Timoleon

Plutarch

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

To these settlers Timoleon not only afforded safety and calm after so long a storm of war, but also supplied their further needs and zealously assisted them, so that he was revered by them as a founder.

All the other inhabitants also cherished like feelings towards him, and no conclusion of war, no institution of laws, no settlement of territory, no arrangement of civil polity seemed satisfactory, unless he gave the finishing touches to it, like a master builder adding to a work that is drawing to completion some grace which pleases gods and men.

At any rate, though in his time Greece produced many men who were great and wrought great things, such as Timotheus, Agesilaüs, Pelopidas, and Epaminondas (whom Timoleon most emulated), still, the lustre of their achievements was tarnished by a certain degree of violence and laborious effort, so that some of them were followed by censure and repentance;

whereas in the career of Timoleon, setting aside his necessary treatment of his brother, there is nothing to which it were not meet, as Timaeus says, to apply the words of Sophocles:—

  1. Ye Gods, pray tell what Cypris or what winning love.
  2. Was partner in this work?
[*](Nauck, Trag. Graec. Frag.2 p. 316.)

For just as the poetry of Antimachus and the pictures of Dionysius, both Colophonians, for all their strength and vigour, seem forced and laboured, while the paintings of Nicomachus and the verses of Homer not only have power and grace besides, but also give the impression of having been executed readily and easily;

so, if we compare the generalship of Epaminondas and Agesilaüs, which in both cases was full of toil and bitter struggles, with that of Timoleon, which was exercised with much ease as well as glory, it appears to men of just and careful reasoning a product, not of fortune, but of fortunate valour.

And yet all his successes were ascribed by him to fortune; for in his letters to his friends at home and in his public addresses to the Syracusans he often said he was thankful to God, who, desiring to save Sicily, gave him the name and title of its saviour.