PHALARIS, tyrant of Acragas (Agrigentum) in Sicily, c. B.C. He was entrusted with the building of the temple of Zeus Atabyrius in the citadel, and took advantage of his posi tion to make himself despot (Aristotle, Politics, v. 1o). Under his rule Agrigentum seems to have attained considerable prosper ity. He supplied the city with water, adorned it with fine build ings, and strengthened it with walls. On the northern coast of the island the people of Himera elected him general with absolute power, in spite of the warnings of the poet Stesichorus (Aristotle, Rhetoric, ii. 20). According to Suidas he succeeded in making himself master of the whole of the island. He was at last over thrown in a general rising headed by Telemachus, the ancestor of Theron (tyrant c. 488-472), and burned in his brazen bull.
After ages have held up Phalaris to infamy for his excessive cruelty. In his brazen bull, invented, it is said, by Perillus of Athens, the tyrant's victims were shut up and, a fire being kindled beneath, were roasted alive, while their shrieks represented the bellowing of the bull. Perillus himself is said to have been the first victim. There is hardly room to doubt that we have here a tradition of human sacrifice in connection with the worship of the Phoenician Baal (Zeus Atabyrius) such as prevailed at Rhodes. The Carthaginians carried away a brazen bull from Agrigentum to Carthage but it was restored by Scipio.
Later tradition represented Phalaris as a naturally humane man and a patron of philosophy and literature. Plutarch, though
he takes the unfavourable view, mentions that the Sicilians gave to the severity of Phalaris the name of justice and a hatred of crime. (Suidas, s.v.; Diod. Sic. ix. 20, 30, ICiii. 90, XIC.Xii. 25; Polybius vii. 7, xii. 25 ; Cicero, De Officiis, ii. 7, iii. 6.) The letters bearing the name of Phalaris (148 in number) are now chiefly remembered for the crushing exposure they received at the hands of Richard Bentley in his controversy with the Hon. Charles Boyle, who had published an edition of them in 1695. The first edition of Bentley's Dissertation on Phalaris appeared in 1697, and the second edition, replying to the answer which Boyle published in 1698, came out in 2699. Bentley proved conclusively that the letters were written by a sophist or rhetorician (possibly Adrianus of Tyre, died c. A.D. 192) hundreds of years after the death of Phalaris. Suidas admired the letters, which he thought genuine and in modern times, before their exposure by Bentley, they were thought highly of by some (e.g., Sir William Temple in his Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning) , though others, as Politianus and Erasmus, perceived that they were not by Phalaris. The latest edition of the Epistles is by R. Hercher, in Epistolographi graeci (1873), and of Bentley's Disserta tion by W. Wagner (with introduction and notes, 1883) ; see especially R. C. Jebb, Life of Bentley (1882).