In March 2005 a rescue excavation uncovered a spectacular new epigraphic find from Thebes. Now on display in the Archaeological Museum of Thebes, a column drum 0.41 m in height has inscribed on it two identical epigrams, one (the older one) written vertically in Boeotian script and a second (later) Ionian copy written horizontally on the other side. Nikolaos Papazarkadas published the editio princeps of the epigram in 2014, using both inscriptions to create a composite text.Footnote ¹ As Papazarkadas realized, the column drum, which has a chi-shaped orifice at one end meant to hold a stationary object, at one point displayed a ‘shining shield’ (φαεννὰν | [ἀσπ]ίδα, lines 3–4) that Herodotus had seen in the temple of Apollo Ismenius in Thebes.Footnote ² Moreover, this shield was interpreted by Herodotus (relying on the language of the inscription and likely on the commentary of temple staff) as having been dedicated by the Lydian king Croesus to the hero Amphiaraus,Footnote ³ when he was ‘testing’ the various oracles in Greece in order to decide on a course of action against his rival Cyrus of Persia.Footnote ⁴

Text (after Papazarkadas [n. 1 above]):

Translation:

As we can see immediately, the inscription on the column is not a straightforward dedication: it is actually the work of a temple supervisor ([ἐ]πιστάς, line 2, or, less likely, [θεσ]πιστάς, ‘prophet’, per Thonemann). It seems that the shield, initially set up at Croesus’ behest at the Amphiaraion,Footnote ⁵ had been stolen (ἐκλέφθε, line 6), but through consultation of Apollo's oracle the temple official at the Ismenion had been able to recover it. The column thus both rededicates Croesus’ original offering and also serves as a thank-offering (χάρις) on the part of the official. This chain of events explains how Croesus’ dedication to Amphiaraus in his shrine eventually came to be housed in the Ismenion instead.Footnote ⁶

The portion of the text crucial for the present argument is the following: the inscription says that Croesus once ‘set up’ (or maybe ‘dedicated’, ἀνέθεκεν, line 5 [restored by Thonemann]) the shining shield to Amphiaraus ‘as a memorial of his excellence [and suffering (pathê)]’.Footnote ⁷ Papazarkadas rightly restored the latter half of the collocation ‘excellence and suffering’, because this is precisely how Herodotus describes the shield: ‘Learning of his excellence and suffering, Croesus dedicated to Amphiaraus a shield made entirely of gold and a solid spear entirely of gold.’Footnote ⁸ Here is striking material evidence for one of Herodotus’ claims: the temple official's dedication, probably erected (based on letter-forms) c.500 b.c.e., was seen by Herodotus in the mid fifth century and taken as evidence that Croesus honoured the hero Amphiaraus, after having learned of his mythological background, as a brave but tragic figure in the story of the Seven against Thebes.Footnote ⁹

In a recent, ingenious argument, Peter Thonemann has questioned Herodotus’ identification of the shield dedicator with the Lydian king.Footnote ¹⁰ He posits that it was a different Croesus, known from another epigraphic source, who had the shield set up. Thonemann finds it strange that Croesus would have expressed his admiration for Amphiaraus through the expression ‘a memorial of his excellence and suffering’. Typically a ‘memorial’ (mnêma) is of the dedicator's virtues and achievements, not of the deity or hero honoured by the dedication.Footnote ¹¹ Here Thonemann's argument relies on the assumption that the language of the temple official's dedication as preserved in the inscription relies, ultimately, on an ‘original, two-line dedicatory epigram’.Footnote ¹² In other words, the temple official knew the exact phrasing of Croesus’ initial dedication and either reproduces or reformulates it at lines 4–5. Since Thonemann assumes, on this basis, that the memorial is of the dedicator's qualities, he finds it likely that the ‘excellence and suffering’ mentioned refer to the excellence and suffering experienced by the dedicator, specifically in a military context. The dedicator fought well (his aretê) and died in battle (his pathê), both of which qualities are celebrated by the epigram and the accompanying shield.

