Letters

Next, I requested that Dion’s family should have possession of his property, instead of the distributors, whom you wot of, having the distribution of it. And further, I deemed it right that the revenue which was usually paid over to him year by year should be forwarded to him all the more, rather than all the less, because of my presence. None of these requests being granted, I asked leave to depart. Thereupon you kept urging me to stop for the year, declaring that you would sell all Dion’s property and send one half of the proceeds to Corinth and retain the other half for his son. And I could mention many other promises none of which you fulfilled; but the number of them is so great that I cut it short. For when you had sold all the goods, without Dion’s consent—though you had declared that without his consent you would not dispose of them—you put the coping-stone on all your promises, my admirable friend, in a most outrageous way: you invented a plan that was neither noble nor ingenious nor just nor profitable —namely, to scare me off from so much as seeking for the dispatch of the money, as being in ignorance of the events then going on. For when you sought to expel Heracleides unjustly, as it seemed to the Syracusans as well as to myself—because I had joined with Theodotes and Eurybius in entreating you not to do so, you took this as an ample excuse, and asserted that it had long been plain to you that I paid no regard to you, but only to Dion and Dion’s friends and connections, and now that Theodotes and Heracleides, who were Dion’s connections, were the subjects of accusations, I was using every means to prevent their paying the just penalty. Such, then, was the course of events as regards our association in political affairs. And if you perceived any other estrangement in my attitude towards you, you may reasonably suppose that that was the way in which all these things took place. Nor need you be surprised; for I should justly be accounted base by any man of sense had I been influenced by the greatness of your power to betray my old and intimate guest-friend—a man, to say the least, in no wise inferior to you— when, because of you, he was in distress, and to prefer you, the man who did the wrong, and to do everything just as you bade me—for filthy lucre’s sake, obviously; for to this, and nothing else, men would have ascribed this change of front in me, if I had changed. Well, then, it was the fact that things took this course, owing to you, which produced this wolf-love and want of fellowship between you and me.