Herodotus, Histories 1.86.3 · 1.86.3
Solon! Solon! Solon!
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τὸν μὲν δὴ ποιέειν ταῦτα· τῷ δὲ Κροίσῳ ἑστεῶτι ἐπὶ τῆς πυρῆς ἐσελθεῖν, καίπερ ἐν κακῷ ἐόντι τοσούτῳ, τὸ τοῦ Σόλωνος ὥς οἱ εἴη σὺν θεῷ εἰρημένον, τὸ μηδένα εἶναι τῶν ζωόντων ὄλβιον. ὡς δὲ ἄρα μιν προσστῆναι τοῦτο, ἀνενεικάμενόν τε καὶ ἀναστενάξαντα ἐκ πολλῆς ἡσυχίης ἐς τρὶς ὀνομάσαι Σόλων.
He indeed was doing this. But as Croesus stood on the pyre, even in such great trouble, the saying of Solon came to him, how it had been spoken to him with a god, that no one of the living was happy. And as this then came upon him, having caught his breath and groaned aloud, out of a long silence he called out three times: Solon.
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The setting
As Croesus stands on the pyre, Solon's old saying comes back to him: that no living man is happy. He groans and cries out the name three times.
A note on this passage
Herodotus slips into the historic infinitive here, eselthein, "it came into his mind," a grammatical shortcut Greek narrative uses to move through a string of events without stopping for a finite verb at every step; three sentences in a row run this way, as if the pace of the telling matched the heat climbing the pyre. What comes to Croesus carries a specific label, syn theōi eirēmenon, "spoken with a god," Herodotus's own gloss on the conversation from chapter 32. The phrase lifts Solon's warning above ordinary human advice: delivered with more than human insight, it reads as something closer to prophecy than to a clever Athenian's opinion.
The scene ends on the bluntest possible stage direction: out of a long silence, es tris, "three times," Croesus calls one word. Herodotus places the name itself, Solōn, as the very last word of the Greek sentence, the position Greek reserves for emphasis, so the reader arrives at the same name Croesus is shouting. A threefold cry is the kind of gesture a Greek audience would recognize as ritual, the way one calls on the dead or on a god, and for a moment it stays ambiguous whether Croesus is praying or simply breaking.
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Herodotus, Histories 1.86.3 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/herodotus/1.86.3/