140 THE MYTHS OF CREATION: THE GODS
This was the nature of his answer to Croesus, and afterward they left
equipped with a band of picked young men and dogs. When they came to the
mountain Olympus they hunted the wild beast, and after they had found him
they stood in a circle round about and hurled their weapons. Then the stranger,
the guest and friend who had been cleansed of murder, who was called Adras-
tus, hurled his javelin at the boar, but missed him, and hit the son of Croesus,
who, struck by the point of the weapon, fulfilled the prediction of the dream;
someone ran to Croesus, as a messenger of what had happened, and when he
came to Sardis he told him of the battle and the fate of his child.
Croesus was greatly distressed by the death of his son and was even more
disturbed because the very one whom he himself had purified had killed him.
Overcome by his misfortune, Croesus called terribly on Zeus the Purifier, in-
voking him to witness that he had suffered at the hands of the stranger and
guest-friend; he called on him too as god of the hearth and as god of friendship,
giving this same god these different names: god of the hearth because he did
not realize that he received in his palace and nourished as a guest the murderer
of his son, and god of friendship because he sent him along as a guardian and
found him to be his greatest enemy.
Afterward the Lydians arrived with the corpse and the murderer followed
behind. He stood before the dead body and stretching forth his hands surren-
dered himself to Croesus; he bade Croesus slaughter him over the corpse, telling
of his former misfortune and how in addition to it he had destroyed the one who
had cleansed him, and life for him was not worth living. Croesus heard and took
pity on Adrastus although he was enmeshed in so great a personal evil, and he
spoke to him: "I have complete justice from yourself, my guest and friend, since
you condemn yourself to death. You are not the one responsible for this evil (ex-
cept insofar as you did the deed unwillingly), but some one of the gods some-
where who warned me previously of the things that were going to be."
Croesus now buried his son as was fitting; and Adrastus, the son of Gor-
dias, the son of Midas, this murderer of his own brother and murderer of the
one who purified him, when the people had gone and quietness settled around
the grave, conscious that he was the most oppressed by misfortune of mankind,
slaughtered himself on the tomb.Croesus' personal and domestic tragedy was compounded by his political
downfall. Daily the power of Cyrus the Great and the Persians was growing;
and as they extended their empire to the west, Croesus' own kingdom of Lydia
eventually was absorbed. In this crisis, Croesus consulted various oracles and
came to believe that the one of Apollo at Delphi alone could speak the truth. He
sent magnificent offerings to Delphi and inquired of the oracle whether or not
he should go to war with the Persians. The Delphic reply is perhaps the most
famous oracle of all time, typically ironic in its simple ambiguity: if Croesus at-
tacked the Persians he would destroy a mighty empire. Croesus, of course,
thought he would destroy the empire of the Persians; instead he brought an end
to his own. Through Croesus' suffering the wisdom of Solon was confirmed.
Herodotus tells of the fall of Sardis (the capital of Lydia) and the fate of