for the sin of his fifth ancestor (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 parent helped much toward the solution of this perplexing problem, as well as to exalt the credit of the oracle, when made to assume the shape of an unnoticed prophecy.  In the affecting story of Solon and Croesus, the Lydian king is punished with an acute domestic affliction because he thought himself the happiest of mankind—­the gods not suffering any one to be arrogant except themselves; and the warning of Solon is made to recur to Croesus after he has become the prisoner of Cyrus, in the narrative