Phalaris

[1] Another expression of his sadistic brutality is that he supposedly ordered a sculptor named Perilaus to make him a brazen hollow bull.

On the northern coast of the island, the people of Himera elected him general with absolute power, in spite of the warnings of the poet Stesichorus.

He was at last overthrown in a general uprising headed by Telemachus, the ancestor of Theron of Acragas (tyrant c. 488–472 BC), and burned in his own brazen bull.

However, it is more likely that it was Scipio Aemilianus who returned this bull and other stolen works of art to the original Sicilian cities, after his total destruction of Carthage circa 146 BC, which ended the Third Punic War.

[citation needed] Despite his alleged cruelties, Phalaris gained in medieval times a certain literary fame as the supposed author of an epistolary corpus.