Page:History of Greece Vol VII.djvu/145

127 GENERAL PROSPERITY IN SICILY. 127 works of art, statues and pictures, 1 with manifold insignia of ornament and luxury. All this is particularly brought to our notice because of the frightful catastrophe which desolated Agri- gentum in 406 B.C. from the hands of the Carthaginians. It was in the interval which we are now describing that this prosperity was accumulated ; doubtless not in Agrigentum alone, but more or less throughout all the Grecian cities of the island. Nor was it only in material prosperity that they were distin- guished. At this time, the intellectual movement in some of the Italian and Sicilian towns was very considerable. The inconsid- erable town of Elea in the gulf of Poseidonia nourished two of the greatest speculative philosophers in Greece, Parmenides and Zeno. Ernpedokles of Agrigentum was hardly less eminent in the same department, yet combining with it a political and prac- tical efficiency. The popular character of the Sicilian govern- ments stimulated the cultivation of rhetorical studies, wherein not only Empedokles and Polus at Agrigentum, but Tisias and Korax at Syracuse, and still more, Gorgias at Leontini, acquired great reputation. 2 The constitution established at Agrigentum after the dispossession of the Theronian dynasty was at first not thoroughly democratical, the principal authority residing in a large Senate of One Thousand members. We are told even that an ambitious club of citizens were aiming at the reestablishment of a despotism, when Empedokles, availing himself of wealth and high position, took the lead in a popular opposition ; so as not only to defeat this intrigue, but also to put down the Senate of One Thousand, and render the government completely democrat- ical. His influence over the people was enhanced by the vein of mysticism, and pretence to miraculous or divine endowments, which accompanied his philosophical speculations, in a manner 1 Diodor. xiii, 82, 83, 90. s See Aristotle as cited by Cicero. Brut. c. 12 ; Plato, Phsedr. p. 267, c. i!3, 114 ; Dionys. Ilalic. Judicium de Isocrate, p. 534 R. and Epist. ii, ad Ammreum, p. 792 ; also Quintilian, iii, 1, 125. According to Cicero (do Inventione, ii, 2), the treatises of these ancient rhetoricians, " usque a prin- cipe illo et inventore Tisia," had been superseded by Aristotle, who had collected them carefully, '' nominatim," and had improved upon their expo- sitions. Dionysius laments that they had been so superseded (Epist. ad A mm, p. 722).