Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Candaules, last of the Heraclid kings of Lydia, was so enamored of his own wife’s beauty that he insisted his bodyguard Gyges see her naked and so confirm the boast. Gyges protested the law that each look upon one’s own; Candaules hid him behind the chamber door. The queen glimpsed the watcher as he slipped out, understood her husband’s deed, and the next day summoned Gyges: he must either kill Candaules and take throne and marriage, or die himself for having seen what he should not. Gyges chose survival. The queen positioned him with a dagger in the same chamber; he killed Candaules in sleep and ruled as Gyges the Mermnad. Delphi—bribed with Lydian silver—confirmed the kingship but foresaw vengeance on the fifth descendant (Croesus). Herodotus offers the story as the beginning of Croesus’s house and as a moral on shame, tyranny, and the glance that cannot be unseen. Greek reception kept it as the classic Lydian intrigue: a husband’s hybris against marital privacy breeds usurpation with the wronged wife as judge.