Inspires another frame with life and light.
So I myself, (well I the past recall)
When the fierce Greeks begirt Troy’s holy wall,
Was brave Euphorbus; and in conflict drear,
Poured forth my blood beneath Atrides’ spear:
The shield this arm did bear I lately saw
In Juno’s shrine, a trophy of that war.
[109] This passage has been interpreted in more ways than one. Casaubon thinks with great probability that there is a hiatus in the text. I have endeavoured to extract a meaning out of what remains. Compare Samuel ii. 16, 23. “And the counsel of Ahitophel, which he counselled in those days, was as if a man had enquired at the oracle of God; so was all the counsel of Ahitophel both with David and with Absalom.”
[110] Zaleucus was the celebrated lawgiver of the Epizephyrian Locrians, and is said to have been originally a slave employed by a shepherd, and to have been set free and appointed lawgiver by the direction of an oracle, in consequence of his announcing some excellent laws, which he represented Minerva as having communicated to him in a dream. Diogenes, is wrong however, in calling him a disciple of Pythagoras (see Bentley on Phalaris), as he lived about a hundred years before his time; his true date being 660 B.C. The code of Zaleucus is stated to have been the first collection of written laws that the Greeks possessed. Their character was that of great severity. They have not come down to us. His death is said to have occurred thus. Among his laws was one forbidding any citizen to enter the senate house in arms, under the penalty of death. But in a sudden emergency, Zaleucus himself, in a moment of forgetfulness, transgressed his own law: on which he slew himself, declaring that he would vindicate his law. (Eustath. ad. Il. i. p. 60). Diodorus, however, tells the same story of Charondas.
[111] Charondas was a lawgiver of Catana, who legislated for his own city and the other towns of Chalcidian origin in Magna Grecia, such as Zancle, Naxos, Leontini, Eubœa, Mylæ, Himera, Callipolis, and Rhegium. His laws have not been preserved to us, with the exception of a few judgments. They were probably in verse, for Athenæus says that they were sung in Athens at banquets. Aristotle tells us that they were adapted to an aristocracy. It is much doubted whether it is really true that he was a disciple of Pythagoras, though we are not sure of his exact time, so that we cannot pronounce it as impossible as in the preceding case. He must have lived before the time of Anaxilaus, tyrant of Rhegium, who reigned from B.C. 494 to B.C. 476, because he abolished the laws of Charondas, which had previously been in force in that city. Diodorus gives a code of laws which he states that Charondas gave to the city of Thurii, which was not founded till B.C. 443, when he must certainly have been dead a long time. There is one law of his preserved by Stobæus, which is probably authentic, since it is found in a fragment of Theophrastus; enacting that all buying and selling shall be transacted by ready money only.