There was a brazen bull which Phalaris made in Agrigentum, and in it he shut up men and afterwards lighting fire beneath it used to take such dreadful revenge on his subjects that as the brass grew red and the man inside perished roasted and scorched, when he screamed in the extremity of his agony, the sound when it reached the ears of those present resembled, owing to the way the thing was constructed, the lowing of a bull.
This bull during the Carthaginian domination was taken from Agrigentum to <a class="linkToPlace" target="_blank" href="/place?placename=Carthage&groupId=441&placeId=820">Carthage</a>, and though the door at the joint of its shoulder-blades through which the victims were lowered into it, was still preserved, and though no reason at all can be found why such a bull should have been made in <a class="linkToPlace" target="_blank" href="/place?placename=Carthage&groupId=441&placeId=820">Carthage</a>,
yet Timaeus attempts to demolish the common story and to give the lie to the statements of poets and authors, asserting that neither the bull that was in <a class="linkToPlace" target="_blank" href="/place?placename=Carthage&groupId=441&placeId=820">Carthage</a> came from Agrigentum, nor had there ever been one in Agrigentum,
and entering into quite a long disquisition on this subject. What terms are we to use in speaking of Timaeus? For to me it seems that all the most bitter phrases of the kind he applies to others are appropriate to himself.
That he was quarrelsome, mendacious, and headstrong has been, I trust, sufficiently proved by what I have already said, but what I am about to add will make it evident that he was no philosopher and in general a man of no education.
For in his twenty-first book, near the end, he says, in the course of Timoleon\'s address to his troops, "The earth lying under the universe being divided into three parts named Asia, <a class="linkToPlace" target="_blank" href="/place?placename=Africa&groupId=300&placeId=294">Africa</a>, and Europe."
No one would credit that, I will not say Timaeus but, even the celebrated Margites had said such a thing.
For who is such an ignoramus, I do not speak of those who undertake to write history but. . . .
Walbank Commentary