religion, inasmuch as it gave a rule of life, with a motive for striving
for wisdom and virtue. Two friends of this Pythagorean sect lived at
Syracuse, in the end of the fourth century before the Christian era.
Syracuse was a great Greek city, built in Sicily, and full of all kinds
of Greek art and learning; but it was a place of danger in their time,
for it had fallen under the tyranny of a man of strange and capricious
temper, though of great abilities, namely Dionysius. He is said to have
been originally only a clerk in a public office, but his talents raised
him to continually higher situations, and at length, in a great war with
the Carthaginians, who had many settlements in Sicily, he became general
of the army, and then found it easy to establish his power over the
city.

This power was not according to the laws, for Syracuse, like most other
cities, ought to have been governed by a council of magistrates; but
Dionysius was an exceedingly able man, and made the city much more rich
and powerful, he defeated the Carthaginians, and rendered Syracuse by
far the chief city in the island, and he contrived to make everyone so
much afraid of him that no one durst attempt to overthrow his power. He
was a good scholar, and very fond of philosophy and poetry, and he
delighted to have learned men around him, and he had naturally a
generous spirit; but the sense that he was in a position that did not
belong to him, and that everyone hated him for assuming it, made him
very harsh and suspicious. It is of him that the story is told, that he
had a chamber hollowed in the rock near his state prison, and
constructed with galleries to conduct sounds like an ear, so that he
might overhear the conversation of his captives; and of him, too, is
told that famous anecdote which has become a proverb, that on hearing a
friend, named Damocles, express a wish to be in his situation for a
single day, he took him at his word, and Damocles found himself at a