Timoleon

Plutarch

Plutarch. Plutarch's Lives, Vol. VI. Perrin, Bernadotte, translator. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1918.

When these had assembled at Corinth, being too few in number, they begged that they might receive fellow colonists from Corinth and the rest of Greece; and after their numbers had risen to as many as ten thousand, they sailed to Syracuse.

But by this time many also from Italy and Sicily had flocked to Timoleon; and when their numbers had risen to sixty thousand, as Athanis states, Timoleon divided the land among them, and sold the houses of the city for a thousand talents,

thus at once reserving for the original Syracusans the power to purchase their own houses, and devising an abundance of money for the community; this had so little, both for other purposes, and especially for the war, that it actually sold its public statues at auction, a regular vote of condemnation being passed against each, as though they were men submitting their accounts.