Croesus’ Story in the History of Armenia of Movsēs Xorenac‘i

In a brief and puzzling section (2.12–13) of his monumental History of Armenia, Moses of Khoren assigns to the Armenian king Artašēs I many military deeds, which include the capture of the Lydian king Croesus and the conquest of the Lydian kingdom. Moreover, this peculiar tradition, with its internal variants, is followed by Moses against the authority of Eusebius’ Chronicon, and is attributed to four, otherwise unknown, “Greek historians”. This paper aims to investigate these interesting chapters from a historical and a historiographical point of view, on the one hand because they preserve a tradition which is completely different both from the Greek (mostly Herodotean) and Persian vulgata about the fate of Croesus, and on the other because Moses’ text is interwoven with echoes, phrases and episodes taken from the classical historiographical models.