Travels with Herodotus (11 page)

In asking this question, he was expecting to be named as the happiest of all men
.

But Solon did not flatter him in the least and instead cited as the happiest of men several heroically fallen Athenians, adding:
“Croesus, when you asked me about men and their affairs, you were putting your question to someone who is well aware of how utterly jealous the divine is, and how it is likely to confound us. Anyone who lives for a long time is bound to see and endure many things he would rather avoid. I place the limit of a man’s life at
seventy years. Seventy years makes 25,200 days … No two days bring events which are exactly the same. It follows, Croesus, that human life is entirely a matter of chance…
.

“Now, I can see that you are extremely rich and that you rule over large numbers of people, but I won’t be in a position to say what you’re asking me to say about you until I find out that you died well…. Until [a man] is dead, you had better refrain from calling him happy, and just call him fortunate
.

“… It is necessary to consider the end of anything … and to see how it will turn out, because the god often offers prosperity to men, but then destroys them utterly and completely.”

And in fact, after Solon’s departure, the punishment of the gods descended brutally upon Croesus, in all likelihood precisely because he thought himself the happiest man on earth. Croesus had two sons—the strapping Atys and another, who was deaf and dumb. Atys was the apple of his father’s eye, protected and watched over. And yet, despite this, not on purpose but purely by accident, a guest of Croesus, one Adrastus, killed him during a hunt. When Adrastus realized what he had done, he broke down. During Atys’s funeral, he waited until everyone had left and it grew quiet around the tomb,
and then, realizing that there was no one in his experience who bore a heavier burden of misfortune than himself, he took his own life at the graveside
.

After his son’s death, Croesus lives for two years in profound grief. During this time, the great Cyrus comes to power in neighboring Persia, and under him the might of the Persians increases rapidly. Croesus is worried that if Cyrus’s nation continues to gather strength it could one day threaten Lydia, and so he hatches a plan for a preemptive strike.

It is the custom at the time for the wealthy and powerful to consult an oracle before making important decisions. Greece abounds in these oracles, but the most important resides in a temple on a towering mountainside—in Delphi. In order to obtain
a favorable prophecy from the oracle, one must propitiate the Delphic deity with gifts. Croesus, therefore, orders a gigantic collection of offerings. Three thousand cattle are to be killed, heavy bars of gold melted, countless objects forged out of silver. He commands that a huge fire be lit, on which he burns in sacrifice gold and silver couches, purple cloaks and tunics.
He also told all the Lydians that every one of them was to sacrifice whatever he could
. We can imagine the numerous and humbly obedient Lydian people as they make their way along the roads to where the great pyre is burning and throw into the flames what until now was most precious to them—gold jewelry, all manner of sacral and domestic vessels, holiday vestments, even favorite everyday attire.

The opinions which the oracle delivers are typically pronouncements of cautious ambiguity and intentional murkiness. They are texts so composed as to allow the oracle, in the event that things turned out otherwise (which occurred often), to retreat adroitly from the whole affair and save face. And yet so undiminished and indestructible is the force of the desire to have the veil lifted on tomorrow that people, with a stubbornness lasting thousands of years already, still listen greedily and with flushed cheeks to the utterances of soothsayers. Croesus, as one can see, was also in that desire’s thrall. Impatiently he awaited the return of the envoys he had sent to the various Greek oracles. The answer of the Delphic oracle was: If you set out against the Persians, you will destroy a great state. And Croesus, who desired this war, blinded by the lust of aggression, interpreted the prediction to mean: If you set out against Persia, you will destroy it. Persia, after all—and in this Croesus was correct—was truly a great state.

So he attacked, but he lost the war, and as a result—and in accordance with the prophecy—annihilated his own great state and was himself enslaved.
The Persians took their prisoner to Cyrus, who built a huge funeral pyre and made Croesus (who was tied up) and fourteen Lydian
boys climb up to the top. Perhaps he intended them to be a victory-offering for some god or other, or perhaps he wanted to fulfil a vow he had made, or perhaps he had heard that Croesus was a god-fearing man and he made him get up on to the pyre because he wanted to see if any immortal would rescue him from being burnt alive …. Although Croesus’s situation up on top of the pyre was desperate, his mind turned to Solon’s saying that no one who is still alive is happy, and it occurred to him how divinely inspired Solon had been to say that. This thought made him sigh and groan, and he broke a long silence by repeating the name “Solon” three times
.