But who, on this reading, is Croesus? He is, Thonemann suggests, the only other such named person known from the Archaic period, from an Attic sepulchral epigram of the mid sixth century.Footnote ¹³ Although, as Thonemann admits (quoting Meiggs and Lewis), ‘dead men do not make dedications’, he still finds it likely that the Attic Croesus (or, rather, his family) posthumously made the dedication to Amphiaraus after he died in battle.Footnote ¹⁴ (Thonemann adduces the example of the [dead] polemarch Callimachus’ dedication after Marathon.Footnote ¹⁵) On this reading, Herodotus passed along a misinterpretation, foisted on him (whether knowingly or not) by the Ismenion temple attendants, who mistook a dead member of the Athenian elite for the famous Lydian king.Footnote ¹⁶

Thonemann's reading makes sense of certain idiosyncrasies in the language of the epigram, and it brings together our existing pieces of evidence in one possible (though very complex) reconstruction of Croesus’ identity.Footnote ¹⁷ However, we should consider other factors that eliminate the need to reject the simpler story, namely that Croesus the king dedicated the shield to Amphiaraus.Footnote ¹⁸ Thonemann's doubts arise because of the language of the inscription that Herodotus directly drew upon, that Croesus learned of Amphiaraus’ aretê and pathê: ‘It is hard to see why his “virtue and suffering” should have mattered to Croesus one way or the other.’Footnote ¹⁹ But we should remember that this explanation for Croesus’ dedication was supplied by the temple official when he had the column inscribed—it need not be the original dedicator's wording. Croesus the king may very well have dedicated the shield to the Boeotian hero because of his ‘oracular capacities’, as Thonemann says; the temple official, however, was free to interpret (or misinterpret) Croesus’ intentions in whatever terms seemed likely to him.

And honouring a hero ‘for his suffering’ was perfectly normal, as Herodotus himself reveals. In a famous if bemusing digression, the historian describes how Cleisthenes the tyrant of Sicyon altered his home city's hero-cult to Adrastus. Since he was at war with Argos and wanted to do down all things Argive, Cleisthenes sought to eliminate the prestige of the Argive hero. He therefore introduced a new cult, to the Theban Melanippus, and transferred Adrastus’ sacrifices and festivals to it. In addition to these honours, Herodotus says, the Sicyonians ‘used to celebrate his [Adrastus’] sufferings [ta pathea autou] with tragic choruses’.Footnote ²⁰

Herodotus’ story about Cleisthenes and the cult of Adrastus remains an enormous puzzle. Historians continue to question almost every element of it: its very historicity; the motivations attributed to Cleisthenes by Herodotus; the political meaning(s) of Cleisthenes’ supposed act; the source(s) for the story and the role played by Herodotus’ own authorial programme.Footnote ²¹ Nevertheless, what seems certain from the episode is that, whatever the truth of the tale, Herodotus found it unremarkable that a hero (and a hero connected with the ‘Seven against Thebes’ cycle at that) would be honoured ‘for his suffering’. The casual way in which he reports this element constitutes evidence that it was a common conception at the time of what the point of hero-cult was supposed to be. Indeed, as Gregory Nagy has shown, the suffering (pathos) of the hero, that which he undergoes (paschein), was a central component both of the picture of the hero in poetry and of the ritual practices involved in heroic cult.Footnote ²²

A particularly striking piece of evidence for this comes from Herodotus’ older contemporary Pindar. In the eighth Pythian Ode, the poet has precisely Amphiaraus, in his capacity as seer, foretell the fate of Adrastus just prior to the second assault on Thebes by the epigoni: ‘The hero [hêrôs] Adrastus, distressed by his earlier suffering [patha], now meets with a message from a better bird of omen; but back at home he will fare the opposite.’Footnote ²³ Pindar has Amphiaraus mention Adrastus’ misfortune at the very moment when he is labelled a hero, a poetic choice I do not believe is accidental, especially in the context of the Seven against Thebes.Footnote ²⁴

