In the sixth century BGC, the Lydian king Croesus was extraordinarily wealthy. His reputation for extraordinary wealth developed under the same misleading accounting used to value the wealth of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos while they were married to Melinda Gates and MacKenzie Bezos, respectively. Croesus himself was rightly unsure about his wealth and his welfare. He gained much better understanding when Cyrus the Great violently captured him and forbid him from ever again participating in war. Cyrus made Croesus happy by establishing gender equality between Croesus and his wife.
Before Cyrus the Great captured King Croesus, Solon of Athens, revered for his wisdom, visited him at his Lydian capital Sardis. Croesus displayed to Solon enormous wealth. Croesus thought of himself as the man most favored with good among all men. Nonetheless, he seemed uneasy about his welfare and sought validation. Recognizing that Solon was well-known for wisdom, he said to Solon:
Now thus longing has come upon me to ask if you have ever seen anyone more favored with good?
{ νῦν ὦν ἐπειρέσθαι με ἵμερος ἐπῆλθέ σε εἴ τινα ἤδη πάντων εἶδες ὀλβιώτατον. }[1]
Eschewing flattery of Croesus, Solon spoke the truth as he understood it. He said that Tellus of Athens was most favored with good. Solon explained that Tellus’s city of Athens was prosperous, and Tellus fathered noble and good sons who all had surviving children, and Tellus was wealthy. Moreover, Tellus died a “most glorious {λαμπροτάτος}” death attacking the Athenians’ Megarian enemy at Eleusis. Tellus received a public burial and great posthumous honor. However, being dead, even being dead and highly honored, isn’t good in a more gender-enlightened view. Solon, like the Spartan mothers and so many others throughout history, valued men as instruments of war above men’s very lives.
Hoping to be rated just behind Tellus, Croesus asked Solon who had the most good second to Tellus. Solon said Kleobis and Biton. These two young men worked in the place of oxen to pull their mother atop her wagon about five miles to a festival of the reigning goddess Hera. Exhausted, the two sons died that night in the temple of Hera after receiving great honor. In common sense of ordinary persons throughout history, it isn’t good for men to be dead. The great ancient Greek poet Sappho valued her brothers Charaxos and Larichos not as instruments, but as fully human beings. All men deserved to be valued, not merely for the feats that they perform, but primarily for their intrinsic worth as living, fully human beings.
Women need men as fully human beings. Despite his wisdom, Solon upheld the gender-traditional view of men as instruments valued in serving others and ultimately as disposable persons. But Solon didn’t support female supremacism or a female exclusivism. Solon in his wisdom declared:
No land suffices to provide everything for itself, but it has one thing, and another it lacks. The best land has not all but the most. In the same way, no single person is self-sufficient. Every person needs another.
{ ὥσπερ χώρη οὐδεμία καταρκέει πάντα ἑωυτῇ παρέχουσα, ἀλλὰ ἄλλο μὲν ἔχει ἑτέρου δὲ ἐπιδέεται· ἣ δὲ ἂν τὰ πλεῖστα ἔχῃ, αὕτη ἀρίστη. ὣς δὲ καὶ ἀνθρώπου σῶμα ἓν οὐδὲν αὔταρκες ἐστί· τὸ μὲν γάρ ἔχει, ἄλλου δὲ ἐνδεές ἐστι· }[2]
Women as a gender are not self-sufficient. Men as fully human beings are others to women. Men are good as others to women.
Only after being defeated and captured did King Croesus understand how to be better favored with good and experience gender equality. Because he misinterpreted one Delphic oracle, Croesus allied with the Assyrians in attacking the Persian king Cyrus the Great. Cyrus routed Croesus’s Lydian army and conquered the Lydian capital Sardis. Croesus realized through this defeat that he had failed to uphold a second Delphic oracle: “know yourself {γνῶθι σαυτὸν}.”[3]
Now knowing that he was inferior in military might to Cyrus, Croesus wondered whether now he would be happy. Feeling sorry for Croesus, Cyrus restored to him his wife and children, his friends and servants, and his home. Cyrus, however, forbid Croesus from further participating in wars. Croesus was delighted. He explained:
Because the life that others considered to be the most fortunate, and I agreed with them, this life I will now have and enjoy myself.
