The Rise of Athens

Croesus’s neighbors to the east were the kingdoms of Babylon and of Media, which had joined forces to destroy the old Assyrian Empire and sack its capital, Nineveh, in 612. Babylon was one of the great cities of the world. Once free of the Assyrians, its king built high, impregnable walls enclosing about one thousand acres and with eight gates. The most spectacular of these was the Ishtar Gate, faced with glazed blue bricks on which were bas reliefs of various animals, including lions and aurochs. The gate opened onto a grand processional way that led into the heart of the city.

To the northwest of Babylon and south of the Caspian Sea lay Media, a vigorous and newly centralized state. In the first half of the seventh century a founding king, Deiokes, built a great capital on a hill, Ecbatana. If the Greek historian Herodotus is to be trusted, its fortifications were as remarkable as those of Babylon. Looking very much like a ziggurat, they consisted of a series of massive concentric walls, each out-topped by the one within it. Inside the innermost and tallest wall stood the royal palace and the treasury.

The parapets of the first circle are white, of the next black, of the third scarlet, of the fourth blue, of the fifth orange; all these colors being painted. The last two have their battlements coated respectively with silver and gold.

—

The rulers of the three states were on reasonably good terms, and had intermarried.

Eastwards in the southwestern part of Iran, roughly coextensive with the modern region of Fārs, there was the small dependent kingdom of Persis. Its new king was the youthful, hook-nosed Cyrus (in Old Persian, Kūruš), an ambitious and energetic ruler. He assembled the Persian tribes in 550 and persuaded them to approve his plan to revolt from his Median overlord. The campaign met with total success, as a Babylonian priest recorded.

King Ishtumegu (Astyages) [of Media] called up his troops and marched against Cyrus, king of Anshan (a city under Persian rule), in order to me[et him in battle]. The army of Ishtumegu revolted against him and they de[livered] him in fetters to Cyrus. Cyrus [marched] against the country Agamtanu (Ecbatana); the royal residence [he seized]; he took as booty silver, gold, (other) valuables…of the country Agamtanu and brought [them] to Anshan.

It was this disaster that captured Croesus’s full attention. He decided that he needed to act rather than wait, like a tethered goat, for Cyrus’s next step, which would very probably be an invasion of Lydia.

However, before making any definite move, he consulted Apollo’s oracle at Delphi.

Croesus wanted to be sure that Delphi and other well-known oracles were all they were cracked up to be, or so writes Herodotus. As a first step he sent delegates to the oracle, instructing them to consult the Pythia on the hundredth day after they had left Sardis, the Lydian capital. They were to ask what the king was doing at that very moment. This they did, and in the versified response the prophetess claimed that she could smell

hard-shelled tortoise

Boiling in bronze with the meat of lamb,

Laid upon bronze below, covered with bronze on top

Croesus was most impressed, for at the relevant time he had chopped up a tortoise and a lamb, and boiled them together in a bronze cauldron with a bronze lid. It was now that the king began to deluge the shrine at Delphi with generous gifts. The god looked after patrons like Croesus, generous and trusting. The king was given priority consultation rights, exemption from fees, and the best seats at Delphi’s festivals.

In due course a second delegation raised a more substantive issue. This was the king’s question: “Croesus, king of the Lydians and other peoples, in the belief that yours is the only true oracle in the whole world, gives you gifts worthy of your prophetic insight, and asks whether he should wage war against the Persians and whether he should seek to add any military force to his own as an ally.”

The god replied that if Croesus were to cross the Halys River, the boundary of his empire, and wage war on the Persians, he would destroy a mighty empire. So victory was guaranteed. The Lydian envoys asked a third question. Would his reign be a long one?

The Pythia answered in cryptic verse:

Wait till a mule becomes king of the Medes,

Then, tender-footed Lydian, run away to the pebbly River Hermus.

And hurry, hurry, don’t feel ashamed of being a coward.

More good news, thought Croesus. He had never heard of a mule ruling a kingdom and he could safely look forward to many years on the throne.