12 GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 



Eagle, the Hare, and the Beetle ; and to prove to them that injustice 

 always meets with its due punishment, though practised by the strong 

 upon the weakest of creatures. " Nor are you," continued the un- 

 happy sage, "to flatter yourselves that the profaners of the holy 

 altars, and the oppressors of the guiltless, can ever ultimately avoid 

 the vengeance of the gods." All this served but the more to enrage 

 his already exasperated judges, and the furious and unthinking multi- 

 tude. They dragged him forward to the fatal spot, and the last words 

 he uttered were characteristic of his history. He likened his miserable 

 lot to that of an old man who had fallen into a pit, together with some 

 asses : both he and the beasts having been beaten out of their road by 

 the violence of a tempest, the animals, when they found themselves 

 precipitated into this cavern, and confined to its narrow boundaries, 

 began to kick the aged traveller, and gave him his death- wounds. 

 " Unhappy wretch that I am," exclaimed ^Esop, in the person of this 

 old man, " since die I must, it is doubly hard to die by means of, and 

 surrounded by, these asses, the most senseless of beasts ! To suffer 

 death unjustly were enough calamitous, but for it to be inflicted by the 

 hands of a barbarous and ignorant people, alike devoid of humanity, 

 honour, hospitality, or justice; ye gods, permit not my innocent 

 death to pass unavenged!" In the midst of this harangue, the im- 

 patient multitude precipitated him from the rock, and he fell lifeless 

 His death, at its base. Thus perished, as he had lived, the sage and celebrated 



, mixing wisdom with wit, entertainment with instruction. 

 The veneration with which the character of JEsop has been generally 

 regarded by the historians of his time, cannot, perhaps, be more strongly 

 exemplified than in their ascribing a dreadful plague, with which the 

 Delphians were shortly afterwards visited, to the outrage thus com- 

 mitted on the hospitality peculiarly due to great men, and their impiety 

 to the gods. This the Pythoness herself declared to be but justice 

 upon them for their crime, and directed a public atonement to be made 

 for it. Accordingly we find that this clamorous arid capricious people, 

 soon after his death, erected a pyramid to the memory of ^Esop. It 

 was also a tradition of the best times of Greece, that the conspirators 

 by whose wicked contrivance he fell, so severely suffered the stings of 

 conscience, that they slew themselves in remorse ; a circumstance 

 which is reported to have given pleasure to the more civilized nations 

 of the Greeks around. Socrates is said to have amused and consoled 

 himself, in several of the serious hours he spent in prison, shortly 

 before he suffered, by rendering several of the compositions of 

 into familiar verse. 