{ ὅτι ἣν ἄλλοι τε μακαριωτάτην ἐνόμιζον εἶναι βιοτὴν καὶ ἐγὼ συνεγίγνωσκον αὐτοῖς, ταύτην καὶ ἐγὼ νῦν ἔχων διάξω. }[4]
Cyrus, who hadn’t yet married, didn’t understand. He asked who lives a life that is the most fortunate. Croesus declared:
“My wife,” he said. “She, O Cyrus, always shared equally with me in wealth, luxuries, and every joy that life brought, but she had no share in the anxieties of securing it, nor in those of war or battle. Indeed you seem be putting me thus in the same position as I did my wife, whom among humans I love the most. I hence feel that I owe the god Apollo new offerings of thanks.”
{ Ἡ ἐμὴ γυνή, εἶπεν, ὦ Κῦρε· ἐκείνη γὰρ τῶν μὲν ἀγαθῶν καὶ τῶν μαλακῶν καὶ εὐφροσυνῶν πασῶν ἐμοὶ τὸ ἴσον μετεῖχε, φροντίδων δὲ ὅπως ταῦτα ἔσται καὶ πολέμου καὶ μάχης οὐ μετῆν αὐτῇ. οὕτω δὴ καὶ σὺ δοκεῖς ἐμὲ κατασκευάζειν ὥσπερ ἐγὼ ἣν ἐφίλουν μάλιστα ἀνθρώπων, ὥστε τῷ Ἀπόλλωνι ἄλλα μοι δοκῶ χαριστήρια ὀφειλήσειν. }[5]
Croesus is famed for his wealth. That’s shallow fame. With Croesus’s wise insight into his and his wife’s happiness, those who have ears to hear and eyes to see should perceive that one greater than Solon is here.[6] Husbands’ supreme love for their wives need not be an obstacle to gender equality. Upholding the solemn public commitment to gender equality, everyone should encourage wives to work stressful, full-time jobs to provide for their husbands and to stand ready to defend their husbands through military service. Become as wise as Croesus was!
Throughout history, wives have done much for their husbands. Wives strengthened their husbands amid the destroyed civilization of fifth-century Roman Gaul. The woman hero Felice didn’t commit suicide so that her husband wouldn’t be charged with murder. Gliceria, a very sensual woman, compromised with her husband over gloves and jesses in the marital bed. Wives saved their husbands from castration, even duping the devil to do so. Not every husband can offer his wife the wealth of Croesus. Every husband, however, can demonstrate his support for women and gender equality by learning and implementing the wisdom of Croesus.
* * * * *
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Notes:
[1] Herodotus, Persian Wars / Histories {Ἱστορίαι} 1.30.2, ancient Greek text and English translation (modified) from Godley (1920). For a freely available commentary on Herodotus, Book 1, Steadman (2012). The account above of Solon and Croesus follows Herodotus, Histories 1.29 to 1.34.
I’ve translated the accusative case of ὀλβιώτατος, the superlative form of ὄλβιος, as anyone “more favored with good” among everyone. Other translations: “more blest” in Godley (1920) and “to be the happiest” in Steadman (2012). In current English, “blessed” tends to be associated with divine favor of a spiritual sort. In ancient Greek, ὄλβιος had strong connections to material wealth. Rutter (2023) p. 9. On ὄλβιος in Herodotus specifically, id. pp. 28-32. The meaning of “good” / “happy” is a central issue in the discussion between Solon and Croesus.
The discussion between Solon and Croesus tends to be superficially moralized as “Call no man happy until he is dead.” However, in Herodotus’s Histories, the textual source for Solon’s dictum, Solon is not sententious, but prolix. Here is merely a small excerpt of Solon on this issue:
He who is very rich is not more blessed than he who has but enough for the day, unless fortune so attend him that he ends his life well, having all good things about him. … We must look to the conclusion of every matter, and see how it shall end, for there are many to whom heaven has given a vision of blessedness, and yet afterwards brought them to utter ruin.
{ οὐ γάρ τι ὁ μέγα πλούσιος μᾶλλον τοῦ ἐπ᾽ ἡμέρην ἔχοντος ὀλβιώτερος ἐστί, εἰ μή οἱ τύχη ἐπίσποιτο πάντα καλὰ ἔχοντα εὖ τελευτῆσαὶ τὸν βίον. … σκοπέειν δὲ χρὴ παντὸς χρήματος τὴν τελευτήν, κῇ ἀποβήσεται· πολλοῖσι γὰρ δὴ ὑποδέξας ὄλβον ὁ θεὸς προρρίζους ἀνέτρεψε. }
Herodotus, Histories 1.32.8, ancient Greek text and English translation (modified) from Godley (1920).
