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PLATO'S FIRST VISIT TO SICILY 303 woke in grey dawn to find the feast over, only Socrates still unchanged, discoursing to Agathon and Aristophanes. Aristodemus was weary and could not follow the whole argument ; he only knew that it showed how comedy and tragedy are the same thing. But by this time new influences were at work in Plato's development. On his master's death he had retired with other Socratics to Megara, where the whole- hearted protection of Eucleides laid the seeds in Plato's mind of a life-long respect and friendliness towards the barren Megaric dialectics. The Gorgias can scarcely have been written in Athens. We hear vaguely of travels in Egypt and Cyrene. But Plato seems to have returned home before 388 B.C., when he made his first fateful expedition to Sicily. Most of Sicily was at this time a centralised military despotism in the hands of Dionysius I., whose brother-in-law, Dion, was an enthu- siastic admirer of Plato. It was partly this friend, partly the Pythagorean schools, and partly interest in the great volcano, which drew Plato to Syracuse ; and he probably considered that any tyrant's court was as fit a place for a philosopher as democratic Athens. But he was more a son of his age and country than he ever admitted. He could not forgo the Athenian's privilege of irappTjaia (free speech), and he used it in the Athenian manner, on politics. The old autocrat put him in irons, and made a present of him — so the legend runs — to the Spartan ambassador Pollis. Pollis sold him as a slave in -^gina, where one Annikeris of Cyrene — a follower of Aristippus apparently, heaping coals of fire on the anti-Hedonist's head — bought him into freedom, and refused to accept repayment from Plato's friends ; who, since the sub-