Bibliotheca Historica

​An ancient saying has been handed down that democracies are overthrown not by ordinary men, but by those who excel in preeminence. For this reason, some of the cities, suspecting those of the politicians who are most powerful, curtail their distinctions.

​For the transition to the enslavement of their fatherland seems to be near for those who remain in power, and it is difficult to abstain from monarchy for those who, through their preeminence, have acquired hopes of ruling.

​For seeking to have more is natural to those who reach for greater things, and to have their desires boundless. Therefore the Athenians, for these reasons, exiled the leading citizens, having established by law the so-called ostracism among them. And they did this not to exact punishment for past wrongdoings, but so that those who had the power to break the law might not have the opportunity to commit crimes against their fatherland.

​For they remembered the words of Solon as if some oracle, in which, foretelling about the tyranny of Peisistratus, he set down this elegy: »By great men a city is destroyed, and the people through ignorance fall into the slavery of a tyrant.« ​But most of all, the impulse toward monarchies prevailed in Sicily before the Romans made themselves masters of this island; for the cities, deceived by demagogueries, kept making the weak powerful up to this point, until they became masters of those who had been deceived.

​But in the most unique manner of all, Agathocles became tyrant of the Syracusans, having used the smallest resources, but having plunged into the greatest misfortunes not only Syracuse, but also all Sicily and Libya.

​For having practiced the potter’s craft through lack of livelihood and weakness of resources, he advanced to such a degree of power and at the same time of bloodthirstiness as to enslave the greatest and most beautiful of all islands, and to acquire for a certain time the greater part of Libya and parts of Italy, and to fill the cities throughout Sicily with outrage and slaughter.

​For none of the tyrants before him accomplished any such thing, nor showed such cruelty toward his subjects. For he punished private citizens by slaughtering their entire kindred, and from the cities he exacted retribution by murdering those of military age, and because of a few of the accused, forcing the many who had done no wrong at all to undergo the same disaster, he condemned the cities en masse to death.

​But since this book, along with other matters, contains also the tyranny of Agathocles, we, omitting to speak of it beforehand, will add what follows continuously upon the things previously said, after first setting forth the chronology appropriate to the history.

​In the preceding eighteen books, therefore, we recorded, so far as lay in our power, the deeds from the most ancient times that occurred in the known parts of the inhabited world, up to the year before the tyranny of Agathocles, to which year from the capture of Troy eight hundred and sixty-six years are reckoned; and in this book, making our beginning from this rule, we shall end at the battle at Himera of Agathocles against the Carthaginians, embracing seven years.