between myth and history 183
bronze bull. It was hollow, with a trapdoor or hatch big enough for a man
to enter.
Perilaus presented this handsome bull statue to Phalaris and explained
how it worked. “Should you wish to punish someone, lock him inside
the bull and build a fire under it. As the bronze bull’s body heats up, the
man roasts within!” Then Perilaus described the fiendish mechanism in
the bull’s interior. Perilaus had installed a system of pipes to amplify the
victim’s screams. While smoke flowed from the bull’s nostrils, the tubes
directed the sounds of the victim to issue from bull’s mouth, transforming
the shrieks of agony into the “most pathetic bellowings of a bull, music
to your ears.” Impressed, Phalaris slyly requested a demonstration of the
special sound effects. “Come then, Perilaus, show me how it works.” As
soon as Perilaus crept inside to yell into the pipes, Phalaris locked the
door and built a fire under the bull. The bronze smith was roasted to death
(some say he was baked and then thrown from a cliff ).
The story evokes the ironic folk motif of an inventor/criminal killed
by his own invention/plot. Yet such sadistic behavior in real- life despots
is hardly unknown (two Roman examples were the emperors Nero and
Caligula). The existence of the Brazen Bull of Phalaris is not in doubt; it
was described in numerous extant and lost ancient sources. And Phalaris
became the prototypical evil dictator. In fifth- century Greece, the poet
Pindar could assume that everyone knew the “hateful reputation” of
Phalaris who, “with his pitiless mind, burned his victims in a bronze
bull” (Pythian 1.95). A century later, Aristotle twice referred to Phalaris’s
tyrannical rule as common knowledge. 7
In the first century BC, Plutarch told of Phalaris’s bronze bull in which
he burned people alive, citing an earlier lost historian. The historian
Diodorus Siculus also expounded on the bull. Pliny (first century AD)
criticized the sculptor Perilaus (Perillus) for conceiving of such a horrid
use for his art and approved of his fate as the bull’s first victim. Accord-
ing to Pliny (34.19.88) the sculptor’s other statues were still preserved in
Rome “for one purpose only, so that we may hate the hands that made
them.” In the second century AD, the satirist Lucian composed a humor-
ous essay pretending to defend the reputation of the loathsome Phalaris. 8
The bull spawned other roasting devices. Plutarch’s Moralia referred to
a lost history by Aristides, who described a very similar Sicilian invention
in the city of Segesta, but in the shape of a realistic bronze horse, forged by