Timoleon on condition that he should have a fair trial before the people of Syracuse, and that Timoleon should say nothing against him.  When he was brought to Syracuse he was brought before the people, and tried to deliver a long premeditated speech to them, but meeting with interruptions and seeing that the assembly was inexorable he flung away his cloak and rushed across the theatre, striking his head against a stone step with the intention of killing himself.  However he failed, and paid the penalty of his crimes by suffering the death of a pirate.

XXXV.  In this fashion the despotisms were put down by Timoleon, and the wars finished.  The whole island, which had become a mere wilderness through the constant wars, and was grown hateful to the very natives, under his administration became so civilized and desirable a country that colonists sailed to it from those very places to which its own citizens had formerly betaken themselves to escape from it.  For Akragas and Gela, large cities, which after the war with Athens had been destroyed by the Carthaginians, were now repeopled; the former colonists led by Megellus and Pheristus, from Elea on the south coast of Italy, and the latter by a party led by Gorgus, who sailed from Keos and collected together the former citizens.

When these cities were being reorganised Timoleon not only afforded them peace and safety, but also gave them great assistance, and showed so great an interest in them as to be loved and respected by them as their real Founder.  The other cities also all of them looked upon him with the same feelings, so that no peace could be made by them, no laws established, no country divided among settlers, no constitutional changes made that seemed satisfactory, unless he had a hand in them, and arranged them just as an architect, when a building is finished, gives some graceful touches which adorn the whole.

XXXVI.  There were many Greeks, in his lifetime, who became great, and did great things, such as Timotheus, and Agesilaus, and Pelopidas, and Timoleon’s great model, Epameinondas.  But these men’s actions produced a glory which was involved in much strain and toil, and some of their deeds have incurred censure, and even been repented of.  Whereas those of Timoleon, if we except the terrible affair of his brother, have nothing in them to which we cannot apply, like Timaeus, that verse of Sophocles—­

    “Ye gods, what Venus or what grace divine
    Took part in this.”

For as in the poetry of Antimachus, and the paintings of Dionysius, the Kolophonians, we find a certain vigour and power, yet think them forced in expression, and produced with much labour, while the paintings of Nikomachus and the verses of Homer, besides their other graces and merits, have the charm of seeming to have been composed easily and without effort, so also the campaigns of Timoleon, when compared with the laborious and hardly contested ones of Epameinondas