Greek and Roman Parallel Stories (39)

Phalaris, the tyrant of Agrigentum, used to inflict most cruel torture and torment upon the strangers that passed his way. Perillus, a bronze-founder by trade, made a bronze heifer and gave it to the king that he might burn the strangers in it alive. But Phalaris on this one occasion proved himself a just man and threw into it the artisan; the heifer seemed to give forth a sound of bellowing.[*] So in the second book of Causes.[*]

In Segesta, a city of Sicily, there lived a certain cruel despot, Aemilius Censorinus, who used to reward with gifts those who invented more novel forms of torture; and a certain Arruntius Paterculus constructed a horse of bronze and gave it as a gift to the aforesaid that he might cast the citizens therein. But on this occasion, for the first

time, the despot behaved in a just manner and thrust first the giver of the gift into the horse, so that he himself should be the first to experience the torment which he had devised for others. Then he seized the man and hurled him from the Tarpeian Rock. It is believed that those who rule with great cruelty are called Aemilii from this Aemilius. So Aristeides in the fourth book of his Italian History.