663 need he paid a debt by placing on each coin an official mark which a sanctuary on distant barbarian shores might seem a small thing, SECT. 8. DEATH OF DIONYSIUS. ESTIMATE OF HIS WORK Of the cam First we find Punic War, 383 B.C. It was only for a moment that the dominion of the Syracusan Outbreak despot reached its extreme limits. lands of Croton, when his borders fell back in the west of his own He had hardly won the city and of Third island. A new war with Carthage had broken out, and this time if Dionysius was not the first to draw the sword, he at least provoked hostilities. He entered into alliances with some of the cities dependent on Carthage-possibly Segesta or Eryx. paigns we know almost nothing, except their result. Carthage helping the Italiots with whom the tyrant was at war. Next we find a Carthaginian force in Sicily commanded by Mago. In a battle fought at Cabala- -a place unknown-the Syracusans won Battle of a great victory and Mago was killed. were proceeding, another battle was fought at Cronion near Panormus, Cronion, While negotiations for peace Cabala. and fate reversed her award. Dionysius was defeated with terrible loss, and compelled to make a disadvantageous peace. of Greek against Punic Sicily was withdrawn from the river Mazarus 378 B.C. to the river Halycus. This meant that the deliverer of Selinus and Thermae gave back those cities to the mercies of the barbarian. Battle of 379 B.C. The boundary Peace, At the mouth of the Halycus, the old Greek foundation of Heraclea Ras Minoa now became, under the corresponding Punic name Ras Melkart. Melkart, one of the chief strongholds of Punic power. War, 368 B.C. Just ten years later, ten years in which the history of Sicily is a Fourth blank, Dionysius essayed to retrieve the losses which the disastrous Punic battle of Cronion had brought upon him. He made war once more upon Carthage, and for the second time he invaded Punic Sicily. He delivered Greek Selinus; he won Campanian Entella; and captured Elymian Eryx along with its haven Drepanon. attempted, we may almost say, to repeat the great exploit of his first He then war. There was no more a Motya to capture, but he laid siege to Lilybaeum, which had taken Motya's place. But he was compelled to abandon the attempt; the fortress was too strong; and his illsuccess was soon crowned by the loss of a large part of his fleet, which was carried out of the harbour of Drepanon by an enterprising Carthaginian admiral. Death of It was the last undertaking of the great "ruler of Sicily." He did Dionysius, not live to conclude the peace which probably confirmed the Halycus 367 B.C as the boundary between Greek and barbarian. His death was connected with a side of his character which has not yet come before us. The tyrant of Syracuse has a place, though it is a small place, Dionysius in literary history. He was a dramatic poet, and he frequently comas a tragic peted with his tragedies in the Athenian theatre. He won third, he poet. won even second, prizes; but his dearest ambition was to be awarded a first place. That desire was at length fulfilled; his failure at Lilybaeum and the loss of his ships at Drepanon were compensated by the tidings that the first prize had been assigned to his Ransom of Hector at the Lenaean festival. He celebrated his joy by an unwonted carouse; his intemperance was followed by a fever; and a soporific draught was administered to him which induced the sleep of death. Relations Dionysius did not stand wholly aloof from the politics of elder of Sicily to Greece. His alliance with Sparta, and the help which he received Eastern from her at the siege of Syracuse, involved him in obligations to her Greece in which he fulfilled on more than one occasion; and in the regions of time of Dionysius. Corcyra his empire came into direct contact with the spheres of some of the states of the mother-country. But these political relations are an unimportant part of his reign. His reign, as a whole, lies apart from the contemporary politics of elder Greece. Yet, from some points of view, it possesses more significance in Grecian, and in European, history than the contemporary history of Sparta and Athens. Significance of In the first place, Dionysius stands out as one of the most prominent champions of Europe in the long struggle between the Dionysius Asiatic and the European for the possession of Sicily. He did what in history. Champion no champion had done before; he carried the war into the enemy's of Europe precinct. He well-nigh achieved what it was reserved for an against the Italian commonwealth to achieve actually, the reclaiming of the Semite. whole island for Europe, the complete expulsion of the Semitic in Extra Sicilian truder. In the second place, he stands out as the man who raised his own city not only to dominion over all Greek Sicily but to a transmarine dominion, which made her the most powerful city in the Greek world, the most potent state in Europe. The purely Sicilian policy is flung aside, and Syracuse becomes a continental power, Mace laying one hand on that peninsula to which her own island geographically belongs, and stretching out the other to the lands beyond the Hadriatic. And, thirdly, this empire, though it is thinly disguised Anticipa like the later empire of Rome under constitutional forms, is really a tion of the monarchical realm, which is a foreshadowing of the Macedonian donian monarchies and an anticipation of a new period in European history. monAgain in the art of war Dionysius inaugurated methods which did archies. not come into general use till more than half a century later; some Military improveof his military operations seem to transport us to the age of Alexander ments. the Great and his successors. In another way too Dionysius antici- Deificapated the age of those