Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.5, 1865).djvu/274

266 DION. . Cyprian, on whose death Aristotle wrote his Dialogue of the Soul, and Timonides the Leucadian. They also engaged on his side Miltas the Tliessalian, who was a prophet, and had stvidied in the Academy. But of all that were banished by Dionysius, who were not fewer than a thousand, five and twenty only joined in the enter- prise ; the rest were afraid, and abandoned it. The ren- dezvous was in the island Zacynthus, where a small force of not quite eight hundred men came together, all of them, however, persons already distinguished in ^^lenty of previous hard service, their bodies well trained and practised, and their exjaerience and courage amply suffi- cient to animate and embolden to action the numbers whom Dion expected to join him in Sicily. Yet these men, when they first understood the expe- dition was against Dionysius, were troubled and dis- heartened, blaming Dion, that, hurried on Uke a madman by mere passion and desj3air, he rashly threw both him- self and them into certain ruin. . Nor were they less angry with their commanders and muster-masters, "that they had not in the beginning let them know the design. But when Dion in his address to them had set forth the unsafe and weak condition of arbitrary government, and declared that he carried them rather for commanders than soldiers, the citizens of Syracuse and the rest of the Sicilians having been long ready for a revolt, and when, after him, Alcimenes, an Achsean of the highest birth and reputation, who accompanied the expedition, harangued them to the same effect, they were con- tented. It was now the middle of summer, and the Etesian winds blowing steadily on the seas, the moon was at the full, when Dion prepared a magnificent sacrifice to Apollo, and with great solemnity marched his soldiei's to the temple in all their arms and accoutrements. And after