XXI. so offended with something that Plato had said, that CHAP. he sent him forthwith to the slave-market, and had him sold as a slave, but that the philosophers immediately redeemed him by a general subscription amongst themselves, and then urged him to quit Sicily. A similar story is told of the poet Philoxenus, whom Dionysius is said to have sent from his own table to his prisons in the quarries, because he had expressed an unfavourable opinion of the tyrant's poetry. These stories may deserve but little credit for the particular facts; yet the intercourse between Frederick of Prussia and Voltaire was interrupted in a similar manner, and the presumption of literary men on the one hand, and the pride of rank and power on the other, are likely to lead to such results. life. That the despot of Syracuse should not scruple to His private send a poet to the quarries and to sell a philosopher in the slave-market, is nothing wonderful. We may be more unwilling to believe the reports of the state of miserable fear to which suspicion could reduce one so able and so daring as Dionysius. "He could trust no man," it was said 76, "but a set of miserable freedmen, and outcasts, and barbarians, whom he made his body-guard. He fenced his chamber with a wide trench, which he crossed by a drawbridge; he never addressed the Syracusan people but from the top of a high tower, where no dagger could reach him; he never visited his wives without having their apartments previously searched, lest they should contain some lurking assassin; nay, he dared not allow himself to be shaved by any hands except his own daughters'; and even them he was afraid to entrust with a razor; but taught them how to singe off his beard with hot walnut shells." Much of this is probably exaggeration, but the Greek tyrants knew that 76 Cicero, Tusculan. Disputat. V. 20. XXI. CHAP. to kill them was held to be no murder; and it is no shame to Dionysius, if his nerves were overcome by the hourly danger of assassination, a danger which appalled even the iron courage of Cromwell. character of tyrannies. Peculiar The Greeks had no abhorrence for kings: the dethe ancient scendant of a hero race, ruling over a people whom his fathers had ruled from time immemorial, was no subject of obloquy, either with the people or with the philosophers. But a tyrant, a man of low or ordinary birth, who by force or fraud had seated himself on the necks of his countrymen, to gorge each prevailing passion of his nature at their cost, with no principle but the interest of his own power, such a man was regarded as a wild beast, that had broken into the fold of civilized society, and whom it was every one's right and duty by any means, or with any weapon, presently to destroy. Such mere monsters of selfishness, Christian Europe has rarely seen. If the claim to reign by "the grace of God" has given an undue sanction to absolute power, yet it has diffused at the same time a sense of the responsibilities of power, such as the tyrants, and even the kings of the later age of Greece, never knew. The most unprincipled of modern sovereigns would yet have acknowledged, that he owed a duty to his people, for the discharge of which he was answerable to God; but the Greek tyrant regarded his subjects as the mere instruments of his own gratification; fortune, or his own superiority, had given him extraordinary means of indulging his favourite passions, and it would be folly to forego the opportunity. It is this total want of regard for his fellow-creatures, the utter sacrifice of their present and future improvement, for the sake of objects purely personal, which constitutes the guilt of Dionysius and his fellowtyrants. In such men all virtue was necessarily blighted; neither genius, nor courage, nor occasional XXI. signs of human feeling, could atone for the deliberate CHAP. wickedness of their system of tyranny. Brave and able as Dionysius was, active, and temperate, and energetic, he left behind him no beneficial institutions; he degraded rather than improved the character of his countrymen; and he has therefore justly been branded with infamy by the accordant voice of his own and of after-ages; he will be known for ever as Dionysius the tyrant. CHAPTER XXII. CARTHAGE-BARBARIANS OF WESTERN EUROPE-EAST XXII. Difficulties history. "Cæterum-qui mortales initio coluerint, indigenæ an advecti, parum compertum."-TACITUS, Agricola, 11. CHAP. THE enlarged researches of our own times, while they make us more sensible of the actual extent of our of ancient ignorance, yet encourage us with the hope that it will gradually be diminished. But he who attempts to write history, in the interval between this awakened consciousness of the defects of our knowledge, and that fuller light which may hereafter remove them, labours under peculiar disadvantages. A reputation for learning was cheaply gained in the days of our fathers, by merely reading the works of the Greek and Roman writers, and being able to repeat the information which they have communicated. But now we desire to learn, not what existing accounts may have recorded of a people or a race, but what that people or race really was, and did; we wish to conceive a full and lively image of them, of their language, their institutions, their arts, their morals; to understand what they were in themselves, and how they may have affected the fate of the world, either in their own times, or in after-ages. These, however, are questions which the ancient writers were often as unable to answer as we are; happier, it may XXII. be thought, than we in this, that they had no painful CHAP. consciousness of ignorance. To repeat what the Greek and Roman writers have left on record of Carthage, and its dominion in Spain and Africa, would be an easy task, but at the same time most unsatisfactory. We look around for other witnesses, we question existing languages, and races, and manners, in the hope of gleaning from them some fuller knowledge of extinct nations than can be gained from the scanty accounts of foreigners or enemies. The internal state of Carthage may fitly be reserved Carthage. for a later period of this history. It will be enough now to fill up, so far as I can, that sketch of her dominion and foreign relations which has been begun in some measure in the two preceding chapters. the Cartha nion in In the middle of the fourth century before the Extent of Christian era, the Carthaginians possessed the north- ginian domiern coast of Africa, from the middle of the greater Africa. Syrtis to the Pillars of Hercules, a country reaching from 19 degrees east longitude, to 6 degrees west; and a length of coast which Polybius' reckoned at above sixteen thousand stadia. But unlike the compactness and organization of the provinces of the Roman empire, this long line of coast was for the most part only so far under the dominion of the Carthaginians, that they possessed a chain of commercial establishments along its whole extent, and with the usual ascendancy of civilized men over barbarians, had obliged the native inhabitants of the country, whether cultivators of the soil or wandering tribes, to acknowledge their superiority. But in that part where the coast runs nearly north and south, from the Hermæan headland, or Cape Bon, to the lesser Syrtis, 1 Polybius, III. 39. 2 Όσα γέγραπται πολίσματα ἢ ἐμπόρια ἐν τῇ Λιβύῃ ἀπὸ τῆς Σύρτιδος τῆς παρ' Εσπερίδας μέχρι Ηρακλείων 2 στηλῶν ἐν Λιβύῃ πάντα ἐστὶ Καρχη |