Epistles

and beyond all this, suppose that he is no longer willing to send me away by giving his own personal order to one of the shipmasters, but makes it plain to them all that he has no wish for me to sail away in comfort—in this case would any of them consent to convey me as a passenger, [*](For this use of the word ναύτης cf. Soph. Phil. 901.) starting off from the residence of Dionysius? For, in addition to my other misfortunes, I was lodging in the garden adjoining his residence, and out of this not even the doorkeeper would have allowed me to pass without a permit sent him from Dionysius. On the other hand, if I stay on for the year I shall be able to write and tell Dion the position in which I am placed and what I am doing; and if Dionysius should actually perform any of his promises, I shall have accomplished something not altogether contemptible—for Dion’s property, if it is rightly valued, amounts probably to as much as a hundred talents; whereas if the events now dimly threatening come to pass in the way that seems likely, I am at a loss to know what I shall do with myself. Notwithstanding, I am obliged, it appears, to endure another year of toil and endeavor to test by actual experience the devices of Dionysius. When I had come to this decision, I said to Dionysius on the following day—I have decided to remain. I request you, however, I said, not to regard me as Dion’s master, but to join with me yourself in sending him a letter explaining what we have now decided, and asking him whether it satisfies him; and if not, and if he desires and claims other conditions, let him write them to us immediately; and do you refrain till then from taking any new step in regard to his affairs. This is what was said, and this is what we agreed; pretty nearly in the terms I have now stated. [*](For this part of the biographical details cf. Plat. L. 3.318a ff.) After this the vessels had put to sea and it was no longer possible for me to sail; and then it was that Dionysius remembered to tell me that one half of the property ought to belong to Dion, the other half to his son; and he said that he would sell it, and when sold he would give me the one half to convey to Dion, and leave the half intended for his son where it was; for that was the most equitable arrangement. I, then, although I was dumbfounded at his statement, deemed that it would be utterly ridiculous to gainsay him any more; I replied, however, that we ought to wait for the letter from Dion, and then send him back this proposal by letter. But immediately after this he proceeded to sell the whole of Dion’s property in a very high-handed fashion, where and how and to what purchasers he chose, without ever saying a single word to me about the matter; and verily I, in like manner, forbore to talk to him at all any longer about Dion’s affairs; for I thought that there was no longer any profit in so doing.

Now up to this time I had been assisting in this way philosophy and my friends but after this, the kind of life we lived, Dionysius and I, was this—I was gazing out of my cage, like a bird [*](cf. Plat. Phaedrus 249d.) that is longing to fly off and away, while he was scheming how he might shoo me back without paying away any of Dion’s money; nevertheless, to the whole of Sicily we appeared to be comrades. Now Dionysius attempted, contrary to his father’s practice, to reduce the pay of the older members of his mercenary force, and the soldiers, being infuriated, assembled together and refused to permit it. And when he kept trying to force them by closing the gates of the citadel, [*](The mercenaries lived in the island of Ortygia, but beyond the walls of the Acropolis; so when Plato had to quit the Acropolis he was surrounded by them in his new lodgings.) they immediately rushed up to the walls shouting out a kind of barbaric war-chant; whereupon Dionysius became terribly alarmed and conceded all and even more than all to those of the peltasts that were then assembled. Then a report quickly got abroad that Heracleides [*](cf. Plat. L. 3.318c for Heracleides, Theodotes, and Eurybius.) was to blame for all this trouble; and Heracleides, on hearing this, took himself off and vanished. Then Dionysius was seeking to capture him, and finding himself at a loss he summoned Theodotes to his garden; and it happened that at the time I too was walking in the garden. Now the rest of their conversation I neither know nor heard, but I both know and remember what Theodotes said to Dionysius in my presence. Plato, he said, I am urging this course on our friend Dionysius: if I prove able to fetch Heracleides here to answer the charges now made against him, in case it is decided that he must not reside in Sicily, I claim that he should have a passage to the Peloponnese, taking his son and his wife, and reside there without doing injury to Dionysius, and enjoying the income from his property. In fact I have already sent to fetch him, and I will now send again, in case he should obey either my former summons or the present one. And I request and beseech Dionysius that, should anyone meet with Heracleides, whether in the country or here in the city, no harm should be inflicted on him beyond his removal out of the country until Dionysius has come to some further decision. And addressing Dionysius he said, Do you agree to this? I agree, he replied, that even if he be seen at your house he shall suffer no harm beyond what has now been mentioned.

