It were much to be wished that our information concerning the policy of Pisistratus and the public affairs of Athens during his administration were more minute; but the total silence of history concerning this period indicates at least that it was one of tranquillity and happiness. We have seen already that his private character was amiable; it remains to be added that his tastes were elegant and his mind cultivated. By many he is included in the list of worthies distinguished as the seven sages of Greece; indeed all writers who mention him bear testimony to the successful cultivation of his mental powers; and he possesses a strong claim to the gratitude of the world at large, if it be true that he collected and rendered into order the scattered fragments of Homer’s poems before they were irretrievably corrupted and confused by the inaccuracies of oral tradition.[169] And he scarcely deserves less credit for having been the first to establish a public library: an institution most valuable in all ages and places, but especially before the introduction of printing, when the price of books rendered it impossible for any but the wealthy to possess them. He also devoted much of his attention and revenue to the embellishment of the city; he built fountains, and a gymnasium, or place of exercise; he threw his private gardens open to the public; he dedicated a temple to the Pythian Apollo, and had commenced another to Olympian Zeus, the Latin Jupiter, when his labours were interrupted by death, B.C. 527, after he had enjoyed for ten years in tranquillity the sovereignty which he had pursued for so many anxious years. He left a name adorned by many virtues and accomplishments, and blemished apparently only by one great fault, ambition: but this, the master–passion of his life, has sullied his numerous great and good qualities, as a tainted fountain pollutes the whole stream. Had he been a rightful sovereign, he might have been hailed as the father of his country: instead of which his fellow–citizens saw in him only the parent of a hated and proscribed race, and later ages “damn him with the faint praise” of being the best of tyrants.