The Croesus Mindset

There is so much interpretation and re-interpretation of history nowadays, that it is virtually a waste of time doing things like suggesting: 'the TRUTH about so-and-so REALLY was...'

And besides, how is it possible to encapsulate someone's whole life into a few short phrases or sentences or even a book?

Better to look at a lesson from history, or a particular complex idea expressed by way of some particular incident out of history.

And so in this piece I'd like to just look at one or two simple things we know about the legendarily wealthy King Croesus of Lydia (Turkey, today). We know he got gold from the river Pactolus, in which by myth or legend before him, King Midas washed in order to rid himself of the problematic blessing from the god Dionysus, which was namely that everything he touched would turn into gold.

The gold coin of King Croesus -
what are those symbols?!

We know he used innovations of the time, to do with separating silver from gold by heating the mixtures with plain salt - and issued fairly pure gold coins.

And we know that he instituted a treasury inside the Delphic Oracle of the Pythia.

What is less commonly known is that although the main Oracular centers took in gifts, they also distributed them out as well...

In Dodona, where the sacred Oak grove was, that also issued oracular pronouncements, 'mysterious gifts wrapped in straw would arrive from the Hyperboreans." Now the Hyperboreans lived in a place virtually no one had ever been to, way up North where it was both snowy as well as permanently in sunlight, full of pleasant corn fields and where no one got old, et cetera, et etera.

Croesus was a master of trading and he instituted and supported trade centers in his main home cities of Sardis and Ephesus.

In Winter, the god Apollo left the Delphic Oracle and holidayed in Hyperborea, with the gifts left behind, those mysterious ones wrapped tightly in straw, left to pacify the Delpheans in his absence.

And what is this all about?

...My point is to do with Midas, though. And not so much to do with what Croesus did after he got his main wealth.

Who is this Midas, really, and what is the myth about him based on - is it psychological, or magical and unreal; a fantasy of the human social mind?