previous next

When Zeno the philosopher1 was suffering the agonies of the torture because of the conspiracy he had entered into against the tyrant Nearchus and was being asked by Nearchus who his fellow conspirators were, he replied, "Would that I were as much the master of my body as I am of my tongue!"Const. Exc. 4, pp. 296-297. [2]

When Zeno's native city was being ground down by the tyranny of Nearchus, Zeno formed a conspiracy against the tyrant. But he was found out, and when he was asked by Nearchus, while suffering the agonies of the torture, who his fellow conspirators were, he replied, "Would that I were as much the master of my body as I am of my tongue!" [3] And when the tyrant made the torture more and more severe, Zeno still withstood it for a while; and then, being eager to be rid at last of the agony and at the same time to be revenged upon Nearchus, he devised the following plan. [4] During the greatest intensity of the torture, pretending that his spirit was yielding to his bodily pains, he cried out, "Relax it! I will tell the whole truth." And when they did so, he asked Nearchus to come near and listen to him privately, asserting that many matters he was about to disclose would best be kept secret. [5] When the tyrant came up to him readily and placed his ear close to Zeno's lips, Zeno took the tyrant's ear into his mouth and sank his teeth into it. And when the attendants quickly approached and applied every torment to make Zeno relax his hold, he held on all the tighter. [6] Finally, being unable to shake the fortitude of the man, they stabbed him to death that they might in this way break the hold of his teeth. By this device Zeno got release from the agonies he was suffering and exacted of the tyrant the only punishment within his grasp.Const. Exc. 2 (1), pp. 225-226.

[Many generations later Dorieus2 the Lacedaemonian came to Sicily, and taking back the land founded the city of Heracleia.3 Since the city grew rapidly, the Carthaginians, being jealous of it and also afraid that it would grow stronger than Carthage and take from the Phoenicians their sovereignty, came up against it with a great army, took it by storm, and razed it to the ground. But this affair we shall discuss in detail in connection with the period in which it falls.]Diod. 4.23.3.

1 Zeno of Elea (Velia in Italy) in the middle of the 5th century B.C.; see the following paragraph.

2 c. 510 B.C. An account of the chequered career of Dorieus, of the royal line of Sparta, is given by Hdt. 5.41-48.

3 On the south coast of Sicily near Agrigentum.

Diodorus Siculus. Diodorus of Sicily in Twelve Volumes with an English Translation by C. H. Oldfather. Vol. 4-8. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd. 1989.

The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.

Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (1989)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Sicily (Italy) (2)
Velia (1)
Italy (Italy) (1)
Elea (1)
Carthage (Tunisia) (1)
Agrigentum (Italy) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
510 BC (1)
hide References (5 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: