Plutarch's life of the Corinthian who killed his own tyrant brother, then sailed to Sicily with a handful of men to overthrow the tyrant Dionysius the Younger, defeat a vast Carthaginian army at the Crimisus, and hand Syracuse back its laws before quietly retiring, blind, among the citizens he had freed.
Timoleon opens Plutarch's Parallel Lives volume paired with Aemilius Paulus, and it tells the career of a Corinthian nobleman who, years after having his own brother Timophanes killed for seizing tyrannical power at home, is sent to Sicily to end the far worse tyranny of Dionysius the Younger at Syracuse. Landing with only a handful of ships and soldiers, Timoleon out-maneuvers the mercenary strongman Hicetas and a large Carthaginian fleet, receives the surrender of Dionysius, and drives the tyrant into an ignoble exile in Corinth, where the once-absolute ruler is reduced to lounging in perfume-shops and fish-markets and mocked openly by philosophers like Diogenes.
The narrative then follows Timoleon's re-founding of Syracuse: he calls for new colonists from Corinth and across Greece, resettles a city so depopulated that deer and wild boar roamed its market-place, and campaigns methodically against the remaining tyrants of Sicily. Its climax is the battle at the river Crimisus, where Timoleon's roughly six thousand men rout a Carthaginian force many times their size in a storm of rain and hail that blinds the heavily armored enemy while leaving the lightly equipped Greeks unhindered. Plutarch treats the victory, and the run of good fortune that attended nearly every stage of Timoleon's campaign, as itself a subject worth reflecting on, repeatedly weighing how much credit belongs to Timoleon's virtue and how much to sheer luck.
Historically the Life matters as one of Plutarch's clearest studies of a leader who declines to keep the power he wins: having freed Sicily from tyranny, Timoleon laid down his own extraordinary authority, settled as a private citizen among the Syracusans he had liberated, and was cared for by them in his blindness and old age as a kind of civic father, an image Plutarch clearly intends as a moral counterweight to the self-aggrandizing generals-turned-tyrants who fill so many of the other Lives. It is also a rare account, preserved largely through Plutarch and Diodorus, of Greek Sicily's near-collapse and recovery in the mid-fourth century BCE, and of the ordinary machinery of resettlement, colonization, and civic memory that followed a successful liberation.
“For others' benefit, originally, I set out to compose these Lives; yet now I continue the task and take delight in it for my own sake too, using history as a kind of mirror in which I try, somehow, to order and adorn my own life in the likeness of the virtues of these men.”
— Timoleon
“Diogenes of Sinope, however, on first meeting him said, "How unworthily you live, Dionysius." And when Dionysius stopped and said, "You do well, Diogenes, to share our grief at our misfortune," Diogenes replied, "What? Do you suppose I grieve with you, and am not rather indignant that such a slave as you,”
— Timoleon
“he often said he was grateful to god because, wishing to save Sicily, god had inscribed Timoleon's own name upon it. And in his house he founded a shrine and sacrificed to Automatia, and consecrated the house itself to the Good Daimon.”
— Timoleon
“The people of the Syracusans bury this man, Timoleon son of Timodemus, a Corinthian, at the cost of two hundred minae, and have honored him for all time to come with contests in music, horsemanship, and athletics, because, having put down the tyrants, and having conquered the barbarians in war, and having resettled the greatest of the devastated cities, he restored their laws to the Sicilian Greeks.”
— Timoleon
“he ran and threw his cloak down in the middle of the theater, and rushing at a run toward one of the benches he dashed his head against it, meaning to die”
— Timoleon
Timoleon was a Corinthian statesman and general of the fourth century BCE, sent by Corinth to Sicily to end the tyranny of Dionysius the Younger at Syracuse. He defeated both the local tyrants and a large Carthaginian army, then voluntarily surrendered his own power once Sicily was free.
His brother Timophanes had seized tyrannical power over Corinth after being given command of mercenaries. Timoleon first pleaded with him to give it up; when he refused, Timoleon's companions killed Timophanes while Timoleon, by Plutarch's account, stood by grieving but did not stop them, an act that haunted him for years afterward.
Timoleon allowed Dionysius to leave Syracuse for exile in Corinth with only a little money. There the former tyrant of Sicily lived as an ordinary, somewhat disreputable private citizen, spending his time around fish-markets and perfume-shops and becoming an object of mockery, including from the philosopher Diogenes.
It was Timoleon's decisive victory over a huge Carthaginian invasion force at the river Crimisus in western Sicily. A sudden storm of rain and hail struck the heavily armored Carthaginians in the face and blinded them while leaving the more lightly equipped Greeks largely unaffected, and Timoleon's much smaller army routed them, with many drowning in the rain-swollen river.
No. Once the tyrannies were destroyed and Syracuse and other cities were resettled and given back their laws, Timoleon laid down his extraordinary command and lived out his life as a private citizen among the Syracusans, though the city continued to consult him informally and cared for him in his old age and blindness.
Plutarch repeatedly pauses to marvel at how many pivotal moments in Timoleon's campaign turned on chance rather than calculation, from a would-be assassin's confession to a sudden storm at the Crimisus, and explicitly weighs whether Timoleon's achievement should be credited more to fortune or to his own virtue and judgment.
The city had been devastated by decades of tyranny and factional warfare; Plutarch describes its market-place so depopulated that deer and wild boar were hunted there, and its citizens scattered or dead, before Timoleon's campaign and subsequent call for new colonists brought it back to life.
They gave him a lavish public funeral attended by tens of thousands, had a proclamation read out crediting him with putting down the tyrants, defeating the Carthaginians, and restoring Sicilian Greek laws, buried him in the market-place, and later built a gymnasium there in his honor called the Timoleonteum.
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