BETWEEN CRCESUS AND CYRUS. 19 the assailant, wishing to avenge his brother-in-law, to arrest the growth of the Persian conqueror, and to increase his own domin- ions : his more prudent councillors in vain represented to %i m that he had little to gain, and much to lose, by war with a nation alike hardy and poor. He is represented, as just at that time recovering from the affliction arising out of the death of his son. To ask advice of the oracle, before he took any final decision, was a step which no pious king would omit ; but in the present perilous question, Croesus did more, he took a precaution so extreme, that, if his piety had not been placed beyond all doubt by his extraordinary munificence to the temples, he might have drawn upon himself the suspicion of a guilty skepticism. 1 Be- fore he would send to ask advice respecting the project itself, he resolved to test the credit of some of the chief surrounding oracles, Delphi, Dodona, Branchidae near Miletus, Amphiaraus at Thebes, Trophonius at Lebadeia, and Ammon in Libya. His envoys started from Sardis on the same day, and were all directed on the hundredth day afterwards to ask at the respective oracles how Croesus was at that precise moment employed. This was a severe trial : of the manner in which it was met by four out of the six oracles consulted, we have no information, and it rather appears that their answers were unsatisfactory. But Amphiaraus maintained his credit undiminished, and Apollo at Delphi, more omniscient than Apollo at Branchidas, solved the question with such unerring precision, as to afford a strong additional argument against persons who might be disposed to scoff at divination. No sooner had the envoys put the question to the Delphian priestess, on the day named, "What is Croesus now doing?" than she ex- claimed, in the accustomed hexameter verse, 2 " I know the num- ber of grains of sand, and the measures of the sea ; I understand the dumb, and I hear the man who speaks not. The smell reaches me of a hard-skinned tortoise boiled in a copper with lamb's flesh, copper above and copper below." Croesus was 1 That this point of view should not be noticed in Herodotus, may appear singular, when we read his story (vi, 86) about the Milesian Glau- kus, and the judgment that overtook him foi having tested the oracle ; but it is put forward by Xenophon as constituting part of the guilt of Croesus (Cyropaed. vii, 2,17).
- Herodot. 47-50.
