Croesus ( ; ) was the last king of Lydia from 585 or 561 BC to 547 BC. He was renowned for his great wealth, as well as his ultimate defeat by the Persian king Cyrus the Great following the siege of Sardis.

A son of the Lydian king Alyattes, Croesus ascended to the throne following a succession struggle with his step-brother. He continued his father's expansionist policies and launched a series of military campaigns that eventually brought much of western Asia Minor under Lydian control. Stopping short of attacking the city-states of the Aegean islands, he concluded treaties with them instead and benefited significantly from trade. In addition, he fostered friendly relations with Media, Egypt, Babylonia and Sparta. He became famous for his extravagant riches; Herodotus and Pausanias noted that his gifts were preserved at Delphi.

In 550 BC, the Median kingdom, led by Croesus' brother-in-law Astyages, was conquered by the Persian king Cyrus the Great. Croesus responded by attacking Pteria, a Phrygian state and Persian vassal. Cyrus intervened and inflicted a series of defeats on Croesus before capturing the capital Sardis, bringing the Lydian kingdom to an end. Croesus' subsequent fate is unclear; ancient sources describe him variously as having been executed or coming into Cyrus' service.

The fall of Croesus had a profound effect on the Greeks, providing a fixed point in their calendar. "By the fifth century at least", J. A. S. Evans has remarked, "Croesus had become a figure of myth, who stood outside the conventional restraints of chronology."

Name

The name of Croesus was not attested in contemporary inscriptions in the Lydian language. In 2019, D. Sasseville and K. Euler published a study of Lydian coins apparently minted during his rule, where the name of the ruler was rendered as Qλdãns.

The name comes from the Latin transliteration of the Greek , which was thought by J.M. Kearns to be the ancient Hellenic adaptation of the reconstructed Lydian name . This putative name was analyzed as a compound term consisting of the proper name , of a glide () and of the Lydian term , perhaps meaning "master, lord, noble". According to J. M. Kearns, Croesus's real personal name would have been , while would have been a honorific name meaning "The noble Karoś".

Life and reign

thumb|Lydia's borders under King Croesus

Croesus was born in 620 BC to the king Alyattes of Lydia and one of his queens, a Carian noblewoman whose name is unknown. Croesus had at least one full sister, Aryenis, as well as a half-brother named Pantaleon, born from an Ionian wife of Alyattes.

Under his father's reign, Croesus had been a governor of Adramyttium, which Alyattes had rebuilt as a centre of operations for military actions against the Cimmerians, a nomadic people from the Pontic steppe who had invaded Western Asia, and attacked Lydia over the course of several invasions during which they killed Alyattes's great-grandfather Gyges, and possibly his grandfather Ardys and his father Sadyattes. As governor of Adramyttium, Croesus had to provide his father with Ionian Greek mercenaries for a military campaign in Caria. Phrygia under Lydian rule would continue to be administered by its local elites, such as the ruler of Midas City who held Phrygian royal titles such as (king) and (commander of the armies), but were under the authority of the Lydian kings of Sardis and had a Lydian diplomatic presence at their court, following the framework of the traditional vassalage treaties used since the period of the Hittite and Assyrian empires, and according to which the Lydian king imposed on the vassal rulers a "treaty of vassalage" which allowed the local Phrygian rulers to remain in power, in exchange of which the Phrygian vassals had the duty to provide military support and sometimes offer rich tribute to the Lydian kingdom.

Croesus also brought Caria, whose various city-states had since Gyges been allied to the Mermnad dynasty, and from where Croesus's own mother originated, under the direct control of the Lydian Empire.

International relations

Croesus continued the friendly relations with the Medes concluded by his father Alyattes and the Median king Cyaxares after five years of war in 585 BC, shortly before both their respective deaths that same year. As part of the peace treaty ending the war between Media and Lydia, Croesus's sister Aryenis had married Cyaxares's son and successor Astyages, who thus became Croesus's brother-in-law, while a daughter of Cyaxares might have been married to Croesus. Croesus continued these good relations with the Medes after he succeeded Alyattes and Astyages succeeded Cyaxares. Hermodike II, the daughter of an Agamemnon of Cyme, claimed descent from the original Agamemnon who conquered Troy. She was likely one of Alyattes’ wives, so may have been Croesus’ mother, because the bull imagery on the croeseid symbolises the Hellenic Zeus—see Europa (consort of Zeus). Zeus, through Hercules, was the divine forefather of his family line.

Moreover, the first coins were quite crude and made of electrum, a naturally occurring pale yellow alloy of gold and silver. The composition of these first coins was similar to alluvial deposits found in the silt of the Pactolus river (made famous by Midas), which ran through the Lydian capital, Sardis. Later coins, including some in the British Museum, were made from gold purified by heating with common salt to remove the silver.

