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Updated: May 5, 2025
"I fear that Cæsar will be a very Phalaris, and that we may expect the very worst," he wrote to his intimate friend Atticus, who, safe from harm and turmoil, was dwelling under the calm Athenian sky.
Indeed, he read and re-read with an almost morbid interest both the Tristia and the Ex Ponto. Ovid's images seemed applicable to himself. "I, too," he said, "am a neglected book gnawed by the moth," "a stream dammed up with mud," "a Phalaris, clapped, for nothing in particular, into the belly of a brazen bull."
He also wrote most of Boyle's Examination of Dr. Bentley's Dissertations on the Epistles of Phalaris, and pub. sermons, which, with his letters to Swift, Pope, and other friends, constitute the foundation of his literary reputation.
In another place, he shows how illogical is the scepticism of Timaeus as regards the existence of the Bull of Phalaris simply by appealing to the statue of the Bull, which was still to be seen in Carthage; pointing out how impossible it was, on any other theory except that it belonged to Phalaris, to account for the presence in Carthage of a bull of this peculiar character with a door between his shoulders.
The Stoics maintained that one might have led a happy life in the belly of the bull of Phalaris. This is going too far. Suffering degrades, humiliates, and leads to blasphemy. The only acceptable death is the noble death, which is not a pathological accident, but a premeditated and precious end before the Everlasting.
Rapt in the contemplation of eternal verities, the purified soul is indifferent to external circumstances: pain and suffering are unheeded, and the just man can feel happy even in the bull of Phalaris. But in one important respect the Neo-Platonic teaching is at variance with Stoical doctrine.
But hear the man himself: "Cet homme de meurtres et d'inceste, incarne dans l'animal des hecatombes et des bestialites antiques en evoque les monstrueuses images. Je crois entendre le taureau de Phalaris et le taureau de Pasiphae repondre, de loin, par d'effrayants mugissements, aux cris humains de ce bucentaure." That is the top note on this subject. Hereafter all must pale to anti-climax.
His lines on the Barometer and the Bowling Green were applauded by hundreds, to whom the Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris was as unintelligible as the hieroglyphics on an obelisk. Purity of style, and an easy flow of numbers, are common to all Addison's Latin poems.
For, after thinking of that endurable, or, as you will have it, most amiable king, Cyrus to name him in preference to any one else then, to produce a change in our minds, we behold the barbarous Phalaris, that model of tyranny, to which the monarchical authority is easily abused by a facile and natural inclination.
Clutterbuck!" were the only words I heard farther: and with tears in my eyes, and a suffocating feeling in my throat, for the matrimonial situation of my unfortunate friend, I descended into the drawing-room. The only one yet there, was the pale nephew; he was bending painfully over a book; I took it from him, it was "Bentley upon Phalaris."
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