2. The hypothesis, therefore, that Crœsus was king 570 B. C., during the lifetime of his father, is one purely gratuitous, resorted to on account of the chronological difficulties connected with the account of Herodotus. But it is quite insufficient for such a purpose; it does not save us from the necessity of contradicting Herodotus in most of his particulars; there may, perhaps, have been an _interview_ between Solon and Crœsus in B. C. 570, but it cannot be _the interview_ described by Herodotus. That interview takes place within ten years after the promulgation of Solon’s laws,—at the maximum of the power of Crœsus, and after numerous conquests effected by himself as king,—at a time when Crœsus had a son old enough to be married and to command armies (Herod, i, 35),—at a time, moreover, immediately preceding the turn of his fortunes from prosperity to adversity, first in the death of his son, succeeded by two years of mourning, which were put an end to (πένθεος ἀπέπαυσε, Herod. i, 46) by the stimulus of war with the Persians. That war, if we read the events of it as described in Herodotus, cannot have lasted more than three or four years,—so that the interview between Solon and Crœsus, _as Herodotus conceived it_, may be fairly stated to have occurred within seven years before the capture of Sardis. If we put together all these conditions, it will appear that the interview recounted by Herodotus is a chronological impossibility: and Niebuhr (Rom. Gesch. vol. i, p. 579) is right in saying that the historian has fallen into a mistake of ten olympiads, or forty years; his recital would consist with chronology, if we suppose that the Solonian legislation were referable to 554 B. C., and not 594. In my judgment, this is an illustrative tale, in which certain real characters,—Crœsus and Solon; and certain real facts,—the great power and succeeding ruin of the former by the victorious arm of Cyrus,—together with certain facts probably altogether fictitious, such as the two sons of Crœsus, the Phyrgian Adrastus and his history, the hunting of the mischievous wild boar on Mount Olympus, the ultimate preservation of Crœsus, etc., are put together so as to convey an impressive moral lesson. The whole adventure of Adrastus and the son of Crœsus is depicted in language eminently beautiful and poetical.