Now on the next day, at evening, Eurybius and Theodotes came to me hurriedly, in an extraordinary state of perturbation; and Theodotes said—Plato, were you present yesterday at the agreement which Dionysius made with us both concerning Heracleides? Of course I was, I replied. But now, he said, peltasts [*](i.e. light-armed soldiers, so called from the kind of light shield they carried.) are running about seeking to capture Heracleides, and he is probably somewhere about here. But do you now by all means accompany us to Dionysius. So we set off and went in to where he was and while they two stood in silence, weeping, I said to him—My friends here are alarmed lest you should take any fresh step regarding Heracleides, contrary to our agreement of yesterday; for I believe it is known that he has taken refuge somewhere hereabouts. On hearing this, Dionysius fired up and went all colors, just as an angry man would do; and Theodotes fell at his knees and grasping his hand besought him with tears to do no such thing. And I interposed and said by way of encouragement—Cheer up, Theodotes; for Dionysius will never dare to act otherwise contrary to yesterday’s agreement. Then Dionysius, with a highly tyrannical glare at me, said— With you I made no agreement, great or small. Heaven is witness, I replied, that you did,—not to do what this man is now begging you not to do. And when I had said this I turned away and went out. After this Dionysius kept on hunting after Heracleides, while Theodotes kept sending messengers to Heracleides bidding him to flee. And Dionysius sent out Tisias and his peltasts with orders to pursue him; but Heracleides, as it was reported, forestalled them by a fraction of a day and made his escape into the Carthaginians’ province. Now after this Dionysius decided that his previous plot of refusing to pay over Dion’s money would furnish him with a plausible ground for a quarrel with me; and, as a first step, he sent me out of the citadel, inventing the excuse that the women had to perform a sacrifice of ten days’ duration in the garden where I was lodging; so during this period he gave orders that I should stay outside with Archedemus. And while I was there Theodotes sent for me and was loud in his indignation at what had then taken place and in his blame of Dionysius; but the latter, when he heard that I had gone to the house of Theodotes, by way of making this a new pretext, akin to the old, for his quarrel against me, sent a man to ask me whether I had really visited Theodotes when he invited me. Certainly, I replied; and he said—Well then, he ordered me to tell you that you are not acting at all honorably in always preferring Dion and Dion’s friends to him. Such were his words; and after this he did not summon me again to his house, as though it was now quite clear that I was friendly towards Theodotes and Heracleides but hostile to him; and he supposed that I bore him no goodwill because of the clean sweep he was making of Dion’s moneys.

