Timoleon lived to see his great work of Sicilian enfranchisement consummated, to carry it through all its incipient difficulties, and to see it prosperously moving on. Not Syracuse alone, but the other Grecian cities in the island also, enjoyed under their revived free institutions a state of security, comfort, and affluence, to which they had been long strangers. The lands became again industriously tilled; the fertile soil yielded anew abundant exports; the temples were restored from their previous decay, and adorned with the votive offerings of pious munificence.[405] The same state of prosperous and active freedom, which had followed on the expulsion of the Gelonian dynasty a hundred and twenty years before, and lasted about fifty years, without either despots within or invaders from without—was now again made prevalent throughout Sicily under the auspices of Timoleon. It did not indeed last so long. It was broken up in the year 316 B. C., twenty-four years after the battle of the Krimêsus, by the despot Agathokles, whose father was among the immigrants to Syracuse under the settlement of Timoleon. But the interval of security and freedom with which Sicily was blessed between these two epochs, she owed to the generous patriotism and intelligent counsel of Timoleon. There are few other names among the Grecian annals, with which we can connect so large an amount of predetermined and beneficent result.

Endeared to the Syracusans as a common father and benefactor,[406] and exhibited as their hero to all visitors from Greece, he passed the remainder of his life amidst the fulness of affectionate honor. Unfortunately for the Syracusans, that remainder was but too short; for he died of an illness apparently slight, in the year 337-336 B. C.—three or four years after the battle of the Krimêsus. Profound and unfeigned was the sorrow which his death excited, universally, throughout Sicily. Not merely the Syracusans, but crowds from all other parts of the island, attended to do honor to his funeral, which was splendidly celebrated at the public cost. Some of the chosen youths of the city carried the bier whereon his body was deposited: a countless procession of men and women followed, in their festival attire, crowned with wreaths, and mingling with their tears admiration and envy for their departed liberator. The procession was made to pass over that ground which presented the most honorable memento of Timoleon; where the demolished Dionysian stronghold had once reared its head, and where the court of justice was now placed, at the entrance of Ortygia. At length it reached the Nekropolis, between Ortygia and Achradina, where a massive funeral pile had been prepared. As soon as the bier had been placed on this pile, and fire was about to be applied, the herald Demetrius, distinguished for the powers of his voice, proclaimed with loud announcement as follows:—

“The Syracusan people solemnize, at the cost of two hundred minæ, the funeral of this man, the Corinthian Timoleon, son of Timodemus. They have passed a vote to honor him for all future 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 constitution and laws.”

A sepulchral monument, seemingly with this inscription recorded 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 palæstræ, for the exercises of youths. The aggregate of buildings all taken together was called the Timoleontion.[407]

When we reflect that the fatal battle of Chæroneia 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 shall not regret, for his sake, that a timely death relieved him from so mournful a spectacle. It was owing to him that the Sicilian Greeks were rescued, for nearly one generation, from the like fate. He had the rare glory of maintaining to the end, and executing 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, manifesting 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. Timoleon had been brought up as the citizen of a free, though oligarchical community in Greece, surrounded by other free communities, and amidst universal hatred of despots. The politicians whom he had learnt to esteem were men trained in this school, maintaining a qualified ascendency against more or less of open competition from rivals, and obliged to look for the means of carrying their views apart from simple dictation. Moreover, the person whom Timoleon had selected for his peculiar model, was Epaminondas, the noblest model that Greece afforded.[408] It was to this example that Timoleon owed in part his energetic patriotism combined with freedom from personal ambition—his gentleness of political antipathy—and the perfect habits of conciliatory and popular dealing—which he manifested amidst so many new and trying scenes to the end of his career.

Now the education of Dion (as I have recounted in the preceding chapter) had been something totally different. He was the member of a despotic family, and had learnt his experience under the energetic, but perfectly self-willed, march of the elder Dionysius. Of the temper or exigencies of a community of freemen, he had never learnt to take account. Plunged in this corrupting atmosphere, he had nevertheless imbibed generous and public-spirited aspirations: he had come to hold in abhorrence a government of will, and to look for glory in contributing to replace it by a qualified freedom and a government of laws. But the source from whence he drank was, the Academy and its illustrious teacher Plato; not from practical life, nor from the best practical politicians like Epaminondas. Accordingly, he had imbibed at the same time the idea, that though despotism was a bad thing, government thoroughly popular was a bad thing also; that, in other words, as soon as he had put down the despotism, it lay with him to determine how much liberty he would allow, or what laws he would sanction, for the community; that instead of a despot, he was to become a despotic lawgiver.

Here then lay the main difference between the two conquerors of Dionysius. The mournful letters written by Plato after the death of Dion contrast strikingly with the enviable end of Timoleon, and with the grateful inscription of the Syracusans on his tomb.

CHAPTER LXXXVI.
CENTRAL GREECE: THE ACCESSION OF PHILIP OF MACEDON TO THE BIRTH OF ALEXANDER. 359-356 B. C.

My last preceding chapters have followed the history of the Sicilian Greeks through long years of despotism, suffering, and impoverishment, into a period of renovated freedom and comparative happiness, accomplished under the beneficent auspices of Timoleon, between 344-336 B. C. It will now be proper to resume the thread of events in Central Greece, at the point where they were left at the close of the preceding volume—the accession of Philip of Macedon in 360-359 B. C. The death of Philip took place in 336 B. C.; and the closing years of his life will bring before us the last struggles of full Hellenic freedom; a result standing in mournful contrast with the achievements of the contemporary liberator Timoleon in Sicily.