Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/229

SICILIAN AFFAIRS. -GELO AND HIS DYNASTY. 205 petty Sikan communities in the neighborhood : but exaction and cruelties towards his own subjects are noticed as his most prom- inent characteristic, and his brazen bull passed into imperishable memory. This piece of mechanism was hollow, and sufficiently capacious to contain one or more victims inclosed within it, to perish in tortures when the metal was heated: the cries of these suffering prisoners passed for the roarings of the animal. The artist was named Perillus, and is said to have been himself the first person burnt in it, by order of the despot. In spite of the odium thus incurred, Phalaris maintained himself as despot for sixteen years ; at the end of which period a general rising of the people, headed by a leading man named Telemachus, termin- ated both his reign and his life.i "Whether Telemachus became despot or not, we have no information : sixty years afterwards, we shall find his descendant Theron established in that position. It was about the period of the death of Phalaris that the Syracusans reconquered their revolted colony of Kamarina (in the southeast of the island between Syracuse and Gela), ex- pelled or dispossessed the inhabitants, and resumed the terri- tory .2 With the exception of this accidental circumstance, we axe without information about the Sicilian cities until a time ' Everything which has ever been said about Phalaris is noticed and dis- cussed in the learned and acute Dissertation of Bentley on the Letters of Phalaris : compare also Seyffert, Akragas und sein Gebiet, pp. 57-61, who, however, treats the pretended Letters of Phalaris with more consideration than the readers of Dr. Bentley will generally be disposed to sanction. The story of the brazen bull of Phalaris seems to rest on sufficient evi- dence : it is expressly mentioned by Pindar, and the bull itself, after having been carried away to Carthage when the Carthaginians took Agrigentum, was restored to the Agrigentines by Scipio when he took Carthage. See Aristot. Polit. V, 8,4; Pindar, Pyth. i, 185; Polyb. xii, 25; Diodor. xiii, 90 ; Cicero in Verr. iv, 33. It does not appear that Timaeus really called in question the historical reality of the bull of Phalaris, though he has been erroneously supposed to have done so. Timaeus affirmed that the bull which was shown in his own time at Agrigentum was not the identical machine : which was correct, for it must have been then at Carthage, from whence it was not restored to Vgrigentum until after 146 B.C. See a note of Boeckh on the Scholia ad Pindar. Pyth. i, 185. • Thucyd. vi, 5 ; Schol. ad Pindar. Olymp. v, 1 9 ; compare Wesseling ad Diodor. xi, 76.