Dion

This tyrant’s son, as I have said, Dion saw to be dwarfed and deformed in character from his lack of education, and therefore exhorted him to apply himself to study, and to use every entreaty with the first of philosophers to come to Sicily,

and, when he came, to become his disciple, in order that his character might be regulated by the principles of virtue, and that he might be conformed to that divinest and most beautiful model of all being, in obedience to whose direction the universe issues from disorder into order;

in this way he would procure great happiness for himself, and great happiness for his people, and that obedience which they now rendered dejectedly and under the compulsion of his authority, this his moderation and justice would base upon goodwill and a filial spirit, and he would become a king instead of a tyrant.

For the adamantine bonds of sovereignty were not, as his father used to say, fear and force and a multitude of ships and numberless barbarian body-guards, but goodwill and ardour and favour engendered by virtue and justice; these, though they were more flexible than the bonds of severity and harshness, were stronger to maintain a lasting leadership.

And besides all this, it was mean and spiritless in a ruler, while his body was magnificently clothed and his habitation resplendent with luxurious furnishings, to be no more majestic in his intercourse and conversation than an ordinary man, and not to insist that the royal palace of his soul should be adorned in meet and royal fashion.

Since Dion frequently gave him such advice, and artfully mingled with it some of Plato’s doctrines, Dionysius was seized with a keen and even frenzied passion for the teachings and companionship of Plato.

At once, then, many letters began to come to Athens from Dionysius, and many injunctions from Dion, as well as others from the Pythagorean philosophers of Italy, all of whom urged Plato to come and get control of a youthful soul now tossed about on a sea of great authority and power, and steady it by his weighty reasonings.

Plato, accordingly, as he tells us himself,[*](Epist. vii. p. 328.) out of shame more than any thing else, lest men should think him nothing but theory and unwilling to take any action; and further, because he expected that by the purification of one man, who was, as it were, a controlling factor, he would cure all Sicily of her distempers, yielded to these requests.