Hide browse bar Your current position in the text is marked in blue. Click anywhere in the line to jump to another position:
book:
chapter:
chapter 1chapter 2chapter 3chapter 4chapter 5chapter 6chapter 7chapter 8chapter 9chapter 10chapter 11chapter 12chapter 13chapter 14chapter 15chapter 16chapter 17chapter 18chapter 19chapter 20chapter 21chapter 22chapter 23chapter 24chapter 25chapter 26chapter 27chapter 28chapter 29chapter 30chapter 31chapter 32chapter 33chapter 34
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
[6]
When the hour drew close and all were giving up hope,
Phintias unexpectedly arrived on the run at the
last moment, just as Damon was being led off to his
fate. Such a friendship was in the eyes of all men a thing of wonder, and Dionysius remitted
the punishment of the condemned man, urging the two men to include himself as a third in their
friendship.1
1 The story of the friendship between Damon and Phintias (Pythias is incorrect) was widely known in the ancient world, and in many forms. Diodorus and Cicero De Off. 3.45; Cicero Tusc. Disp. 5.22 (quoting the tyrant: "Utinam ego tertius vobis adscriberer!") give the oldest version, the latter clearly connecting the event with the Elder Dionysius. The fullest account we possess, as given by Iamblichus Vita Pythag. 233 on the authority, as he claims, of Aristoxenus, who is described as receiving the tale directly from the mouth of the tyrant himself at Corinth, makes the occasion of the event a scheme of the court of the Younger Dionysius to put the Pythagorean reputation of friendship to the test. The account by Hyginus Fab. 257 was the source of Schiller's famous Ballade, "Die Burgschaft."
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
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.
show
Browse Bar
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.
Phintias (2)Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Damon (Ohio, United States) (2)
Corinth (Greece) (1)
Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.
hide
Search
hideStable Identifiers
hide
Display Preferences