In fact, there are good reasons for thinking that Pindar himself believed that the golden shield in the Ismenion was dedicated by Croesus the Lydian king. The language of the epigram finds echoes in a passage of Pindar's song and therefore may reflect personal knowledge and autopsy of the monument on the part of the poet.Footnote ²⁵ Pindar concludes his first Pythian Ode of 470 b.c.e., for the tyrant Hiero, with a contrast between two tyrannical figures, one positive and the other negative: ‘The friendly-minded generosity of Croesus does not fade, but everywhere a hateful account covers Phalaris, he who burned people with the bronze bull, pitiless of mind.’Footnote ²⁶ In approaching this remark we should begin with the background assumption that, as a Theban, Pindar was familiar with the Ismenion and its contents, including dedications by Croesus. He refers explicitly to the Ismenion in Pythian 11 as a ‘sacred storehouse of golden tripods’, confirming Herodotus’ account that, on a separate occasion, Croesus the Lydian king dedicated just such a tripod to Apollo Ismenius.Footnote ²⁷ But was the Croesus column published by Papazarkadas also in the Ismenion at the time of the first Pythian Ode and, if so, did Pindar consider it the dedication of the Lydian?

On this front, it is striking that Pindar describes Croesus’ generosity as ‘never fading’, οὐ φθίνει: imperishability (being aphthitos) is frequently predicated of gold in archaic poetry, and in fact Pindar himself links them elsewhere when he calls the Golden Fleece the ‘imperishable coverlet, the fleece radiant with golden tassel’.Footnote ²⁸ The solid gold shield dedicated by Croesus (Hdt. 1.52), the ‘shining shield’ of the epigram, would also have been understood as imperishable. Furthermore, Pindar uses aretê to signify Croesus’ generosity, a word that appears in the text of the epigram itself.Footnote ²⁹ Thus there is a strong possibility that Pindar, whether consciously or not, drew upon the combination of precious metal and inscribed word, of gold and aretê, present in Croesus’ agalma when he paid tribute to Croesus in Pythian 1. This interpretation gains ground when we consider that the point of contrast with Croesus’ generosity is precisely a material object, the ‘bronze bull’ in which the tyrant Phalaris roasted his enemies alive. On the physical level, as often in his poetry, Pindar links the gold of the shield with the everlasting kleos that Croesus enjoys, just as Phalaris’ bad reputation finds concrete form in the bronze of the bull (a metal inferior in status to gold).Footnote ³⁰ Finally, to what exactly does Pindar refer when he mentions the ‘kindly-minded generosity’ of Croesus? For what act would Pindar admire the Lydian king? As we have already seen, Croesus dedicated a golden tripod to Apollo Ismenius, a gesture of munificence and piety that would likely impress the Theban poet. A dedication to the Boeotian hero Amphiaraus, however, would find just as much favour.Footnote ³¹ In sum, it seems highly likely that the Croesus column, already in place in the Ismenion, informed Pindar's poetic language on the occasion of Hiero's victory.Footnote ³²

Of course, this identification on the poet's part does not necessarily constitute evidence for the true identity of the dedicator, since Pindar could have been misled by temple staff no less than Herodotus. However, since Pindar was older than Herodotus, having been born c.520, he could plausibly have been a witness of the original dedication, before it was lost, recovered and re-erected c.500. If he did not question the identity of the Croesus from the Ismenion pillar after having seen the original, then we would have even less reason to believe that the first version of the monument was not by the Lydian Croesus but by someone else. However, his knowledge of the original dedication to Amphiaraus must remain unknown.Footnote ³³ It is impossible, though, that before his death some time after 446 Pindar did not know of the column viewed by Herodotus. And it is very unlikely that the column was erected in the generational span between Pindar's composition of the first Pythian Ode in 470 and Herodotus’ viewing of it.Footnote ³⁴ Thus, if the foregoing account is convincing, then it seems that Herodotus, Pindar and the cult personnel of the temple of Apollo Ismenius all believed the golden shield to be a gift of the Mermnad dynast, and we should too.