A single dominion yet remained to him,--that of affection. The people worshipped him. His voice was law. As he grew older his sight failed, until he became totally blind. Yet still, when any difficult question arose, the people trusted to their sightless benefactor to tell them what to do. On such occasions Timoleon would be brought in his car, drawn by mules across the market-place, and then by attendants into the hall of assembly. Here, still seated in his car, he would listen to the debate, and in the end give his own opinion, which was usually accepted by nearly the whole assembly. This done, the car would be drawn out again amid shouts and cheers, and the blind "father of his country" return to his modest home. Such liberty and prosperity as now ruled in Sicily had not for a century been known, and when, three or four years after the great victory of the Crimesus, Timoleon suddenly died, the grief of the people was universal and profound. His funeral obsequies were splendidly celebrated at the public cost, his body was burned on a vast funeral pile, and as the flames flashed upward a herald proclaimed,-- "The Syracusan people solemnize, at the cost of two hundred minae, the funeral of this man, the Corinthian Timoleon, son of Timodemus. They have passed a vote to honor him for all future time with festival matches in music, horse and chariot races, and gymnastics; because, after having put down the despots, subdued the foreign enemy, and recolonized the greatest among the ruined cities, he restored to the Sicilian Greeks their constitution and laws." And thus died one of the noblest and most successful men the world has ever known. The fratricide of his earlier years was for the good of mankind, and his whole life was consecrated to the cause of human liberty, while not a thought of self-aggrandizement seems to have ever disturbed his noble soul. _THE SACRED WAR._ There were two places in Greece which had been set aside as sacred,--Plataea, the scene of the final defeat of the Persian invaders, and Delphi, the seat of the great temple of Apollo, in whose oracles all Greece placed faith. We have already seen how little the sacredness of Plataea protected it from ruin. We have next to see how the sacredness of Delphi was condemned, and how all Greece suffered in consequence.