previous next
92.

There are many offerings of Croesus' in Hellas, and not only those of which I have spoken. There is a golden tripod at Thebes in Boeotia, which he dedicated to Apollo of Ismenus; at Ephesus1 there are the oxen of gold and the greater part of the pillars; and in the temple of Proneia at Delphi, a golden shield.2 All these survived to my lifetime; but other of the offerings were destroyed. [2] And the offerings of Croesus at Branchidae of the Milesians, as I learn by inquiry, are equal in weight and like those at Delphi. Those which he dedicated at Delphi and the shrine of Amphiaraus were his own, the first-fruits of the wealth inherited from his father; the rest came from the estate of an enemy who had headed a faction against Croesus before he became king, and conspired to win the throne of Lydia for Pantaleon. [3] This Pantaleon was a son of Alyattes, and half-brother of Croesus: Croesus was Alyattes' son by a Carian and Pantaleon by an Ionian mother. [4] So when Croesus gained the sovereignty by his father's gift, he put the man who had conspired against him to death by drawing him across a carding-comb, and first confiscated his estate, then dedicated it as and where I have said. This is all that I shall say of Croesus' offerings.

1 The temple at Ephesus was founded probably in Alyattes' reign, and not completed till the period of the Graeco-Persian War.

2 The temple of Athena Proneia (= before the shrine) was situated outside the temple of Apollo.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Notes (W. W. How, J. Wells)
load focus Greek (1920)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Delphi (Greece) (3)
Ephesus (Turkey) (2)
Thebes (Greece) (1)
Lydia (Turkey) (1)
Greece (Greece) (1)
Branchidae (Turkey) (1)
Boeotia (Greece) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (32 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: