Herodotus, Histories 1.51.1 · 1.51.1
Two bowls at the temple door
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Ἐπιτελέσας δὲ ὁ Κροῖσος ταῦτα ἀπέπεμπε ἐς Δελφούς, καὶ τάδε ἄλλα ἅμα τοῖσι, κρητῆρας δύο μεγάθεϊ μεγάλους, χρύσεον καὶ ἀργύρεον, τῶν ὁ μὲν χρύσεος ἔκειτο ἐπὶ δεξιὰ ἐσιόντι ἐς τὸν νηόν, ὁ δὲ ἀργύρεος ἐπʼ ἀριστερά.
When Croesus had finished all this, he sent it off to Delphi, and with it other gifts as well: two very large mixing bowls, one of gold and one of silver. Of these the golden one stood on the right as one enters the temple, and the silver one on the left.
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The setting
Croesus dispatches all his offerings to Delphi and places two great bowls, gold and silver, to flank the entrance.
A note on this passage
Epitelesas, "having brought to completion," closes the whole catalogue of melted gold and burnt purple from the previous section in a single participle, and only then does Croesus act: apepempe, "he sent it off." The sending is itself a decision. Everything so far has been made in Sardis; now it travels the length of Lydia and across the Aegean to arrive, as an object, at the god's own house.
Herodotus places the two bowls with the same precision he used for the lion's weight: epi dexia, "on the right," for the gold one, ep' aristera, "on the left," for the silver, both measured from the position of esionti, "one going in," a visitor walking through the temple door. The pairing by metal and the pairing by side mirror each other, gold right and silver left, the same balance that split the half-bricks of the section before into refined and pale. A reader standing at the threshold with Herodotus's sentence would know exactly where to look.
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