Page:The battle of the books - Guthkelch - 1908.djvu/183

 fighting in earnest. He is as extravagant too in the honours he would raise to his poet's memory; nothing less than a temple and deification. Cicero tells us, that in his days there was his statue still extant at Himera (then called Thermae), which, one would think, was honour enough. But a sophist can build temples in the air, as cheaply and easily as some others do castles.

What an inconsistency is there between the fifty-first and sixty-ninth Epistles! In the former he declares his immortal hatred to one Pytho, who, after Phalaris's flight from Astypalaea, would have persuaded his wife Erythia to a second marriage with himself; but seeing her resolved to follow her husband, he poisoned her. Now this could be no long time after his banishment; for then she could not have wanted opportunities of following him. But in the sixty-ninth Epistle we have her alive again, long after that Phalaris had been tyrant of Agrigentum; for he mentions his growing old there. And we must not imagine, but that several years had passed, before he could seize the government of so populous a city, that had two hundred thousand souls in it; or, as others say, eight hundred thousand. For he