Dionysius, where his tyranny concluded like the pompous finale of some
great tragedy. Alexander the Great, when Hephæstion died, not only cut
off the manes of the horses and mules, but actually took down the
battlements from the walls, that cities might seem in mourning,
presenting a shorn and woeful look in contrast to their former
appearance.

But these were the commands of tyrants; they were done under
compulsion, and caused a feeling of dislike to the person honoured,
and of absolute hatred against those who enforced them, but showed no
gratitude or desire to honour the dead. They were mere displays of
barbaric pride and boastful extravagance, which wastes its superfluity
on vain and useless objects; whereas, here was a private citizen who
died in a foreign land, without his wife, his children or his friends,
and, without any one asking for it or compelling them to it, he was
escorted to his grave, buried and crowned with garlands by so many
provinces and cities, vying with one another in showing him honour,
that he seems to have enjoyed the most blessed fate possible. For as
Æsop says, the death of the fortunate is not grievous, but blessed,
since it secures their felicity, and puts it out of Fortune's power.
That Spartan spoke well, who, when Diagoras, the Olympic victor, was
looking at his sons being in their turn crowned as victors at Olympia,
with his grandchildren about him, embraced him and said, "Die,
Diagoras; for you cannot rise to Olympus and be a god there." Yet I do
not suppose that any one would compare all the Olympian and Pythian
prizes together with one of Pelopidas's achievements, of which he
performed many, and lived the most part of his life esteemed and
looked up to, and at last, in his thirteenth Bœotarchy, when fighting
gloriously against a tyrant, he died in defence of the liberties of
Thessaly.