Croesus, king of Lydia, showed a visiting sage the finest treasury in his world and asked to be named the most fortunate of men — and the whole case hangs on that question. Herodotus, whose Histories (c. 430 BC, in A. D. Godley's 1920–25 translation) carries nearly the entire record, stages the audience at Sardis: the storerooms opened on the king's orders, and Solon the Athenian, "offering no flattery but keeping to the truth", naming instead Tellus, a plain citizen with good children and a glorious death. The king — who would yet send Delphi a golden bowl and even his own wife's necklaces — was amazed, and unpersuaded.
The fall kept the oracle's grammar. The god had declared that if Croesus marched against the Persians "he would destroy a great empire"; he never sent to ask whose. Cyrus took Sardis, and the record closes the reign with its tersest arithmetic: "Croesus had ruled fourteen years and been besieged fourteen days". On the pyre the prisoner broke a long silence to call Solon's name three times, and Cyrus, hearing through interpreters what the Athenian had said of human fortune, ordered the fire quenched. The spared king sent his chains to Delphi to lie on the temple's doorstep, asking whether the god was not ashamed to deceive those who serve him; the priestess answered, it is said, that the god had delayed the city's fall three years, had saved Croesus from the burning, and that a man who asked no second question had only himself to blame. Croesus heard it and confessed that "the sin was not the god's, but his".
Then the record argues with itself. Plutarch, whose Solon comes some five centuries after Herodotus (c. 100 CE, imperial Greek, written under Trajan; in Bernadotte Perrin's 1914–1926 translation), sets the objection down squarely: as for the interview with Croesus, "some think to prove by chronology that it is fictitious" — by some reckonings of the dates, the two men could never have stood in the same room. And in the same breath he refuses the verdict: a story "so famous and so well-attested", and so worthy of Solon's wisdom, he will not reject out of deference to chronological canons that thousands were still revising without bringing their contradictions into agreement. So the shelf keeps its most famous scene with the doubt pinned beside it — told whole, disputed in the open, surrendered by no one.
When a life's best scene and its dates cannot both be true, which is the record keeping — the calendar, or the character?
Sources: Hdt. 1.30 · Hdt. 1.51 · Hdt. 1.86 · Hdt. 1.90 · Hdt. 1.91 · Plut. Solon 27