Croesus

whichever has the most is the best.

So, Croesus, man is entirely chance.

So Adrastus lived in Croesus ' house.

Accordingly, he sent around to all those under his sway and to Croesus, the king of Lydia, to the king of Cappadocia;

Croesus, the king of Lydia, is said to be coming at the head of 10,000 horsemen and more than 40,000 peltasts and bowmen.

And on the following day the Assyrian king and Croesus and the other commanders let their troops rest within the entrenchments;

And indeed you have heard the story of Croesus the Lydian, who, thinking he obeyed the god above all, and having crossed the river Halys, lost his empire, and himself was bound in fetters and was nearly burned alive.

But when I bethought myself that Apollo advised Croesus, the king of the Lydians, when a certain thing had happened, to go willingly into exile, leaving his kingdom, and to be in no way ashamed on this account, even if he should seem base to men, prophesying somewhat thus:

for Apollo would not have urged and counselled the one of them, namely flight, and forbidden the other outright, namely remaining — and that too in prophesying to a man who was most diligent in matters divine, who offered the most sacrifices and had sent the greatest dedications of all who ever made offerings at Delphi.

For when once the happy life has been taken up, it remains as long as wisdom herself, the producer of the happy life, and does not await the last span of life — that which Herodotus writes was the precept given by Solon to Croesus.

For as the light of a lamp is darkened and overcast by the light of the sun, and as a drop of honey is lost in the magnitude of the Aegean sea, and as the addition of a farthing to the riches of Croesus, or one step in the road which leads from here to India, so, when the end of goods is that which the Stoics say, all that valuation of bodily things must needs be darkened and overwhelmed and peris …

for if he had ever been happy, he would have carried his happy life through even to that pyre built by Cyrus.

How many better men, nevertheless, have you left in the lower world!

For in the reign of Cyrus and Darius was Zechariah, at which time Thales, prince of natural philosophers, gave Croesus, when he questioned him, no certain answer about divinity, being troubled, no doubt, by the voices of the prophets.

But with what cunning they shape the ambiguities of their oracles to fit the events, the cases of Croesus, the cases of Pyrrhus, know.

And Eudemus, in his Astrological Histories, says that Thales foretold the eclipse of the sun which occurred at the time when the Medes and the Lydians joined battle with one another, in the reign of Cyaxares, the father of Astyages, over the Medes, and of Alyattes, the father of Croesus, over the Lydians.

"O Croesus, every man is a creature of calamity.

And when he sees this, the man who has wealth and with his wealth the repute of hostility to democracy, then in the words of the oracle delivered to Croesus, By the pebble-strewn strand of the Hermos Swift is his flight, he stays not nor blushes to show the white feather.

They relate that he was a shepherd in the service of the ruler at that time of Lydia, and that after a great deluge of rain and an earthquake the ground opened and a chasm appeared in the place where he was pasturing;

and becoming aware of this, he immediately managed things so that he became one of the messengers who went up to the king, and on coming there he seduced the king’s wife and with her aid set upon the king and slew him and possessed his kingdom.

So too Croesus is said to have laid aside his anger against the slayer of his son, who had surrendered himself for punishment;

He betrayed his friend Croesus, and, forgetting his fee — so fond of glory was he — he led Croesus across the Halys to the pyre.

and set before your eyes whole dramas and scenes of the same kind, all that you have known from your own experience or from the older histories — as the whole court of Hadrian, the whole court of Antoninus, the whole court of Philip, of Alexander, of Croesus;

The kindly excellence of Croesus does not perish, but Phalaris, with his pitiless mind, who burned his victims in a bronze bull, is surrounded on all sides by a hateful reputation;

Do you not know at what age Hecuba began to serve, at what age Croesus, at what age the mother of Darius, at what age Plato, at what age Diogenes?

I will not send you to Croesus, who saw his own pyre both lit while he lived and quenched again, made to outlive not only his kingdom but his very death;

Thus he who serves both makes lords, and the surrendered slave of Admetus increases the Roman citizens with empire, while he ruined his liberal worshipper Croesus by deceiving him with ambiguous oracles.

and in the case of the Ionians, when their power had advanced to a high pitch, Cyrus and the Persian kingdom, having subdued Croesus and all within the Halys to the sea, marched against them, and reduced to bondage their cities on the mainland, as Darius afterwards did even the islands, conquering them by means of the fleet of the Phoenicians.