Letters

Now up to this time I had been assisting in this way philosophy and my friends but after this, the kind of life we lived, Dionysius and I, was this—I was gazing out of my cage, like a bird that is longing to fly off and away, while he was scheming how he might shoo me back without paying away any of Dion’s money; nevertheless, to the whole of Sicily we appeared to be comrades. Now Dionysius attempted, contrary to his father’s practice, to reduce the pay of the older members of his mercenary force, and the soldiers, being infuriated, assembled together and refused to permit it. And when he kept trying to force them by closing the gates of the citadel, they immediately rushed up to the walls shouting out a kind of barbaric war-chant; whereupon Dionysius became terribly alarmed and conceded all and even more than all to those of the peltasts that were then assembled. Then a report quickly got abroad that Heracleides was to blame for all this trouble; and Heracleides, on hearing this, took himself off and vanished. Then Dionysius was seeking to capture him, and finding himself at a loss he summoned Theodotes to his garden; and it happened that at the time I too was walking in the garden. Now the rest of their conversation I neither know nor heard, but I both know and remember what Theodotes said to Dionysius in my presence. Plato, he said, I am urging this course on our friend Dionysius: if I prove able to fetch Heracleides here to answer the charges now made against him, in case it is decided that he must not reside in Sicily, I claim that he should have a passage to the Peloponnese, taking his son and his wife, and reside there without doing injury to Dionysius, and enjoying the income from his property. In fact I have already sent to fetch him, and I will now send again, in case he should obey either my former summons or the present one. And I request and beseech Dionysius that, should anyone meet with Heracleides, whether in the country or here in the city, no harm should be inflicted on him beyond his removal out of the country until Dionysius has come to some further decision. And addressing Dionysius he said, Do you agree to this? I agree, he replied, that even if he be seen at your house he shall suffer no harm beyond what has now been mentioned.