Croesus

They know the story of King Croesus who, taken prisoner by Cyrus and condemned to die, cried “O Solon!

After someone told Cyrus of this, and after he sought to discover what it meant, Croesus told him that he was finding, at great personal cost, that the warning Solon had once given him was true:

Passion gave Croesus’s son a voice which nature had denied him.

Croesus, marching his army through certain waste lands near Sardis, met with an infinite number of serpents, which the horses devoured with great appetite, and which Herodotus says was a prodigy of ominous portent to his affairs.

Croesus, having caused a gentleman, the favorite of his brother Pantaleon, to be seized, carried him into a fuller’s shop, where he caused him to be scratched and carded with the cards and combs belonging to that trade, till he died.

Croesus reproached him with his bounty, and cast up to how much his treasure would amount if he had been a little closer-handed.

When all these answers were brought to him, every one of his friends, not thinking it enough barely to offer him so much as he had received from his bounty, and adding to it a great deal of his own, it appeared that the sum amounted to a great deal more than Croesus’sreckoning .