erected a funeral pyre in the courtyard of his palace, and took up his
position on it, together with his wives, his daughters, and the noblest
youths of his court, surrounded by his most precious possessions.
He could cite the example of more than one vanquished monarch of the
ancient Asiatic world in choosing such an end, and one of the fabulous
ancestors of his race, Sandon-Herakles, had perished after this fashion
in the midst of the flames. Was the sacrifice carried out? Everything
leads us to believe that it was, but popular feeling could not be
resigned to the idea that a prince who had shown such liberality towards
the gods in his prosperity should be abandoned by them in the time
of his direst need. They came to believe that the Lydian monarch had
expiated by his own defeat the crime by the help of which his ancestor
Gyges had usurped the throne. Apollo had endeavoured to delay the
punishment till the next generation, that it might fall on the son of
his votary, but he had succeeded in obtaining from fate a respite of
three years only. Even then he had not despaired, and had warned Croesus
by the voice of the oracles. They had foretold him that, in crossing the
Halys, the Lydians ^would destroy a great empire, and that their power
would last till the day when a mule should sit upon the throne of Media.
Croesus, blinded by fate, could not see that Cyrus, who was of mixed
race, Persian by his father and Median by his mother, was the predicted
mule. He therefore crossed the Halys, and a great empire fell, but it
was his own. At all events, the god might have desired to show that to
honour his altars and adorn his temple was in itself, after all, the
best of treasures. "When Sardes, suffering the vengeance of Zeus, was
conquered by the army of the Persians, the god of the golden sword,
Apollo, was the guardian of Croesus. When the day of despair arrived,
the king could not resign himself to tears and servitude; within the
brazen-walled court he erected a funeral pyre, on which, together with
his chaste spouse and his bitterly lamenting daughters of beautiful