"Cer

he thought Zancle and Messana two different towns. tainly," says Bentley, "the true Phalaris could not write thus; and it is a piece of ignorance inexcusable in our sophist not to know that these names belonged to one and the same city at different times." But perhaps the change from the early name of Zancle to the later one of Messana may have happened during the progress of these very Letters. The present arrangement of the Letters is indeed inconsistent with that supposition, for it is the 85th which mentions the old name Zancle, whilst the 1st, 21st, and 84th mention Messana. But that objection, if there were no other, might be eluded by supposing the particular order in which the letters stand in our present editions to have been either purely accidental, or even arbitrarily devised by some one of the early librarii. But, allowing all this, the evasion of Bentley's argument will yet be impossible on grounds of chronology. Thucydides tells us the occasion of that irreparable expulsion which the Zancleans had suffered, and the time-viz. about the last year of the 70th Olympiad.1 The same author states the circumstances under which the new name Messana arose; and though he does not precisely date this latter incident, he says generally that it was où toλλ vσTEPOV (not long after the other). Separate parts of this statement are corroborated by other historians; and upon the whole, taking the computus least favourable to Bentley, the new name of Messana appears not to have been imposed by Anaxilaus until more than sixty years after Phalaris was dead and gone. One objection there is undoubtedly to this argument, and Bentley frankly avows Pausanias antedates Anaxilaus by not less than 180 years. But there is no

it:

1 "The 70th Olympiad" :—I will here make the reader a present of an exceedingly useful direction for the ready management of Olympiads, whenever he gets into a chronological dispute in a railway carriage going 45 miles an hour. Multiply the particular Olympiad by 4. This cannot be very difficult. Here, for example, multiply 70 into 4, and the product will be 280. Good and what is he to do with that? Put it into his waistcoat-pocket? Why, yes, if he pleases; but first let him subtract it from 777. Now 280, subtracted from 777, leaves 497; and that expresses the Olympic or Grecian period in the Christian equivalent of years B. C. The calamity of Zancle, therefore, occurred nearly 500 years before the birth of Christ.

need to recite the various considerations which invalidate his authority, since the argument derived from him is one of those which prove too much. Doubtless, it would account for the use of "Messana" in the Letters of Phalaris, but so effectually account for it as to make it impossible that any other name should have been familiarly employed at an age when "Zancle" must have been superannuated by a century. Such is the dilemma in which Bentley has noosed his enemies; skilfully leaving it a matter of indifference to his own cause whether they accept or reject the authority of Pausanias.

From this dilemma, however, Boyle attempts to escape, by taking a distinction between the town and the people who drew their name from it. Zancleans, he thinks, might subsist under that name long after Zancle had changed its masters and forfeited its name. But this hypothesis is destroyed by means of an inscription which Bentley cites from a statue at Olympia, connected with the comment of the person who records it. The statue, it seems, had been set up by Evagoras, who inscribed himself upon it as a Zanclean; from which single word the recorder infers the antiquity of the statue, arguing that the mere name Zanclaan" sufficiently proved its era to have been anterior to the imposition of the modern name of Messana; whereas clearly, had there been a race of Zancleans who survived (under that name) the city of Zancle, this argument would have been without force, and could not have occurred to the writer who builds upon it.

The fifth argument will perhaps not be thought so entirely satisfactory as it seemned to Bentley. Phalaris, in threatening the people of Himera, says, αὐτοὺς ἐκτρίψω TÍTVOS SíkηV-("I will crush them like a pine-tree"); that is to say, root and branch. Now, this Delphic threat, and in these identical words, appears first of all in Herodotus, who explains the force of it to lie in this-that of all trees the pine only was radically destroyed by mere lopping. That historian ascribes the original use of this significant allusion to Croesus, who did not even begin his reign until six years after the pretended use of it by Phalaris. But Bentley conceives that he has sufficient reason to father it upon

Herodotus himself; in which case it will be younger than the age of Phalaris by a century. But I confess myself dissatisfied, or, if that word is too strong, imperfectly satisfied. "We see," says Bentley, "the phrase was then" (¿.e., in the time of Crœsus) "so new and unheard of that it puzzled a whole city." But it is probable that accidents of place, rather than of time, would determine the intelligibility of this proverb: wherever the pine-tree was indigenous, and its habits familiarly known, the allusion would suggest itself, and the force of it would be acknowledged, no matter in what age. And, as to the remark that Aulus Gellius, in the title of a chapter now lost, seems to consider Herodotus as the real author of the saying, it amounts to nothing: at this day we should be apt to discuss any vulgar error which has the countenance of Shakspere under a title such as this— "On the Shaksperian notion that a toad is venomous"; meaning merely to remind our readers that this notion has a real popular hold and establishment, not surely that Shakspere was the originator of it. The authority of Eustathius, so very modern an author, adds no strength at all to Bentley's hypothesis. No real links of tradition could possibly connect two authors removed from each other by nearly two thousand years. Eustathius ascribes, or seems to ascribe, the mot to Herodotus, not in a personal sense, but as a shorthand way of designating the book in which it is originally found. The truth is that such a proverb would be co-eval and co-extensive with the tree. Symbolical forms are always delightful to a semi-barbarous age; such, for instance, as the emblematic advice of that silent monitor to a tyrant, who, walking through a garden, and desiring to suggest the policy of removing the aristocracy, as a hostile force, cut off the heads of all the plants which overtopped the rest. Threats more especially assume this form: where they are perfectly understood, they are thus made more lively and significant; and, on the other hand, where they are enigmatical, the uncertainty (according to a critical remark of Demetrius Phalereus) points the attention to them under a peculiar advantage of awe and ominous expectation. This point I might exemplify by citing the symbolic menace of the Scythians to Darius Histaspes-viz. a bow and arrows,

