Letters

Be it so, then, that this is nothing but a prayer (and in truth every man ought always to begin his speaking and his thinking with the gods); yet may it attain fulfilment in indicating some such counsel as this:—Now and almost ever since the war began both you and your enemies have been ruled continuously by that one family which your fathers set on the throne in the hour of their greatest distress, when Greek Sicily was in the utmost danger of being entirely overrun by the Carthaginians and barbarized. On that occasion they chose Dionysius because of his youth and warlike prowess to take charge of the military operations for which he was suited, with Hipparinus, who was older, as his fellow-counsellor, appointing them dictators for the safeguarding of Sicily, with the title, as men say, of tyrants. But whether one prefers to suppose that the cause which ultimately brought about their salvation was divine Fortune and the Deity, or the virtue of the rulers, or possibly the combination of both assisted by the citizens of that age—as to this let everyone form his own notion; in any case this was the way in which salvation for the men of that generation came about. Seeing, then, that they proved themselves men of such a quality, it is surely right that they should be repaid with gratitude by all those whom they saved. But if in after times the tyrant’s house has wrongly abused the bounty of the city, the penalty for this it has suffered in part, and in part it will have to pay. What, then, is the penalty rightly to be exacted from them under existing circumstances? If you were able to get quit of them easily, without serious dangers and trouble, or if they were able to regain the empire without difficulty, then, in either case, it would not have been possible for me so much as to offer the advice which I am now about to utter; but as it is, both of you ought to bear in mind and remember how many times each party has hopefully imagined that it lacked but a little of achieving complete success almost every time; and, what is more, that it is precisely this little deficiency which is always turning out to be the cause of great and numberless evils. And of these evils no limit is ever reached, but what seems to be the end of the old is always being linked on to the beginning of a new brood; and because of this endless chain of evil the whole tribe of tyrants and democrats alike will be in danger of destruction. But should any of these consequences—likely as they are though lamentable—come to pass, hardly a trace of the Greek tongue will remain in all Sicily, since it will have been transformed into a province or dependency of Phoenicians or Opicians. Against this all the Greeks must with all zeal provide a remedy.