Parallela minora
Plutarch
Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals, Vol. 5. Goodwin, William W., editor; Oswald, John, translator. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company; Cambridge: Press of John Wilson and Son, 1874.
Busiris, the son of Neptune and Anippe the daughter of Nilus, was used to invite strangers in to him under a pretence of hospitality, and then to murder them; but divine vengeance met with him at last, for Hercules found out the villany, and killed him with his club. —Agatho the Samian.
Hercules, as he was driving Geryon’s oxen through Italy, took up his lodging with King Faunus there, the son of Mercury, whose custom it was to sacrifice strangers to his father. He set upon Hercules, and had his brains beaten out for his pains.—Dercyllus’s Third Book of Italian History.
Phalaris of Agrigentum, a cruel tyrant, was wont to put strangers and travellers to the most exquisite torment.
Perillus, a brass-founder, made a cow of brass, and presented it to the king for a new invention, that he might burn strangers alive in it. Phalaris for this once was just, in making the first proof of it upon Perillus himself; and the invention was so artificial, that upon putting it in execution, the engine itself seemed to bellow.—Second Book of Questions or Causes.In Egesta, a city of Sicily, there was a certain tyrant called Aemilius Censorinus, who was so inhuman that he proposed rewards to the inventors of new tortures. There was one Aruntius Paterculus that had framed a brazen horse, and made a present of it to the tyrant to practise with it upon whom he pleased. It was the first piece of justice that ever the tyrant did, to make trial of the torment upon the author of it, that he might first feel himself the torments he had provided for others. He was afterwards thrown down from the Tarpeian Rock. It may be thought that unmerciful rulers are from this tyrant called Aemilii. —Aristides’s Fourth Book of Italian History.