Thereafter I was residing outside the citadel among the mercenaries; and amongst others some of the servants who were from Athens, fellow-citizens of my own, came to me and reported that I had been slanderously spoken of amongst the peltasts; and that some of them were threatening that if they could catch me they would make away with me. So I devised the following plan to save myself: I sent to Archytas and my other friends in Tarentum stating the position in which I found myself: and they, having found some pretext for an Embassy from the State, dispatched a thirty-oared vessel, and with it one of themselves, called Lamiscus; and he, when he came, made request to Dionysius concerning me, saying that I was desirous to depart, and begging him by all means to give his consent. To this he agreed, and he sent me forth after giving me supplies for the journey; but as to Dion’s money, neither did I ask for any of it nor did anyone pay me any. On arriving at Olympia, [*](i.e. for the festival of 360 B.C.) in the Peloponnese, I came upon Dion, who was attending the Games; and I reported what had taken place. And he, calling Zeus to witness, was invoking me and my relatives and friends to prepare at once to take vengeance on Dionysius,—we on account of his treachery to guests (for that was what Dion said and meant) , and he himself on account of his wrongful expulsion and banishment. And I, when I heard this, bade him summon my friends to his aid, should they be willing— But as for me, I said, it was you yourself, with the others, who by main force, so to say, made me an associate of Dionysius at table and at hearth and a partaker in his holy rites; and he, though he probably believed that I, as many slanderers asserted, was conspiring with you against himself and his throne, yet refrained from killing me, and showed compunction. Thus, not only am I no longer, as I may say, of an age to assist anyone in war, but I also have ties in common with you both, in case you should ever come to crave at all for mutual friendship and wish to do one another good; but so long as you desire to do evil, summon others. This I said because I loathed my Sicilian wandering [*](Perhaps an allusion to the wanderings of Ulysses; cf. Plat. L. 7.345e.) and its ill-success. They, however, by their disobedience and their refusal to heed my attempts at conciliation have themselves to blame for all the evils which have now happened; for, in all human probability, none of these would ever have occurred if Dionysius had paid over the money to Dion or had even become wholly reconciled to him, for both my will and my power were such that I could have easily restrained Dion. But, as things are, by rushing the one against the other they have flooded the world with woes.

And yet Dion had the same designs as I myself should have had (for so I would maintain) or anyone else whose purpose regarding his own power and his friends and his city was the reasonable one of achieving the greatest height of power and privilege by conferring the greatest benefits. But a man does not do this if he enriches himself, his comrades, and his city by means of plotting and collecting conspirators, while in reality he himself is poor and not his own master but the cowardly slave of pleasures; nor does he do so if he proceeds next to slay the owners of property, dubbing them enemies, and to dissipate their goods, and to charge his accomplices and comrades not to blame him if any of them complains of poverty. So likewise if a man receives honor from a city for conferring on it such benefits as distributing the goods of the few to the many by means of decrees; or if, when he is at the head of a large city which holds sway over many smaller ones, he distributes the funds of the smaller cities to his own, contrary to what is just. For neither Dion nor any other will ever voluntarily [*](According to the Socratic dictum, No one sins voluntarily.) aim thus at a power that would bring upon himself and his race an everlasting curse, but rather at a moderate government and the establishment of the justest and best of laws by means of the fewest possible exiles and executions. Yet when Dion was now pursuing this course, resolved to suffer rather than to do unholy deeds—although guarding himself against so suffering [*](For suffering wrong as a bar to complete happiness cf. Plat. Laws 829a.)—none the less when he had attained the highest pitch of superiority over his foes he stumbled. And therein he suffered no surprising fate. For while, in dealing with the unrighteous, a righteous man who is sober and sound of mind will never be wholly deceived concerning the souls of such men; yet it would not, perhaps, be surprising if he were to share the fate of a good pilot, who, though he certainly would not fail to notice the oncoming of a storm, yet might fail to realize its extraordinary and unexpected violence, and in consequence of that failure might be forcibly overwhelmed. And Dion’s downfall was, in fact, due to the same cause; for while he most certainly did not fail to notice that those who brought him down were evil men, yet he did fail to realize to what a pitch of folly they had come, and of depravity also and voracious greed; and thereby he was brought down and lies fallen, enveloping Sicily in immeasurable woe.

What counsel I have to offer, after this narrative of events, has been given already, and so let it suffice. But I deemed it necessary to explain the reasons why I undertook my second journey to Sicily [*](i.e. Plato’s third Sicilian visit (as he does not count the first), cf. Plat. L. 7.330c, Plat. L. 7.337e.) because absurd and irrational stories are being told about it. If, therefore, the account I have now given appears to anyone more rational, and if anyone believes that it supplies sufficient excuses for what took place, then I shall regard that account as both reasonable and sufficient.