a proclamation to the following purpose: "The people of Syracuse performs the funeral rites of Timoleon, the son of Timodemus, the Corinthian, at the common expense of two hundred minas, and will do honour to his memory for ever, by annual prizes to be competed for in music, and horse races, and all sorts of bodily exercise; because he suppressed the tyrants, overthrew the barbarians, repeopled the largest of the deserted cities, and restored the Sicilian Greeks to the enjoyment of their own laws." Besides this, they made his tomb in the market-place, which they afterwards built round with colonnades, and attached to it places of exercise for the young men, and gave it the name of the Timoleonteum. And keeping to that form of civil polity and observing those laws and constitutions which he left them, they lived for a considerable time in prosperity.

DEMOSTHENES.

Bust of Demosthenes.

THE author of the poem in honour of Alcibiades upon 1 his winning the chariot-race at the Olympian games tells us, Sosius* (whether he were Euripides, as is commonly thought, or some other person), that the happy man must in the first place be born in some famous city. But for a man's attaining the true happiness, which depends so very much on the character and disposition, I hold it is of no more disadvantage to be born in a mean, obscure country, than to be born of a small or plain-looking woman. It would be ludicrous to think that Iulis, a little part of the small island of Ceos, and Ægina, which an Athenian once said ought to be removed, like an eye-sore, from the port of Piræus, should give the world good actors and

* Sosius Senecio, to whom this life is addressed, was a distinguished Roman friend of Plutarch's. He was four times consul under Nerva and Trajan.

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poets*, but be incapable of producing a just, temperate, wise, and high-minded man. Those arts, which exist for wealth or honour, are likely enough to wither and decay in poor and undistinguished towns; but virtue, like a strong and durable plant, may take root and thrive in any place where it can lay hold of an ingenuous nature and a mind that is industrious. I for my part shall desire, that for any deficiency of mine in right judgment or action, I myself may be, as in fairness, held accountable, and shall not ask to have it attributed to the obscurity of my birthplace.

But if a inan undertake to write a history, which has to be collected from books and documents not easy to be got in all places, nor written always in his own language, but many of them foreign and dispersed in other hands, for him undoubtedly it is in the first place and above all things necessary to reside in a city of note, addicted to liberal arts, and populous; where he may have plenty of all sorts of books, and may inform himself by personal inquiry of such particulars, as having escaped the pens of writers, are more faithfully preserved in the memories of men, lest his work be deficient in many even of those points which it can least dispense with. For me, I live in a little town, where I am content to remain not to make it less; and having had no leisure, what with public business and with my hearers in philosophy, to study the Roman language while I was in Rome and other parts of Italy, it was late and far on in

* Simonides, the lyric poet, was born at Iulis in Ceos; and Polus, the celebrated actor, who is mentioned in the account, further on, of Demosthenes's death, was a native of Ægina. The ode in honour of Alcibiades is quoted in his life, Chap. 11.