This triumphant justification extorted even from Crœsus himself a full confession, that the sin lay with him, and not with the god.[341] It certainly illustrates, in a remarkable manner, the theological ideas of the time; and it shows us how much, in the mind of Herodotus, the facts of the centuries preceding his own, unrecorded as they were by any contemporary authority, tended to cast themselves into a sort of religious drama; the threads of the historical web being in part put together, in part originally spun, for the purpose of setting forth the religious sentiment and doctrine woven in as a pattern. The Pythian priestess predicts to Gygês that the crime which he had committed in assassinating his master would be expiated by his fifth descendant, though, as Herodotus tells us, no one took any notice of this prophecy until it was at last fulfilled:[342] we see thus that the history of the first Mermnad king is made up after the catastrophe of the last. There was something in the main facts of the history of Crœsus profoundly striking to the Greek mind: a king at the summit of wealth and power,—pious in the extreme, and munificent towards the gods,—the first destroyer of Hellenic liberty in Asia,—then precipitated, at once and on a sudden, into the abyss of ruin. The sin of the first parent helped much towards the solution of this perplexing problem, as well as to exalt the credit of the oracle, when made to assume the shape of an unnoticed prophecy. In the affecting story (discussed in a former chapter[343]) of Solon and Crœsus, the Lydian king is punished with an acute domestic affliction, because he thought himself the happiest of mankind,—the gods not suffering anyone to be arrogant except themselves;[344] and the warning of Solon is made to recur to Crœsus after he has become the prisoner of Cyrus, in the narrative of Herodotus. To the same vein of thought belongs the story, just recounted, of the relations of Crœsus with the Delphian oracle. An account is provided, satisfactory to the religious feelings of the Greeks, how and why he was ruined,—but nothing less than the overruling and omnipotent Mœræ could be invoked to explain so stupendous a result. [341] Herodot. i, 91. Ὁ δὲ ἀκούσας συνέγνω ἑωϋτοῦ εἶναι τὴν ἁμαρτάδα, καὶ οὐ τοῦ θεοῦ. Xenophon also, in the Cyropædia (vii, 2, 16-25), brings Crœsus to the same result of confession and humiliation, though by steps somewhat different. [342] Herodot. i, 13. [343] See above, chap, xi, vol. iii, pp. 149-153. [344] Herodot. vii, 10. οὐ γὰρ ἐᾷ φρονέειν ἄλλον μέγα ὁ θεὸς ἢ ἑωϋτόν.