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24 Crœsus should destroy a great empire, without saying what empire it should be. Crœsus had no right to interpret his words according to his own wish. As to the oracle about the mule, he might have known that Cyrus was a Persian by his father's side and a Mede by his mother's, and so a hybrid king." Crœsus was obliged to acquiesce in the explanation, and to take his fate patiently. His ruin was, indeed, no common bankruptcy. "As rich as Crœsus" soon grew into a vernacular proverb. Yet he was by no means a bad specimen of the millionaire. His gentleness and good-nature were as proverbial as his wealth, and Pindar, the Theban poet, testifies to this point doubtless for substantial reasons of his own:—

The strange vicissitudes of his life became a fertile subject for Greek romancers and moralists. His riches seem to have been derived partly from the grains of gold brought down in the sand of the river Pactolus, which made Asia Minor the California of antiquity. This was doubtless the origin of the fable of the Phrygian king Midas turning all that he touched to gold. It seems that Sardis in early times was an important place of trade, as Herodotus says that the Lydians were the first coiners of money and the first storekeepers, so far as was known. It was at the same time notorious as the great slave-market of the world.