Page:History of Greece Vol XI.djvu/64

38 HISTORY OF GREECE. read of public antipathy, against an individual, being carried tc the pitch of desecrating by violence the majesty of the Olympic festival. Here then were the real and sufficient causes not the mere ill-success of his poem which penetrated the soul of Dionysius, driving him into anguish and temporary madness. Though he nad silenced the Vox Populi at Syracuse, not all his mercenaries, ships, and forts in Ortygia, could save him from feeling its force, when thus emphatically poured forth against him by the free- spoken crowd at Olympia. It was apparently shortly after the peace of 387 B. c., that Dionysius received at Syracuse the visit of the philosopher Plato. 1 The latter having come to Sicily on a voyage of inquiry and curiosity, especially to see Mount JEtna was introduced by his friends, the philosophers of Tarentum, to Dion, then a young man, resident at Syracuse, and brother of Aristomache, the wife of Dionysius. Of Plato and Dion I shall speak more elsewhere : here I notice the philosopher only as illustrating the history and character of Dionysius. Dion, having been profoundly impressed with the conversation of Plato, prevailed upon Dionysius to in- vite and talk with him also. Plato discoursed eloquently upon justice and virtue, enforcing his doctrine that wicked men were inevitably miserable that true happiness belonged only to the 1 There are different statements about the precise year in which Plato was born : see Diogenes Laert. iii. 1-6. The accounts fluctuate between 429 and 428 B. c.; and Hermodorus (ap. Diog. L. iii. 6) appears to have put it in 427 B. c.: see Corsini, Fast. Attic, iii. p. 230; Ast. Platen's Lebcn. p. 14. Plato (Epistol. vii. p. 324) states himself to have been about (a^edov) forty years of age when he visited Sicily for the first time. If we accept aa the date of his birth 428 B. c., he would be forty years of age in 388 B. c. It seems improbable that the conversation of Plato with Dion at Syra- cuse (which was continued sufficiently long to exercise a marked and per- manent influence on the character of the latter,) and his interviews with Dionysius, should have taken place while Dionysius was carrying on the Italian war or the siege of Rhegium. I think that the date of the inter- view must be placed after the capture of Rhegium in 387 B. c. And the expression of Plato (given in a letter written more than thirty years after- wards) about his own age, is not to be taken as excluding the supposition that he might have been forty -one or forty-two when he came to Syracu ?e. Athenteus (xi. p. 507) mentions the visit of Plato