Timoleon

Cherished in old age amid such honour and good will, like a common father, a slight cause co-operated with his great age to bring him to his end.[*](In 337 or 336 B.C.)

A number of days having been allowed in which the Syracusans might prepare for his funeral, while the country folk and strangers came together, the whole ceremony was conducted with great magnificence, and besides, young men selected by lot carried his bier with all its decorations through the precinct where the palace of Dionysius had stood before Timoleon destroyed it.

The bier was escorted, too, by many thousands of men and women, whose appearance was one that because a festival, since all were crowned with garlands and wore white raiment; while cries and tears, mingled with benedictions upon the dead, betokened, not a formal tribute of respect, nor a service performed in obedience to public decree, but a just sorrow and a thankfulness arising from genuine good will.

And finally, when the bier had been placed upon the funeral pyre, Demetrius, who had the loudest voice of any herald of the time, read from manuscript the following decree:—

By the people of Syracuse, Timoleon, son of Timodemus, from Corinth, is here buried at a public cost of two hundred minas, and is honoured for all time with annual contests, musical, equestrian, and gymnastic, because he overthrew the tyrants, subdued the Barbarians, re-peopled the largest of the devastated cities, and then restored their laws to the Greeks of Sicily.

Furthermore, they buried his ashes in the market place, and afterwards, when they had surrounded it with porticoes and built palaestras in it, they set it apart as a gymnasium for their young men, and named it Timoleonteum.

And they themselves, using the civil polity and the laws which he had ordained, enjoyed a long course of unbroken prosperity and happiness.