Dion

After using such arguments as these, Dion set Heracleides and Theodotes free.

Then turning his attention to the siege-wall, he bade each one of the Syracusans to cut a stake and lay it down near the works, and setting his mercenaries to the task all night, while the Syracusans were resting, he succeeded in fencing off the acropolis, so that when day came the citizens and the enemy alike were amazed to see with what speed the work had been accomplished.

He also buried the dead Syracusans, ransomed those who had been taken prisoners, although they were fully two thousand in number, and then held an assembly.

Here Heracleides came forward with a motion that Dion should be chosen general with absolute powers by land and sea.

The aristocracy approved of this motion and urged the appointment; but the mob of sailors and day-labourers tumultuously opposed it, being vexed that Heracleides should lose his office of admiral, and considering him, even though good for nothing in other ways, at least altogether more a man of the people than Dion and more under the control of the multitude.

This point Dion yielded to them, and restored the command by sea to Heracleides; but when they insisted upon the redistribution of land and houses, he opposed them and repealed their former decrees on this head, thereby winning their displeasure.

Wherefore Heracleides at once renewed his machinations, and, when he was stationed at Messana, artfully tried to exasperate against Dion the soldiers and sailors who had sailed thither with him, declaring that Dion intended to make himself tyrant; but he himself was all the while making secret compacts with Dionysius through the agency of Pharax the Spartan.

When this was suspected by the better class of Syracusans, there was dissension in the army, and therefore perplexity and want of provisions in Syracuse,

so that Dion was altogether at a loss what to do, and was blamed by his friends for having strengthened against himself a man so perverse and so corrupted by envy and baseness as Heracleides was.