Ammianus Marcellinus, Rerum Gestarum
John C. Rolfe, Ph.D., Litt.D., Ed.

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[37] After this turn of affairs, Constantius, as one that now touched the skies with his head and would control all human chances, was puffed up by the grandiloquence of his flatterers, whose number he himself increased by scorning and rejecting those who were not adepts in that line; as we read of Croesus, ¹ that he drove Solon headlong out of his kingdom for the reason that he did not know how to flatter; and of Dionysius, that he threatened the poet Philoxenus ² with death, because when the tyrant was reading aloud [p. 157] his own silly and unrythmical verses, and every one else applauded, the poet alone listened unmoved.