Now, at the request of Cyrus, who is standing near the pyre, the interpreters ask Croesus whom he is calling and what does it mean. Croesus answers, but as he is telling the story, the pyre, which has already been lit, starts to burn in earnest at its farthest edges. Cyrus, moved by pity but also fearing retribution, reverses his decision and orders the fire extinguished as quickly as possible and Croesus and the boys accompanying him brought down. But all attempts to control the blaze fail.

Croesus realized that Cyrus had changed his mind. When he saw that it was too late for them to control the fire, despite everyone’s efforts to quench it, he called on Apollo …. Weeping, he called on the god, and suddenly the clear, calm weather was replaced by gathering clouds; a storm broke, rain lashed down, and the pyre was extinguished
.

… Once [Cyrus] had got Croesus down from the pyre he asked him who had persuaded him to invade his country and be his enemy rather than his friend. “My lord,” Croesus replied, “it was my doing. You have gained and I have lost from it. But responsibility lies with the god of the Greeks who encouraged me to make war on you. After all, no one is stupid enough to prefer war to peace; in peace sons bury their fathers and in war fathers bury their sons. However, I suppose the god must have wanted this to happen.”…

Cyrus untied him and had him seated near by. He was very impressed with him, and he and his whole entourage admired the man’s demeanour. But Croesus was silent, deep in thought
.

And so two of Asia’s then mightiest rulers—the defeated Croesus and the victorious Cyrus—sit side by side, looking at the remnants of the pyre upon which just a while ago one of them was going to immolate the other. We can imagine that Croesus, who only one hour earlier was awaiting death in dreadful torment, is still in shock, and when Cyrus asks him what he could do for him, he starts to rail against the gods:
“Master,” Croesus replies, “nothing would give me more pleasure than to be allowed to send these shackles of mine to the god of the Greeks, whom I revered more than any other god, and to ask him if it is his normal practice to trick his benefactors.”

What sacrilege! What is more, Croesus, having received Cyrus’s permission,
sent a delegation of Lydians to Delphi. He told them to lay the shackles on the threshold of the temple and ask the god if he was not ashamed to have used his oracles to encourage Croesus to march against the Persians … And they were also to ask whether Greek gods were normally so ungrateful
.

To which the Delphic Pythia was said to reply with the sentence that will constitute the third law of Herodotus:

“Not even a god can escape his ordained fate. Croesus has paid for the crime of his ancestor four generations ago, who, though a member of the personal guard of the Heraclidae, gave in to a woman’s guile, killed his master, and assumed a station which was not rightfully his at all. In fact, Apollo wanted the fall of Sardis to happen in the time of Croesus’ sons rather than of Croesus himself, but it was not possible to divert the Fates ….”

This was the Pythia’s response to the Lydians. They … relayed the statement to Croesus. When he heard it he realized that the fault was his and not the god’s
.

I
thought that I had heard all I was going to hear regarding Croesus, who had actually come to seem quite sympathetically human to me—at first in his naïve and unconcealed pride in the treasures that the whole world admired (all those tons of gold and silver filling his vaults), and then, as well, in his unwavering faith in the prophecies of the Delphic oracle; in his bottomless despair over the death of his son, to which he had indirectly contributed; in his breakdown after the bitter loss of his nation; in his apathetic acquiescence to a martyr’s death upon the pyre; in his sacrilegious repudiation of divine verdicts; and then, finally, in the necessity of his costly atonement for the sin of an ancestor he did not even know. Yes, I thought that I had once and for all said goodbye to this punished, humiliated man, when suddenly he appeared again in the pages of Herodotus, once more in the company of King Cyrus, who, at the head of the Persian army, has set out to conquer the Massagetae, a wild and warlike people living deep in central Asia, all the way on the banks of the Amu Darya.

