had murdered his brother. Hipparchus is said to have put an affront upon Harmodius's sister by dismissing her from a religious procession, in which she was walking at the festival of the Panathenæa : Harmodius was the handsomest youth in Attica, and the prince is by the same account charged with having conceived an unnatural passion for him, in which he was repulsed. If this account were to be

credited in the whole, it would be an incident of so unmanly a sort on the part of Hipparchus, as to leave an everlasting mark of disgrace upon a character otherwise meritorious.

The general prevalence of a turpitude, which neither the religion nor the laws of Greece actually prohibited, may induce our belief of the charge against Hipparchus, as far as concerns Harmodius; but the supposed insult to the sister is irreconcileable to his character. It were far more natural to suppose his resentment should have been pointed against Aristogiton, who was the favorite of Harmodius: such circumstances as we have now related would have carried their own confutation upon the face of them, even though historians had not greatly varied in their accounts of the transaction; but when so respectable an author as Plato gives the narrative a turn entirely opposite to the above, whilst modern historians have only retailed vulgar errors without examining testimonies of better credit, I hope I may be allowed the equitable office of summing up the evidences in this mysterious transaction, for the purpose of rescuing a most amiable character from misrepresentation.

Plato in his Hipparchus says That the current account above given was not the account believed and adopted by people of the best condition and repute; that the insult vulgarly supposed to have been

put upon the sister of Harmodius by Hipparchus was ridiculous and incredible upon the face of it; that Harmodius was the disciple of Aristogiton, a man of ordinary rank and condition; that there was a mutual affection between the pupil and his master; that they had admitted into their society a young Athenian of distinction, whose name had escaped his memory, of whom they were very fond, and whom they had by their conversation and instructions impressed with high ideas of their talents and erudition; that this young Athenian having found access to the person of Hipparchus, attached himself to his society, and began to fall off from his respect for his former preceptors, and even treated their inferiority of understanding with contempt and ridicule; that thereupon they conceived such hatred and resentment against the prince for this preference shewn by their pupil for his company, and for the method he had taken of mortifying their vanity, that they determined upon dispatching Hipparchus by assassination, which they accordingly effected.'

Justin gives a different account and says-That the affront was put upon the sister of Harmodius, not by Hipparchus but by his brother Diocles; that Harmodius with his friend Aristogiton entered into a conspiracy for cutting off all the reigning family at once, and pitched upon the festival of the Pana thenæa as a convenient time for the execution of their plot, the citizens being then allowed to wear arms; that the complete execution of their design was frustrated by one of their party being observed in earnest discourse with Hippias, which occasioned them to suspect a discovery, and so precipitated their attack before they were ready; that in this attack however they chanced upon Ilipparchus, and put him to death."

There are other accounts still differing from these, but they have no colour of probability, and only prove an uncertainty in the general story.

Plutarch relates-That Venus appeared to Hipparchus before his assassination in a dream, and from a phial, which she held in her hand, sprinkled his face with drops of blood.' Herodotus also says— That he was warned by a vision on the eve of his murder, being addressed in sleep by a man of extraordinary stature and beauty in verses of an enigmatical import, which he had thoughts of consulting the interpreters upon next morning, but afterwards passed it off with contempt as a vapour of the imagination, and fell a sacrifice to his incredulity.'

This at least is certain, that he governed the capricious inhabitants of Attica with such perfect temper and discretion, that their tranquillity was without interruption; nor does it appear that the people, who were erecting statues and trophies to his mur. derers, in commemoration of the glorious re-estab lishment of their freedom, could charge him with one single act of oppression; and perhaps if Hippias, who survived him, had not galled them with the yoke of his tyranny during the few years he ruled in Athens after the death of Hipparchus, the public would not have joined in styling those assassins the deliverers of their country, who were known to be guided by no other motives than private malice and resentment.

Harmodius was killed on the spot; Aristogiton fled and was seized in his flight. The part, which Hippias had now to act, was delicate in the extreme; he was either to punish with such rigour, as might secure his authority by terror, or endear himself to the people by the virtue of forbearance: he had the experience of a long administration, conducted by his brother on the mildest and most mer

ciful principles; and if these assassins had been with. out accomplices, it is reasonable to suppose he would not have reversed a system of government, which had been found so successful; but as it appeared that Harmodius and Aristogiton were joined by others in their plot, he thought the Athenians were no longer to be ruled by gentle means, and that no other alternative remained, but to resign his power, or enforce it with rigour.

NUMBER CXXIX.

HIPPIAS began his measures by putting Aristogiton to the torture; he seized the person of Leæna, a courtezan, who was in the secret of the conspiracy, but whilst he was attempting to force her to a confession, she took the resolute method of preventing it by biting off her tongue. Aristogiton, with revengeful cunning, impeached several courtiers and intimates of the tyrant. Athens now became a scene of blood; executions were multiplied, and many principal citizens suffered death, till the informer, having satiated his vengeance upon all who were obnoxious to him or friendly to Hippias, at length told the tyrant that he had been made the dupe of false accusations, and triumphed in the remorse that his confession occasioned: some accounts add that he desired to whisper to Hippias, and in the act suddenly seized his ear with his teeth, and tore it from his head.

Hippias henceforward became a tyrant in the worst sense of the word; he racked the people with

taxes, ordered all the current coin into the royal coffers up on pretence of its debasement, and for the period of three years continued to oppress the state by many grievous methods of exaction and misrule. His expulsion and escape at length set Athens free, and then it was that the Athenians began to celebrate the action of Harmodius and Aristogiton with rapture and applause; from this period they were regarded as the saviours of their country; a public edict was put forth, directing that no slave, or person of servile condition, should in future bear the names of these illustrious citizens: assignments were made upon the Prytaneum for the maintenance of their descendants, and order was given to the magistrate styled Polemarchus to superintend the issue of the public bounty; their posterity were to rank in all public spectacles and processions as the first members of the state, and it was delivered in charge to the superintendants of the Panathenæa, that Harmodius and Aristogiton should be celebrated in the recitations chaunted on that solemnity. There was a popular ode or song composed for this occasion, which was constantly performed on that festival, and is supposed to have been written by Callistratus: it grew so great a favourite with the Athenians, that it became a general fashion to sing it at their private entertainments; some fragments of the comic poets are found to allude to it, and some passages in the plays of Aristophanes. It is a relic of so curious a sort, that, contrary to the practice I shall usually observe, I shall here insert it in the original with a translation.