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PLATO AND POETRY 309 Athens, and the dehberate indifference of the rising schools must have struck him as a failure in duty. Three-fourths of his later writings are about politics, and the ruling aspiration of his outer life is the con- version of Dionysius II. This latter thought makes its first definite appearance in that ' tJiird wave ' which is to make the Republic possible (p. 473) — the demand that either philosophers shall be kings, or those who are now kings take to philosophy ; and the insistence there upon the tyrant's inevitable wretchedness may have been partly meant for a personal exhortation. For some twenty years the great old man clung to his hope of making a philosopher-king out of that vicious dilettante ! The spirit of illusion which he had pitch- forked out of his writings, had returned with a vengeance into his life. Dion had called him a second time to Sicily in 367, immediately on the succession of Dionysius II., and he went. The result was a brief outburst of philosophic enthusiasm in the court of Syracuse ; the air was choked, we are told, with the sand used by the various geometers for their diagrams. Then came coolness, quarrels, Dion's banishment, and Plato's disappointed return. But, of course, a young prince might forget himself and then repent ; might listen to evil counsellors, and afterwards see his error. Plato was ready, on receiving another invitation in 361, "yet again to fathom deadly Chary bdis," as Letter VII. Homerically puts it. He failed to recon- cile the king with Dion, and only escaped with his life through the help of the Pythagorean community at Tarentum. Dion resorted to unphilosophic methods ; drove Dionysius from the throne in 357, and died by assassination in 354. In the Fourth Book of the Laws,