a mouse, and something beside, I forget what; which menace was so mystical that neither the Persian king, nor anybody since his time, has been able to unfold its worshipful meaning. But the Scythians, as savages, and also as fathers of all Tartars, consequently grandfathers of all Chinese, were notoriously blockheads; consequently might not think a meaning essential to a post-paid letter.

The sixth argument is another case of the second and fourth. Phalaris exults that he had routed the Tauromenites and the Zancleans. "But," says Bentley, "there is an old true saying- Πολλὰ καινὰ τοῦ πολέμου — many new and strange things happen in war'). We have just now seen those same routed Zanclæans rise up again, after a thousand years, to give him a worse defeat. And now the others, too, are taking their time to revenge their old losses: for these, though they are called Tauromenites both here and in three other letters, make protestation against the name, and declare they were called Naxians in the days of the true Phalaris. 'Taurominium, quæ antea Naxos,' says Pliny. Whence it is that Herodotus and Thucydides, because they wrote before the change of the name, never speak of Taurominium, but of Naxos."

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Yet it will be objected that Bentley himself has made Pythagoras contemporary with Phalaris: now of this very Pythagoras Porphyry says "that he delivered Croton, Himera, and Taurominium from tyrants"; and Iamblichus says that, a young man of Taurominium being drunk, Pythagoras played him sober by a few airs of grave spondees." A third writer also (Conon) says of a person in the age of Cyrus the Elder, contemporary with Pythagoras and Phalaris, that he "went to Taurominium in Sicily." The answer to all this is obvious: Taurominium is here used with the same sort of licensed prolepsis as when we say, Julius Cæsar conquered France, and made an expedition into England, though we know that Gaul and Britain were the names in that age, whilst France could not have arisen till after the invasion of the Franks (a German tribe) in the fifth century after Christ, nor England till the naval incursion from Jutland of the Angles in the sixth century.

The seventh, eighth, and eighteenth arguments may be thrown together, all turning upon the same objection-viz. that Phalaris is apt to appropriate the thoughts of better men than himself; a kind of piracy which possibly other royal authors may have practised, but hardly (like Phalaris) upon men born long after their own time. Else probably some scoundrel king has been filching my best thoughts three centuries ago. The three cases of this cited by Bentley are of very different weight. Let us begin with the weakest. Writing to Polygnotus, Phalaris is found sporting this sentiment—λόγος ἔργου σκιὰ παρὰ τοῖς σωφρονεστέροις πεπίστευ Tal("that speech is regarded as the shadow of deeds by persons of good sense"). "It is a very notable saying," says Bentley, "and we are obliged to the author of it; and, if Phalaris had not modestly hinted that others had said it before him, we might have taken it for his own. But then there was either a strange jumping of good wits, or Democritus was a sorry plagiary; for he laid claim to the first invention of it. What shall we say to this matter?

Democritus had the character of a man of probity and wit. Besides, here are Plutarch and Diogenes, two witnesses that would scorn to flatter. This bears hard upon the author of the Letters. But how can we help it? He should have minded his hits better, when he was minded to play the tyrant. For Democritus was too young to know even Pythagoras: τὰ τῶν χρόνων μάχεται (considerations of chronology are inconsistent with it'); and yet Pythagoras survived Phalaris." Such is Bentley's argument; but undoubtedly it is unfair. He says 66 besides," as though Plutarch and Diogenes were supplementary evidences to a matter otherwise established upon independent grounds; whereas it is from them only, and from Suidas, whom he afterwards brought forward, that we know of any such claim for Democritus. Again, Bentley overrates their authority. That of Plutarch, upon all matters of fact and critical history, is at this day deservedly low; and, as to Diogenes Laertius, nobody can read him without perceiving that precisely upon this department of his labour-viz. the application of all the stray apophthegms, prose epigrams, and "good things," which then floated in conversation-he had no guide at all. Sometimes there might be a slight internal indication of the author: