Cyrus, king of
the Medes and Persians, the same who overcame Assyria, took Babylon, and
restored Jerusalem, and who was now subduing Asia Minor. Croesus asked
council of all the oracles, but first he tried their truth. He bade his
messenger ask the oracle at Delphi what he was doing while they were
inquiring. The answer was--

"Lo, on my sense striketh the smell of a shell-covered tortoise
Boiling on the fire, with the flesh of a lamb, in a cauldron;
Brass is the vessel below, brass the cover above it."

Croesus was really, as the most unlikely thing to be guessed, boiling a
tortoise and a lamb together in a brazen vessel. Sure now of the truth
of the oracle, he sent splendid gifts, and asked whether he should go to
war with Cyrus. The answer was that, if he did, a mighty kingdom would
be overthrown.

He thought it meant the Persian, but it was his own. Lydia was overcome,
Sardis, his capital, was burnt, and he was about to be slain, when,
remembering the warning, "Call no man happy till his death," he cried
out, "O Solon, Solon, Solon!"

Cyrus heard him, and bade that he should be asked what it meant. The
story so struck the great king, that he spared Croesus, and kept him as
his adviser for the rest of his life.

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CHAP. XV.--PISISTRATUS AND HIS SONS. B.C. 558-499.

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After all the pains that Solon had taken to guard the freedom of the
Athenians, his system had hardly begun to work before his kinsman
Pisistratus, who was also of the line of Codrus, overthrew it. First
this man pretended to have been nearly murdered, and obtained leave to
have a guard of fifty men, armed with clubs; and with these he made
everyone afraid of him, so that he had all the power, and became tyrant
of Athens. He was once driven out, but he found a fine, tall, handsome
woman, a flower-girl, in one of the villages of Attica, dressed her in
helmet and cuirass, like the goddess Pallas, and came into Athens in a
chariot with her, when she presented him to the people as their ruler.
The common people thought she was their goddess, and Pisistratus had
friends among the rich, so he recovered his power, and he did not, on the
whole, use it badly. He made a kind law, decreeing that a citizen who
had been maimed in battle should be provided for by the State, and he was
the first Greek to found a library, and col