(Gyges), who, conspiring with a woman, slew his
master and wrongfully seized the sceptre. Apollo employed all his
influence with the Moerae (Fates) to obtain that this sin might be
expiated by the children of Croesus, and not by Croesus himself; but
the Moerae would grant nothing more than a postponement of the judgment
for three years. Let Croesus know that Apollo has thus procured for him
a reign three years longer than his original destiny, after having tried
in vain to rescue him altogether. Moreover he sent that rain which at
the critical moment extinguished the burning pile. Nor has Croesus any
right to complain of the prophecy by which he was encouraged to enter on
the war; for when the god told him that he would subvert _a great
empire_, it was his duty to have again inquired which empire the god
meant; and if he neither understood the meaning, nor chose to ask for
information, he has himself to blame for the result. Besides, Croesus
neglected the warning given to him about the acquisition of the Median
kingdom by a mule: Cyrus was that mule--son of a Median mother of royal
breed, by a Persian father at once of different race and of lower
position."

This triumphant justification extorted even from Croesus himself a full
confession that the sin lay with him, and not with the god. It certainly
illustrates in a remarkable manner the theological ideas of the time. It
shows us how much, in the mind of Herodotus, the facts of the centuries
preceding his own, unrecorded as they were by any contemporary
authority, tended to cast themselves into a sort of religious drama; the
threads of the historical web being in part put together, in part
originally spun, for the purpose of setting forth the religious
sentiment and doctrine woven in as a pattern. The Pythian priestess
predicts to Gyges that the crime which he had committed in assassinating
his master would be expiated by his fifth descendant, though, as
Herodotus tells us, no one took any notice of this prophecy until it was
at last fulfilled: we see thus the history of the first Mermnad king is
made up after the catastrophe of the last. There was something in the
main facts of the history of Croesus profoundly striking to the Greek
mind, a king at the summit of wealth and power--pious in the extreme and
munificent toward the gods--the first destroyer of Hellenic liberty in
Asia--then precipitated, at once and on a sudden, into the abyss of
ruin. The sin of the first