DEATH OF TIMOLEON. 19, nad been prepared. As soon as the bier had been placed on this pile, and fire was about to be applied, the herald Demetrius, dis- tinguished for the powers of his voice, proclaimed with loud an- nouncement as follows : " The Syracusan people solemnize, at the cost of two hundred minte, the funeral of this man, the Corinthian Timoleon, son of Timodemus. They have passed a vote to honor him for all fu- ture time with festival matches in music, horse and chariot race, and gymnastics, because, after having put down the despots, subdued the foreign enemy, and re-colonized the greatest among the ruined cities, he restored to the Sicilian Greeks their consti- tution and laws." A sepulchral monument, seemingly with this inscription re- corded on it, was erected to the memory of Timoleon in the agora of Syracuse. To this monument other buildings were presently annexed ; porticos, for the assembling of persons in business or conversation and palaestrae, for the exercises of youths. The aggregate of buildings all taken together was called the Timo- leontion. 1 When we reflect that the fatal battle of Chajroneia had taken place the year before Timoleon's decease, and that his native city Corinth as well as all her neighbors were sinking deeper and deeper into the degradation of subject towns of Macedonia, we ."hall not regret, for his sake, that a timely death relieved him from so mournful a spectacle. It was owing to him that the Sicil- ian Greeks were rescued, for nearly one generation, from the like fate. He had the rare glory of maintaining to the end, and exe- cuting to the full, the promise of liberation with which he had gone forth from Corinth. His early years had been years of acute suffering and that, too, incurred in the cause of freedom arising out of the death of his brother ; his later period, mani- festing the like sense of duty under happier auspices, had richly repaid him, by successes overpassing all reasonable expectation, and by the ample flow of gratitude and attachment poured forth to him amidst the liberated Sicilians. His character appears most noble, and most instructive, if we contrast him with Dion. Timo- icon had been brought up as the citizen of a free, though oliga* 1 Plutarch, Timoleon, c. 39 ; Diodor. xvi. 90.
