The Dionysus Statistic

Croesus knew the stories about King Midas and how he bathed for a long time in the river Pactolus to wash off his 'power' of turning everything to gold. As a thinking person, he must have realized that where there was smoke there may be fire, and, investigating, he found that the river in question was full of electrum, the volcanic alloy of silver and gold. And more than that too, evidently, he also was a believer in innovation and technology - such as it was back then - and utilized new ideas about separating gold from silver and other metals in the naturally-occurring alloys in order to make a very well-respected currency. This coin, called the stater, or standard, was actually made of less gold than other similar coins, but of a much higher purity.

A touch of gold, but only a touch,
and not too much!

It cost about 1/2 an ounce of gold per month to pay the salary of a soldier, and Croesus was able to preserve his power and position because of his ability to earn seigneurage on the money that he minted, and thus pay for a lot of soldiers.

Eventually though, his wealth attracted the attention of the lunatic Cyrus 'the Great'(!), who tried to kill him, and by some accounts did kill him.

I think there are a couple of points still relevant to the modern era that may be taken from the Croesus/Midas/Dionysus fables or folkloric histories:

One, that it pays to go where there is a lot of electrum flowing, if you seek to have gold.

And secondly, it probably also pays to keep your wealth as quiet as is practical to do; and this is not a rare idea of course.

What we are confronted with today, is a somewhat new environment in which a lunatic form of government, has succeeded in drawing off massive amounts of currency from the normal internal domestic flows of money and trade, and so it is not so easy to locate any 'river Pactolus' of the modern time...

Turkey, famous for roses,
gold, and King Midas - who was also a rose grower

The god Dionysus, being, as he is hard to grab hold of and stick into a laboratory in order to discover if he exists or is just a figment of someone's imagination - is not necessarily the agency of miraculous incident that one ought to focus on primarily to find out what 'Midas' will be created next, and therefore into whose bathing stream we ought to wade.

The more complex, the more 'attention deficit,' the more hyperactive, the more buzzing, the world gets, seemingly, the more accidents happen - and the more too, humans seem to be in the pathways of hurricanes and things like that.

On the one hand, given the tsunamis, the hurricanes, the floods, the earthquakes, the storms, the fires, and the acts of terrorism and/or revolt, it is notable that virtually no important person has ever been killed in one of them - no one, say, like any particularly important country's leader, or a major banker or industrialist or financier, or some judges or leading counsel.

Dionysus in ecstasy,
a moment from handing out a miracle or two

But, being a thinking and a logical person, I would venture to suggest that it is only a matter of time. And then I think, there is a certain kind of human psychology about political leaders and despots and tyrants and things, that it would pay to understand about, because there is nothing so humorous - or profitable - as to watch when a book-maker (turf accountant/ odds quote-r) looks around with that expression of: 'I didn't organize that! What just happened!'