining bridges across the river so his army could cross, and raising towers on boats

that were used to ferry across the river. While he was occupied with this labor, Tomyris sent a herald and said the following: "King of the Medes, stop pressing so hard at what you are pressing at, for you cannot know whether this, once completed, will turn out well for you. Stop, and be king over your own people, and endure watching us rule over those we rule. Since you will not be willing to take this advice,

but prefer anything to being at peace - well then, if you are so eager to test yourself against the Massagetae, abandon the labor you now have in bridging the river, and withdraw three days' journey from the river while we do the same, and then cross into our land. Or if you would rather receive us into yours, then you do the same." Hearing this, Cyrus called together the leading

men of Persia, and gathering them, laid the matter before them, asking their advice on which course to take. Their opinions all fell in agreement, urging that Tomyris and her army be received into the country. But Croesus the Lydian, who was present, disagreed with this opinion and declared one contrary to the one proposed, speaking as follows: "O king, I told you before

that since Zeus has given me to you, I would, to the best of my power, turn aside whatever misfortune I saw threatening your house; and my own sufferings, bitter as they were, have become lessons for me. If you believe yourself immortal, and that you command an army of immortals as well, there would be no point in my declaring my opinion to you; but if you recognize that you are a man, and that you rule over other men like yourself,

then learn this first: that human affairs turn in a circle, and its turning does not allow the same men always to prosper. Now then, I hold an opinion about the matter before us opposite to theirs. For if we agree to receive the enemy into our country, this is the danger it carries: if you are defeated, you lose your whole empire besides. For it is clear that if they win,

the Massagetae will not turn and run, but will push straight into your own territory. And if you win, the victory falls short of what it would be if you crossed into their land, defeated the Massagetae there, and then chased them down as they fled. Against that plan I set this counter: once you have beaten those who oppose you, you can drive straight ahead into Tomyris's realm. Beyond all this, it would be shameful, something no one could tolerate, for Cyrus son of Cambyses to give way to a woman and pull back

from the land. My advice now is that we cross over and advance as far as they retreat, and then, doing as follows, try to get the better of them. For as I understand it, the Massagetae have no experience of Persian luxuries and no acquaintance with fine and great things. For men such as these, then, we should slaughter freely a great number of our flocks, prepare them, and set out in our camp a banquet, along with bowls

generous portions of strong, undiluted wine, along with food of every sort; once this is done, we should leave the weakest men of the army behind and have the rest fall back to the river again. If my judgment does not fail me, when they catch sight of such abundance they will turn toward it, and from there we will have our proof of a great achievement." These were the plans laid against one another; Cyrus, however, abandoned his own first idea and instead adopted

that of Croesus, and announced to Tomyris that she should withdraw, since he himself would cross over to her side. She then withdrew, just as she had first promised; but Cyrus placed Croesus in the hands of his own son Cambyses, to whom he was giving the kingship, charging him earnestly to honor Croesus and treat him well if the crossing against the Massagetae should not turn out well, and having given these instructions and sent

these men back toward Persia while he himself, together with his army, crossed the river. Once he had made it across the Araxes, night fell, and while asleep in Massagetae territory he had a vision of this kind: in his sleep Cyrus seemed to see Hystaspes' eldest son bearing wings on his shoulders, one wing casting its shadow over Asia and the other over Europe.

Hystaspes son of Arsames, an Achaemenid, had as his eldest child Darius, who was roughly twenty years old at that time and had stayed behind in Persia, since he was not yet old enough for military service. When Cyrus woke up, he turned the vision over in his mind. Because it struck him as a weighty vision, he summoned Hystaspes, and drawing him apart

alone, said: "Hystaspes, your son has been caught plotting against me and against my rule. And I will tell you how I know this for certain: the gods watch over me and reveal to me in advance all that is coming upon me. Now, as I slept last night, I saw the eldest of your sons with wings upon his shoulders, and with one wing he overshadowed Asia, and with the other

Europe. There is, then, no way, from this vision, that he is not plotting against me. Now you must go back to Persia as quickly as possible, and see to it that when I come there after subduing this people, you bring your son before me for questioning." Cyrus said this believing that Darius was plotting against him; but the divine power was showing him in advance that he himself

was destined to die there in that land, and that his kingship would pass around to Darius. Hystaspes then answered him as follows: "O king, may there never be born a Persian man who would plot against you; and if there is such a one, may he perish as swiftly as possible - you who have made the Persians free instead of slaves, and rulers of all instead of being ruled by others. But if any vision tells you