The popularized dictum of Solon, “Call no man happy until he is dead,” has a more sophisticated variant. In the context of ancient Greek worship of dead men-heroes, the dead man-hero might be honored as “blessed {ὄλβιος}. A living man who is ὄλβιος is merely “fortunate.” Nagy (2012) p. 57.
Classicists have scarcely yet begun to examine the devaluation of men’s lives in ancient Greek culture. A leading classicists with apparently unintentional irony declared:
As the narrative of Herodotus implies, only those who are initiated into the mysteries of hero cult can understand the sacral meaning of olbios {ὄλβιος}.
Nagy (2012) p. 57, parenthetical gloss added. The sentence is repeated in Nagy (2013), “Hour 11. Blessed are the heroes: the cult hero in Homeric poetry and beyond.”
[2] Herodotus, Histories 1.32.8, ancient Greek text and English translation (modified) from Godley (1920). Like most persons throughout history, Solon seems to have treated uncritically gender in relation to men. To execute Croesus, Cyrus made the following arrangements:
Having piled up a great pyre, Cyrus placed upon it Croesus, bound in chains, along with fourteen Lydian boys beside him.
{ ὁ δὲ συννήσας πυρὴν μεγάλην ἀνεβίβασε ἐπ᾽ αὐτὴν τὸν Κροῖσόν τε ἐν πέδῃσι δεδεμένον καὶ δὶς ἑπτὰ Λυδῶν παρ᾽ αὐτὸν παῖδας }
Herodotus, Histories 1.86.2, sourced as previously. In this context, the children being sacrificed are surely boys. See, e.g. Xenophon, Cyropaedia 7.2.12. The social forces that condemn men to a shorter lifespan on average than women significantly reduce men’s blessedness relative to women.
[3] Croesus sent Lydians to Delphi to complain about the oracle that had been given to him. The priestess at Delphi declared:
Regarding the oracle that was given him, Croesus has no right to complain. Apollo Loxias declared to him that if he should lead an army against the Persians, he would destroy a great empire.
{ κατὰ δὲ τὸ μαντήιον τὸ γενόμενον οὐκ ὀρθῶς Κροῖσος μέμφεται. προηγόρευε γὰρ οἱ Λοξίης, ἢν στρατεύηται ἐπὶ Πέρσας, μεγάλην ἀρχὴν αὐτὸν καταλύσειν. }
Herodotus, Histories 1.91.4, ancient Greek text and English translation (modified) from Godley (1920). The great empire that Croesus destroyed was his own Lydian empire. He had failed to know himself — that he wasn’t as mighty as Cyrus the Great. On Croesus not knowing himself, Xenophon, Cyropaedia 7.2.23-4.
[4] Xenophon of Athens, The Education of Cyrus / Cyropaedia {Κύρου παιδεία} 7.2.27, ancient Greek text and English translation from Miller (1914). For another English translation of the Cyropaedia, Ambler (2001). Here’s an online discussion forum for the Cyropaedia. The subsequent quote above is similarly from Cyropaedia 7.2.28. Cyrus the Great’s marriage occurred later, as described in Cyropaedia 8.5.28.
[5] A joke currently circulating on social media shows the extent to which wisdom has decayed since the time of Croesus. Consider it:
I was mugged by a thief last night on my way home. Pointing a knife at me, he said “your money or your life!” I told him I am married, so I have no money and no life. We hugged and cried together. It was a beautiful moment.
Joke posted, e.g. on Facebook seven years ago, and on Radnor Heights NextDoor a few weeks ago. This “joke” gender-stereotypes the criminal as a man and the victim implicitly as a woman (“we hugged and cried together”). That stereotyping supports the severe gender injustice of the vastly gender-disproportionate incarceration of men.
In addition, the joke pushes the ideology of individualism against truth. If a woman marries a man earning more more than she, then her effective income increases. Her living expenses are likely to decrease due to couple economies in housing and food and even entertainment, assuming the couple is passionately in love. Married couples spend their time and money differently than single persons, especially if the married couple has children. Characterizing married life, e.g. having children, as “no life,” defies the ordinary sense of life.
