Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/762

730 P H A P H A and friends, in the brazen bull. A decree was carried that no one should thereafter wear a blue dress, as blue had been the tyrant s livery. After ages have held up Fhalaris to infamy for his excessive cruelty. In his brazen bull, invented, it is said, by Perilaus of Athens, and presented by him to Phalaris, the tyrant s victims were shut up and, a fire being kindled beneath, were roasted alive, while their shrieks, conveyed through pipes in the beast s nostrils, represented the bellowing of the bull. Perilaus himself is said to have been the first victim. There is hardly room to doubt that we have here a tradition of human sacrifice in connexion with the worship of the Phoenician Baal, such as prevailed at Rhodes, where Zeus Atabyrius was no other than Baal ; when misfortune threatened Rhodes the brazen bulls in his temple bellowed. The Rhodians brought this worship to Gela, which they founded conjointly with the Cretans, and from Gela it passed to Agrigentum. Human sacrifices to Baal were common, and, though in Phoenicia proper there is no proof that the victims were burned alive (see MOLOCH), the Carthaginians had a brazen image of Baal, from whose down- turned hands the children slid into a pit of fire ; and the story that Minos had a brazen man who pressed people to his glowing breast points to similar rites in Crete, where the child-devouring Minotaur must certainly be connected with Baal and the favourite sacrifice to him of children. So, too, we have the fire -spitting bull of Marathon which burned Androgeus. The stories that Phalaris threw men into boiling cauldrons and vessels filled with fire, and that he devoured sucklings, all tell the same tale. From this point of view we may perhaps reconcile with history the apparently con tradictory tradition which seems to have prevailed in later times, that Phalaris was a naturally humane man and a patron of philo sophy and literature. This is the view of his character which we find in the declamations ascribed to Lucian, and in the letters which bear Phalaris s own name. Plutarch, too, though he takes the unfavourable view, mentions that the Sicilians gave to the severity of Plialaris the name of justice and a hatred of crime. It is recorded that he once pardoned two men who had conspired against him. Phalaris may thus have been one of those men, not unknown in history, who combine justice and even humanity with a religious fanaticism which shrinks from no horrors believed to be demanded by the cause of God. The letters bearing the name of Phalaris (148 in number) are now chiefly remembered for the crushing exposure they received at the hands of Bentley in his controversy with the Hon. Charles Boyle, who had published an edition of them in 1695. The first edition of Bentley s Dissertation on Phalaris appeared in 1697, and the second edition, replying to the answer which Boyle published i)i 1693, came out in 1699. From the mention in the letters of towns (Phintia, Alajsa, and Tauromenium) which did not exist in the time of Plialaris, from the imitations of authors (Herodotus, Democritus, Euripides, Callimachus) who wrote long after he was dead, from the reference to tragedies, though tragedy was not yet invented in the lifetime of Phalaris, from the dialect, which is not Dorian but Attic, nay, New or Late Attic, as well as from absurdities in the matter, and the entire absence of any reference to them by any writer before Stobaeus (who lived apparently about 500 A.D.), Bentley sufficiently proved that the letters were written by a sophist or rhetorician hundreds of years after the death of Phalaris. Suidas admired the letters, which he thought genuine, and in modern times, before their exposure by Bentley, they were admired by some, e.g., by Sir William Temple, though others, as Politiau and Erasmus, perceived that they were not by Phalaris. There are editions of the epistles of Phalaris by Lennep and Valckenaer, Groningen, 1777 (re-edited, with corrections and additions, by Schaefer, Leipsic, 1823), and by R. Hercher, in Epistolographi Cried, Paris, 1873. The latest edition of Bentley s Dissertation is that with introduction and notes by W. Wagner, London, 1883. PHARAOH (rijna ; f>apaw), which the Old Testament often uses as if it were a proper name, applicable to any king of Egypt, though sometimes such a distinguishing name as Hophra ( Apries ; Jer. xliv. 30) or Nechoh (Nekos) (2 Kings xxiii. 29) is added, is really an Egyptian title of the monarch (Pefaa or Phuro), often found on the monu ments. Apart from Hophra and Necho the Biblical Pharaohs cannot, in the present state of Hebrew and Egyptian chronology, be identified with any certainty. PHARISEES (D^ETIS, &apuraioi), the Jewish party of the scribes, the opponents of the Sadducees. See ISRAEL, vol. xiii. p. 423 sy., and MESSIAH. PHARMACOPCEIA (lit. the art of the />ap/xa/co7roto s, or drug-compounder) in its modern technical sense denotes a book containing directions for the identification of simples and the preparation of compound medicines, and published by the authority of a Government or of a medical or pharmaceutical society. The name has also been applied to similar compendiums issued by private individuals. The first work of the kind published under Government authority appears to have been that of Nurem berg in 1542; a passing student named Valerius Cordus showed a collection of medical receipts, which he had selected from the writings of the most eminent medical authorities, to the physicians of the town, who urged him to print it for the benefit of the apothecaries, and obtained for his work the sanction of the senatus. An earlier work, known as the Antidotarium Florentinum, had been pub lished, but only under the authority of the college of medicine of Florence. The term "pharmacopoeia" first appears as a distinct title in a work published at Basel in 1561 by Dr A. Foes, but does not appear to have come into general use until the beginning of the 16th century. Before 1542 the Avorks principally used by apothecaries were the treatises on simples by Avicenna and Serapion ; the De Synonymis and Quid pro Quo of Simon Januensis the Liber Servitoris of Bulchasim Ben Aberazerim, which described the preparations made from plants, animals, and minerals, and was the type of the chemical portion of modern pharmacopoeias ; and the Antidotarium of Nicolaus de Salerno, containing Galenical compounds arranged al phabetically. Of this last work there were two editions in use, Nicolaus magnus and Nicolaus parvus ; in the latter, several of the compounds described in the larger edition were omitted and the formula given on a smaller scale. Until 1617 such drugs and medicines as were in common use were sold in England by the apothecaries and grocers. In that year the apothecaries obtained a separate charter, and it was enacted at the same time that no grocer should keep an apothecary s shop. The preparation of physicians prescriptions was thus confined to the apothecaries, upon whom pressure was brought to bear, in order to make them dispense accurately, by the issue of a pharmacopoeia in May 1618 by the College of Physicians, and by the power which the wardens of the apothecaries received in common with the censors of the College of Physicians of examining the shops of apothecaries within 7 miles of London and destroying all the compounds which they found unfaith fully prepared. This, which was the first authorized London Pharmacopoeia, was selected chiefly from the works of Mezue and Nicolaus de Salerno, with a few additions from those of other authors then in repute, but it was found to be so full of errors that the whole edition was cancelled, and a fresh one was published in the follow ing December. At this period the compounds employed in medicine were often heterogeneous mixtures, some of which contained from 20 to 70, or more ingredients, while a large number of simples were used in consequence of the same substance being supposed to possess different qualities according to the source from which it was derived. Thus crabs eyes, pearls, oyster-shells, and coral were supposed to have different properties. Among other disgusting ingredients entering into some of these formulae were the excrements of human beings, dogs, mice, geese, and other animals, calculi, human skull and moss growing on it, blind puppies, earthworms, &c. Although other editions of the London Pharmacopoeia were issued in 1621, 1632, 1639,and 1677, it was not until the edition of 1721, published under the auspices of Sir Hans Sloane, that any important altera tions were made. In this issue many of the ridiculous remedies previously in use were omitted, although a good number were still retained, such as dog s excrement, earth worms, and moss from the human skull ; the botanical names of herbal remedies were for the first time added to the official ones ; the simple distilled waters were ordered