"that my son is plotting new schemes against you, I hand him over to you to deal with him however you wish." Hystaspes, having answered in this way and crossed the Araxes, went off to Persia to keep watch over Darius, Cyrus's son, on Cyrus's behalf, while Cyrus, advancing a day's journey from the Araxes, did as Croesus had advised. After this, when Cyrus and the uncontaminated part

of the Persian army had withdrawn back to the Araxes, leaving behind the worthless part, a third of the Massagetae army came up and slaughtered those of Cyrus's troops who had been left, though they defended themselves, and when they saw the feast laid out, once they had overpowered their opponents, they lay down and feasted, and once filled with food and wine, they fell asleep. Then the Persians came upon them, killed many of them, and took many more still alive as captives, including

others, and also the son of Queen Tomyris, who was the general of the Massagetae, whose name was Spargapises. When she learned what had happened to the army and to her son, she sent a herald to Cyrus and said this: "Cyrus, insatiable for blood, do not be puffed up over this deed that has happened, if it was the vine's fruit that did it—that fruit on which you fill yourselves and rave so wildly that as the wine goes down

into your body, evil words float up on top of it—that with such a drug you deceitfully overcame my son, and not by force in fair battle. Now then, take up my advice, given in good faith: give me back my son and leave this land unpunished, even though you have insolently treated a third of the army of the Massagetae. But if you will not do this, I swear to you by the sun, the lord of the Massagetae,

that I will glut you with blood, insatiable as you are." Cyrus paid no heed at all to these words when they were reported to him. But Spargapises, the son of Queen Tomyris, once the wine had released him and he learned what trouble he was in, begged Cyrus to be freed from his bonds, and got his wish; but the moment he was released and his hands were free, he did away with himself. And so this man

met his end this way. Tomyris, once Cyrus refused to heed her warning, mustered her entire force and engaged him in battle. Of all the wars ever fought between non-Greek peoples, this one, I judge, was the most savage, and this is how I understand it to have unfolded. First, they say, the two sides stood at a distance and exchanged arrow-fire; then, once their arrows ran out, they crashed together and fought hand to hand with

spears and short blades, grappling in close combat. They remained locked together fighting for a great while, and neither army would give ground. At last the Massagetae came out on top; most of the Persian force was wiped out right there, and Cyrus himself lost his life, having ruled altogether for twenty-nine years. Tomyris then filled a wineskin with human blood and hunted through the fallen Persians

for the body of Cyrus; once she located it, she pushed his severed head into the skin, and mocking the corpse she spoke these words: "Even though I remain alive and beat you in battle, you ruined me by seizing my son through deceit; now, exactly as I warned you, I will drench you in blood." Such are the many differing reports concerning how Cyrus met his death,

this is the one that seems to me most credible. The Massagetae wear clothing similar to the Scythians and follow a similar way of life. They fight both on horseback and on foot—for they take part in both—and they are archers and spearmen, and it is their custom to carry battle-axes. They use gold and bronze for everything: for all their spearheads, arrowheads, and battle-axes they use bronze throughout, and for whatever

goes around the head, belts, and shoulder-straps, they adorn themselves with gold. Likewise for their horses, they put bronze breastplates around the chest, while the bits and bridles and cheek-pieces they fit with gold. They use neither iron nor silver at all, for indeed neither is found in their country, but gold and bronze are boundless there. As for customs, they observe

the following. Each man marries a wife, but they hold the wives in common: for what the Greeks say the Scythians do is not done by the Scythians but by the Massagetae. When a Massagetan man desires a woman, he hangs his quiver in front of her wagon and lies with her without shame. There is no other limit set for them on age; but when a man becomes very old, all his relatives gather together and sacrifice

him, together with other animals slaughtered alongside him, and once they have boiled the flesh they hold a feast on it. This they regard as the happiest possible fate; but whoever dies of illness they refuse to eat, burying him in the earth instead, treating it as a misfortune that he never reached the point of being offered up. They plant no crops at all, living instead off their flocks and off fish, which come to them in great supply from the Araxes river; and milk forms a staple of their diet.

The sun is the only god they worship, and to it they offer horses in sacrifice. The reasoning behind this sacrifice is this: to the swiftest of all the gods they allot the swiftest of all mortal things.

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