Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/166

 150 fflSTORY OF GREECE. But even if no chronological objections existed, the moral pur pose of the tale is so prominent, and pervades it so systemat- stretches this testimony to an inadmissible extent when he makes it tanta- mount to a conquest of sEolis by Halyattes, ("so that sEolis is already con- quered") Nothing at all is said about JEolis, or the cities of the JEolic Greeks, in this passage of Nikolaus, which represents Croesus as governing a sort of satrapy under his father Halyattes, just as Cyrus the younger did in after-times under Artaxcrxes. And the expression of Herodotus, k-Kei TF, 66vTo<; TOV Trarpof, iKpurqae r^f apxvf 6 Kpotcrof, appears to me, when taken along with the context, to indicate a bequest or nomination of successor, and not a donation during life. 2. The hypothesis, therefore, that Croesus was king 570 B. c., during the lifetime of his father, is one purely gratuitous, resorted to on account of the chronological difficulties connected with the account of Herodotus. But it is quite insufficient for such a purpose ; it does not save us from the neces- sity of contradicting Herodotus in most of his particulars ; there may, per- haps, have been an interview between Solon and Croesus in B. c. 570, but it cannot be the interview described by Herodotus. That interview takes place within ten years after the promulgation of Solon's laws, at the maximum of the power of Croesus, and after numerous conquests effected by himself as king, at a time when Croesus had a son old enough to be married and to command armies (Herod, i, 35), at a time, moreover, immediately pro ceding the turn of his fortunes from prosperity to adversity, first in the death of his son, succeeded by two years of mourning, which were put an end to (TTtv&eof uTrercavae, Herod, i, 46) by the stimulus of war with the Fei sians. That war, if we read the events of it as described in Herodotus, cannot have lasted more than three or four years, so that the interview between Solon and Croesus, as Herodotus conceived it, may be fairly stated to have occurred within seven years before the capture of Sardis. If we put together all these conditions, it will appear that the interview recounted by Herodotus is a chronological impossibility : and Niebuhr (Rom. Scsch. vol. 5, p. 579) is right in saying that the historian has fallen into a mistake of ten olympiads, or forty years ; his recital would consist with chronology, if we suppose that the Solonian legislation were referable to 554 B. c., and not 594. In my judgment, this is an illustrative talc, in which certain real charac- ters, Croesus and Solon ; and certain real facts, the great power and succeeding ruin of the former by the victorious arm of Cyrus, together with certain facts probably altogether fictitious, such as the two sons of Croesus, the Phyrgian Adrastus and his history, the hunting of the mis chievous wild boar on Mount Olympus, the ultimate preservation of Croesus, etc., are put together so as to convey an impressive moral lesson. The whole adventure of Adrastus and the son of Croesus is depicted in language ^ninently beautiful and poetical. Plutarch treats the impressivencss and suitableness of this narrative as