Even apart from the new life that children can bring to marriage, the issue of “life” plausibly runs against the joke. A single woman can spend her evenings sitting on her couch and eating ice cream while binge-watching Nexflix series. A married woman is unlikely to do that because of her interests in her husband, include her desire to stay sexually attractive to him, and her interests in the couple’s children, if they have any. A married woman typically interacts extensively with at least one real person. Compared to a married woman, a single woman much more readily can “have no life” in the historical sense of ordinary human life.
[6] While upholding the deeply entrenched gender ideology that men are disposable persons relative to children and women, Croesus offered sound wisdom on profit maximization in conquering cities. Cyrus inquired about alternatives to having his army kill all the men of Sardis, carry off its the women and children, and plunder its material wealth. Croesus answered:
“Well,” Croesus said on hearing all this, “permit me to say to any Lydians that I meet that I have secured from you the promise not to permit any pillaging nor to allow the women and children to be carried off, and that I, in return for that, have given you my solemn promise that you should get from the Lydians of their own free will everything there is of beauty or value in Sardis.”
{ Ἀκούσας ταῦτα ὁ Κροῖσος ἔλεξεν, Ἀλλ ἐμέ, ἔφη, ἔασον λέξαι πρὸς οὓς ἂν ἐγὼ Λυδῶν ἔλθω1 ὅτι διαπέπραγμαι παρὰ σοῦ μὴ ποιῆσαι ἁρπαγὴν μηδὲ ἐᾶσαι ἀφανισθῆναι παῖδας καὶ γυναῖκας· ὑπεσχόμην δέ σοι ἀντὶ τούτων ἦ μὴν παρ᾿ ἑκόντων Λυδῶν ἔσεσθαι πᾶν ὅ τι καλὸν κἀγαθόν ἐστιν ἐν Σάρδεσιν. }
Xenophon, Cyropaedia 7.2.12, sourced as previously. Croesus explained that by not destroying Sardis, the city would continue to produce wealth for Cyrus.
[images] (1) King Croesus, king of ancient Lydian Empire. Detail from depiction of Croesus being executed on pyre by Cyrus the Great. Painting on amphore made in Athens between 500 and 490 BGC. Preserved as entry # LP 1266 in the Louvre Museum (Paris, France). Detail and apparent source image on Wikimedia Commons, with source image thanks to Bibi Saint-Pol.
(2) King Croesus shows his treasure to the wise Solon of Athens. Painting by Frans Francken II (Frans Francken the Younger) and Cornelis de Baellieur probably in the seventeenth century. Source image via Wikimedia Commons. Here’s a similar painting by Frans Francken the Younger.
(3) King Croesus questions the wise Solon of Athens. Painted by Gérard van Honthorst in 1624. Painting preserved in the Hambourg Kunsthalle. Source image by jean louis mazieres on flickr with a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license. Alternate image. Many pictures of the meeting of Croesus and Solon were painted in seventeenth-century western Europe, e.g. painting by Nikolaus Knüpfer about 1651, one by Claude Vignon about 1625 (here’s another version), and one by Willem de Poorter in the seventeenth century,
[4] Silver jug with handle of naked man holding on to wild animals. From Karun Treasure (Lydian Treasure) from seventh-century BGC and found near Uşak, Turkey. Source image thanks to Arif Solak and Wikimedia Commons.
References:
Ambler, Wayne. 2001. Xenophon of Athens. The Education of Cyrus. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press.
Godley, A. D., ed. and trans. 1920. Herodotus. The Persian Wars. Loeb Classical Library 117-120. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Miller, Walter, ed. and trans. 1914. Xenophon. Cyropaedia. Volume I: Books 1-4, Volume II: Books 5-8. Loeb Classical Library 51 & 52. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nagy, Gregory. 2012. “Signs of Hero Cult in Homeric Poetry.” Pp. 27-71 in Franco Montanari, Antonios Rengakos, and Chrēstos K. Tsangalēs, eds. Homeric Contexts: Neoanalysis and the Interpretation of Oral Poetry. Trends in Classics Supplementary, Volume 12. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Nagy, Gregory. 2013. The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
Rutter, Isaac Allen. 2023. Happiness in the Archaic Period: A comprehensive analysis of the evolution of happiness-related keywords during the Archaic Period. Final Thesis for Degree in Classical Philology (Greek). Faculty of Philology. University of Barcelona (Spain). Course: 2022-2023. Tutor: Sergi Grau Guijarro.
Steadman, Geoffrey. 2012. Herodotus, Book 1, Commentary. 2nd ed. Online.