In Greek and Persian cultures the name of Croesus became a synonym for a wealthy man. He inherited great wealth from his father Alyattes, who had become associated with the Midas myth because Lydian precious metals came from the river Pactolus, in which King Midas supposedly washed away his ability to turn all he touched into gold. In reality, Alyattes' tax revenues may have been the real 'Midas touch' financing his and Croesus' conquests. Croesus' wealth remained proverbial beyond classical antiquity: in English, expressions such as "rich as Croesus" or "richer than Croesus" are used to indicate great wealth to this day. The earliest known such usage in English was John Gower's in Confessio amantis (1390):

Original text:

Modern spelling:

Interview with Solon

thumb|left|upright|[[Aesop in front of Croesus]]

According to Herodotus, Croesus encountered the Greek sage Solon and showed him his enormous wealth. Croesus, secure in his own wealth and happiness, asked Solon who the happiest man in the world was, and was disappointed by Solon's response that three had been happier than Croesus: Tellus, who died fighting for his country, and the brothers Kleobis and Biton who died peacefully in their sleep after their mother prayed for their perfect happiness because they had demonstrated filial piety by drawing her to a festival in an oxcart themselves.

thumb|Croesus showing his treasures to Solon. [[Frans Francken the Younger, 17th century]]

Solon goes on to explain that Croesus cannot be the happiest man because the fickleness of fortune means that the happiness of a man's life cannot be judged until after his death. Sure enough, Croesus' hubristic happiness was reversed by the tragic deaths of his accidentally killed son and, according to Ctesias, his wife's suicide at the fall of Sardis, not to mention his defeat at the hands of the Persians.

The interview is in the nature of a philosophical disquisition on the subject "Which man is happy?" It is legendary rather than historical. Thus, the "happiness" of Croesus is presented as a moralistic exemplum of the fickleness of Tyche, a theme that gathered strength from the fourth century, revealing its late date. The story was later retold and elaborated by Ausonius in The Masque of the Seven Sages, in the Suda (entry "Μᾶλλον ὁ Φρύξ," which adds Aesop and the Seven Sages of Greece), and by Tolstoy in his short story "Croesus and Fate".

thumb|Silver croeseid issued by King Croesus of Lydia (561–545 BC), obverse: lion and bull protomes

War against Persia and defeat

thumb|upright=1.5|Defeat of Croesus at the [[Battle of Thymbra, 546 BC.]]

In 550 BC, Croesus's brother-in-law, the Median king Astyages, was overthrown by his own grandson, the Persian king Cyrus the Great. More recent studies have moreover concluded that the non-erased cuneiform sign was not Lu, but rather Ú, making untenable the interpretation of the text as talking of a campaign against Lydia, and instead suggesting that the campaign was against Urartu.

thumb|right|Croesus on the pyre, [[Attica|Attic red-figure amphora, Louvre (G 197)]]

The scholar Max Mallowan argued that there is no evidence that Cyrus the Great killed Croesus, in particular rejected the account of burning on a pyre, and interpreted Bacchylides' narration as Croesus attempting suicide and then being saved by Cyrus.

The historian Kevin Leloux instead maintained the reading of the Nabonidus Chronicle as referring to a campaign of Cyrus against Lydia to argue that Croesus was indeed executed by Cyrus. According to him, the story of Croesus and the pyre would have been imagined by the Greeks based on the fires started during the Persian capture of Sardis throughout the lower city, where the buildings were made largely of wood.

References to Croesus' legendary power and wealth, often as a symbol of human vanity, are numerous in literature, and to be rich as Croesus is an idiom for being very wealthy.

The following, by Isaac Watts, is from the poem "False Greatness":

Another literary example is "Croesus and Fate", a short story by Leo Tolstoy that is a retelling of the account of Croesus as told by Herodotus and Plutarch.

Crœsus, King of Lydia, is a tragedy in five parts by Alfred Bate Richards, first published in 1845.

On the TF1 game show Crésus, the king is reimagined as a CGI skeleton, who has returned from the dead to give some of his money away to lucky contestants.

On The Simpsons, the wealthy Montgomery Burns lives at the corner of Croesus and Mammon Streets.

In East of Eden Chapter 34, John Steinbeck refers to Croesus to explain living a righteous life. Wealth will vanish as did with Croesus. So, the question one should ask to determine whether one lived a good life or not is “Was he loved or was he hated? Is his death felt as a loss or does a kind of joy come of it?”

In 1968, English psychedelic pop band, World of Oz, released its single titled "King Croesus."

See also

  • Croesus (opera)
  • Karun Treasure ("Croesus treasure")

References

Works cited

  • Crésus. Le plus riche des rois de Lydie, Perrin, Paris, 2023 by Kevin Leloux
  • "L'alliance lydo-spartiate", in Ktèma, 39, 2014, pp. 271–288 by Kevin Leloux
  • "Les alliances lydo-égyptienne et lydo-babylonienne", in Gephyra, 22, 2021, pp. 181–207 by Kevin Leloux
  • Herodotus' account of Croesus; 1.6–94 (from the Perseus Project, containing links to both English and Greek versions). Croesus was the son of Alyattes and continued the conquest of Ionian cities of Asia Minor that his father had begun.
  • An in-depth account of Croesus' life, by Carlos Parada
  • Livius, Croesus by Jona Lendering
  • Croesus on Ancient History Encyclopedia
  • Gold Coin of Croesus a BBC podcast from the series: "A History of the World in 100 Objects"