It is the sixth century
B.C.E
. and the Persians are aggressively on the move—they are conquering the world. Years, centuries later, one superpower after another will make the same attempt, but the ambitious striving of the Persians, back in that dim and distant epoch, remains arguably unrivaled in its boldness and scope
They had already conquered the Ionians and the Aeolians; captured Miletus, Halicarnassus, and many other Greek colonies in western Asia; grabbed the Medes and Babylon—in short, everything that could be seized in the near and distant vicinity came under Persian rule. And now Cyrus sets off to subjugate a tribe somewhere at the very ends of what was then the known and imagined world. Perhaps he believes that if he crushes the Massagetae, takes over their lands and herds, he will come yet another inch closer to the moment when he can triumphantly proclaim: “The world is mine!”

But this need to possess everything, which earlier had led to Croesus’s downfall, will now in turn bring about Cyrus’s defeat. The punishment for man’s unrestrained rapaciousness befalls him always at the very moment—and here lies the particularly cruel and destructive irony—when he appears to be but a step away from attaining his dreams. The comeuppance is therefore accompanied by a savage disappointment in the world, a profound resentment toward a vengeful fate, and a depressing sense of humiliation and powerlessness.

For now, however, Cyrus sets off for the depths of Asia, for the north—to conquer the Massagetae. The expedition did not surprise his contemporaries, because everyone
noticed how he attacked every race indiscriminately …. There were a number of significant factors tempting and inducing him to undertake this campaign. The main two were the apparently miraculous nature of his birth, and the good fortune that attended him in war, in the sense that any race which Cyrus sent his troops after found it impossible to escape
.

What is known about the Massagetae is that they live on the great flat steppes of central Asia, as well as on islands in the Amu Darya, which call Araxes, where in the summer they dig up various roots to eat, storing the ripened fruit they find in the trees for subsequent winter consumption. We learn that the Massagetae
used something akin to narcotics, and were therefore the forerunners of today’s addicts and junkies:
They have also discovered a kind of plant whose fruit they use when they meet in groups. They light a bonfire, sit around it, throw this fruit on the fire, and sniff the smoke rising from the burning fruit they have thrown on to the fire. The fruit is the equivalent there to wine in Greece: they get intoxicated from the smoke, and then they throw more fruit on to the fire and get even more intoxicated, until they eventually stand up and dance, and burst into song
.

In those days the queen of the Massagetae is a woman called Tomyris. A deadly, bloody drama will be enacted between her and Cyrus, one in which Croesus will also play a part. Cyrus starts with a subterfuge: he pretends that it is Tomyris’s hand that he is after. But the queen of the Massagetae quickly senses that the Persian king’s designs are not on her but on her kingdom. Cyrus, seeing that he will not attain his goal in the way he had hoped, decides to wage open war against the Massagetae on the other side of the Amu Darya, the river whose shores his forces have just reached.

From the Persian capital of Susa to the shores of the Amu Darya the road is long—or, more accurately, there is no road. One must cross mountain passes, traverse the burning desert of Kara-Kum, and then wander the endless steppes.

One is reminded of Napoleon’s mad campaign for Moscow. The Persian and the Frenchman are in the grips of an identical passion: to seize, conquer, possess. Both will suffer defeat on account of having transgressed a fundamental Greek principle, the law of moderation: never to want too much, not to desire everything. But as they are launching their ventures, they are too blind to see this; the lust for conquest has dimmed their judgment, has deprived them of reason. On the other hand, if reason ruled the world, would history even exist?

For now, though, Cyrus’s expeditionary force is still on the march. It must be an interminable column of men, horses, and matériel. Tired soldiers keep falling off mountain cliffs, later many perish of thirst in the desert, later still some units are lost in the roadless expanses of the steppes. There were no maps in those days, after all, no compasses, no binoculars, no road signs. They must reconnoiter with the help of tribes they encounter along the way, ask around, find guides, perhaps even consult fortune-tellers. Whatever the case may be, the great army advances—laboriously, indefatigably, and at times surely, as was wont to happen with the Persians, under the lash.