Herodotus, Histories 1.56.1 · 1.56.1
Croesus seeks allies
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Τούτοισι ἐλθοῦσι τοῖσι ἔπεσι ὁ Κροῖσος πολλόν τι μάλιστα πάντων ἥσθη, ἐλπίζων ἡμίονον οὐδαμὰ ἀντʼ ἀνδρὸς βασιλεύσειν Μήδων, οὐδʼ ὦν αὐτὸς οὐδὲ οἱ ἐξ αὐτοῦ παύσεσθαι κοτὲ τῆς ἀρχῆς. μετὰ δὲ ταῦτα ἐφρόντιζε ἱστορέων τοὺς ἂν Ἑλλήνων δυνατωτάτους ἐόντας προσκτήσαιτο φίλους,
When these verses reached him, Croesus was more delighted with them than with anything, thinking that a mule would never be king of the Medes instead of a man, and that neither he himself nor his descendants would ever cease from their rule. After this he turned his thought to inquiring which of the Greeks were the most powerful, so that he might win them over as friends.
Word by word
The setting
Croesus is delighted, thinking a mule could never rule the Medes; he turns to finding the strongest Greeks as allies.
A note on this passage
Croesus hears "mule" and relaxes completely: no four-legged animal is going to rule the Medes, so his throne and his children's throne are safe forever, he thinks. Hēstheē, "he was delighted," is a strong word, more pleasure than anything else in the whole embassy has given him. The oracle has told him the exact truth, in a word whose second meaning he has missed entirely; Herodotus will spell out, much later in this book, exactly who the "mule" turns out to be.
The next sentence turns a reassured man into a planning one, and the verb is historeōn, "inquiring," the same root Herodotus uses for his own book, the inquiries that give the work its name. The king who built a hundred-day experiment to test nine oracles now runs a smaller test on Greece itself: which city is strongest? He is not asking out of curiosity. He wants philous, "friends," which in the mouth of a king about to face Persia means allies, and the inquiry will carry him, within a sentence, into the oldest story Herodotus knows: who the Greeks are and where they came from.
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