After ages have held up Phalaris to infamy for his excessive cruelty. In his brazen bull, invented, it is said, by Perilaus of Athens, and presented by him to Phalaris, the tyrant’s victims were shut up and, a fire being kindled beneath, were roasted alive, while their shrieks, conveyed through pipes in the beast’s nostrils, represented the bellowing of the bull. Perilaus 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 connexion with the worship of the Phoenician Baal, such as prevailed at Rhodes, where Zeus Atabyrius was no other than Baal; when misfortune threatened Rhodes the brazen bulls in his temple bellowed. The Rhodians brought this worship to Gela, which they founded conjointly with the Cretans, and from Gela it passed to Agrigentum. Human sacrifices to Baal were common, and, though in Phoenicia proper there is no proof that the victims were burned alive (see Moloch), the Carthaginians had a brazen image of Baal, from whose down-turned hands the children slid into a pit of fire; and the story that Minos had a brazen man who pressed people to his glowing breast points to similar rites in Crete, where the child-devouring Minotaur must certainly be connected with Baal and the favourite sacrifice to him of children. So, too, we have the fire-spitting bull of Marathon which burned Androgens. The stories that Phalaris threw men into boiling cauldrons and vessels filled with fire, and that he devoured sucklings, all tell the same tale. From this point of view we may perhaps reconcile with history the apparently contradictory tradition which seems to have prevailed in later times, that Phalaris was a naturally humane man and a patron of philosophy and literature. This is the view of his character which we find in the declamations ascribed to Lucian, and in the letters which bear Phalaris , s own name. Plutarch, too, 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. It is recorded that he once pardoned two men who had conspired against him. Phalaris may thus have been one of those men, not unknown in history, who combine justice and even humanity with a religious fanaticism which shrinks from no horrors believed to be demanded by the cause of God.

The letters bearing the name of Phalaris (148 in number) are now chiefly remembered for the crushing exposure they received at the hands of 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 1699. From the mention in the letters of towns (Phintia, Alaesa, and Tauromenium) which did not exist in the time of Phalaris, from the imitations of authors (Herodotus, Democritus, Euripides, Callimachus) who wrote long after he was dead, from the reference to tragedies, though tragedy was not yet invented in the lifetime of Phalaris, from the dialect, which is not Dorian but Attic, nay, New or Late Attic, as well as from absurdities in the matter, and the entire absence of any reference to them by any writer before Stobaeus (who lived apparently about 500 A.D.), Bentley sufficiently proved that the letters were written by a sophist or rhetorician 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 admired by some, c.g., by Sir William Temple, though others, as Politian and Erasmus, perceived that they were not by Phalaris.

There are editions of the epistles of Phalaris by Lennep and Valckenaer, Groningen, 1777 (re-edited, with corrections and additions, by Schaefer, Leipsic, 1823), and by R. Hercher, in Epistolographi Graeci, Paris, 1873. The latest edition of Bentley’s Dissertation is that with introduction and notes by W. wagner, London, 1883.