At that time Phalaris of Sicily, having seized the tyranny, was ravaging the people of Agrigentum.
1 Ea tempestate Phalaris Siculus Agrigentinos arrepta tyrannide populabatur.
Cruel in mind and crueller still in his devices, doing everything wickedly against the innocent, he once found — unjust as he was — a man whom he could justly punish.
2 qui crudelis mente, commentis crudelior, omnia nefarie in innocentes agens, inuenit aliquando quem iuste puniret iniustus.
For a certain Perillus, a worker in bronze, seeking the tyrant’s friendship and thinking it a gift well suited to his cruelty, made a bronze bull, in whose side he skilfully fitted a door to serve for thrusting in the condemned: so that when a man shut inside was roasted by fires set beneath it, the hollow capacity of the bronze would magnify the sound of the cries wrung from him and, with a deathly throb, send out a bellow befitting the image; and in that abominable spectacle it would seem the lowing of a beast and not the groaning of a man.
3 nam Perillus quidam aeris opifex adfectans tyranni amicitiam, aptum munus crudelitati illius ratus, taurum aeneum fecit, cui fabre ianuam e latere conposuit, quae ad contrudendos damnatos receptui foret: ut cum inclusus ibidem subiectis ignibus torreretur, sonum uocis extortae capacitas concaui aeris augeret pulsuque ferali conpetens imagini murmur emitteret, nefarioque spectaculo mugitus pecudis, non hominis gemitus uideretur.
But Phalaris, welcoming the work and abhorring the workman, furnished matter both for vengeance and for cruelty: for he punished the craftsman himself with his own invention.
4 sed Phalaris, factum amplexus factorem exsecratus, et ultioni materiam praebuit et crudelitati: nam ipsum opificem sua inuentione puniuit.
A little earlier there had also been a king among the Latins, Aremulus, who, growing for eighteen years in crimes and impieties, was at last cut off by a thunderbolt through divine judgement, and so paid at an unripe age the punishment that was long since ripe.1
5 Fuerat etiam paulo superiore tempore apud Latinos rex Aremulus, qui per annos XVIII flagitiis inpietatibusque crescens, ad postremum diuino iudicio fulmine interceptus matura supplicia inmatura aetate dissoluit.
1Aremulus is the Alban king whom Livy (1.3) calls Romulus Silvius, killed by lightning.
Let the Latins and the Sicilians now choose, if they will, whether they would rather have lived in the days of Aremulus and Phalaris, who wrung out the lives of the innocent by tortures, or in these Christian times, when the Roman emperors, ordered above all by religion itself, having crushed tyrannies for the good of the commonwealth, do not exact punishment even for the wrongs done to themselves by the tyrants.
6 Eligant nunc, si uidetur, Latini et Siculi, utrum in diebus Aremuli et Phalaridis esse maluissent innocentum uitas poenis extorquentium, an his temporibus Christianis, cum imperatores Romani, ipsa in primis religione conpositi, post comminutas reipublicae bono tyrannides ne ipsorum quidem iniurias exigunt tyrannorum.