monarchs; statues were set up representing tion. him in the guise of Dionysus, the god by whose name he was called. Here indeed he did not stand alone among his contemporaries; the Spartan Lysander also had been invested with attributes of divinity. But in one respect Dionysius was far from being a forerunner of Dionysius the Macedonian monarchs: he was not an active or deliberate diffuser not a Hellen to the the Italian did not do more. of Hellenic civilisation. On the contrary he appears rather as an izer: undoer of Hellenic civilisation. He destroys Hellenic towns, and he First signs replaces Hellenic by Italian communities; he cultivates the friend- of the exship of Gauls and Lucanians, to use them against Greeks, not to pansion of make them Greeks. This side of the policy of Dionysius, the estab race. lishment of Italian settlements in Sicily, points in a different direction; it points-unintentionally, indeed, so far as he was concerned expansion of Italy, it points to the Italian conquest of Sicily which was to be accomplished more than a century after his death. Dionysius then has the significance of a pioneer. But there is Why something else to be said. Original and successful as he was, great Dionysius things as he did, we cannot help feeling that he ought to have done greater things still. A master of political wisdom, an originator of daring ideas, a man of endless energy, remarkably temperate in the habits of his life, he was hampered throughout by his unconstitutional position. The nature of tyranny imposed limitations on his work. He had always to consider first the security of his own unchartered rule; he could never forget the fact that he was a hated master. He could therefore never devote himself to the accomplishment of any object or the solution of any problem with the undivided zeal which may animate a constitutional prince who need never turn aside to examine the sure foundations of his power. We saw how the tyrant's warfare against Carthage was affected by these personal calculations. The Syracusan tyranny accomplished indeed far more than could have been accomplished by the Syracusan democracy; Dionysius as a tyrant wrought what he could never have wrought as a mere statesman governing by legitimate influence the counsels of a free assembly. But he illustrates-and all the more strikingly, as Dionysius B. C. law and son-in-law of Dionysius the elder. His political aspirations. the pioneer of the great monarchies of the future-the truth to which attention has been called before, that the tyrannies and democracies of Greek cities were in their nature not adapted to create and maintain large empires. SECT. 9. DIONYSIUS THE YOUNGER The empire of Dionysius, which he had made fast, to use his own expression, "by chains of adamant". -a strong army, a strong navy, and strong walls—descended to his son, Dionysius, a youth of feeble character, not without amiable qualities, but of the nature that is easily swayed to good or evil and is always dependent on advisers. Dion, At first he was under the influence of Dion, who had been the most brother-in- trusted minister of the elder Dionysius in the latter part of his reign, holding the office of admiral, and allied by a double marriage with the tyrant's family. The tyrant had espoused Dion's sister Aristomache; and Dion married one of the daughters of this marriage, Arete, his own niece. The other daughter was given to Dionysius, her half-brother. Another man, possessing the pride, wealth, and ability of Dion, might have sought to fling aside Dionysius, and if he did not seize the tyranny himself, at all events to secure it for the sons of his sister, the brothers of his wife, Hipparinus and Nysaeus. But Dion was not like other men; his aspirations were loftier and less selfish. His object was not to secure tyranny for any man, but to get rid of tyranny altogether. But this was not to be done by a revolution; the democracy which would have risen on the ruins of the despotism would have been in Dion's eyes as evil a thing for Syracuse as the despotism itself. For Dion had imbibed, and thoroughly believed in, the political teaching of his friend, Plato the philosopher. His darling project was to establish at Syracuse a constitution which would so far as possible conform to the theoretical views of Plato, and which would probably have taken the shape of a limited kingship, with some resemblance to the constitution of Sparta. And this could never have been brought about by a pure vote of the Syracusan people; the ideal constitution must be imposed upon them for their own good. The sole chance lay in persuading a tyrant to impose limitations on his own absolute power and introduce the required constitution. "Give me," says Plato himself, "a city governed by a tyranny, and let the tyrant be young, with good brains, brave, and generous, and let fortune bring in his way a good lawgiver"-then a state has a chance of being well governed. Dion saw in young Dionysius a nature which might be moulded as he wished, -a nature, perhaps, which he missed in his own nephews, Hipparinus and Nysaeus. He devoted himself loyally to Dionysius, Plato's influence on Dion. who looked up to his virtue and experience, and he set himself to interest the young ruler in philosophy and make him take a serious view of his duties. But his chief hope lay in bringing the_tyrant under the attraction of the same powerful personality which_had exercised a decisive and abiding influence over himself. Plato must come to Syracuse and make the tyrant a philosopher. The treatment which Plato had experienced on the occasion of a previous visit c. 388 B.C. to Sicily, at the hands of the elder Dionysius, was not indeed such as to encourage him to return. But he yielded, reluctantly, to the Plato's pressing invitation of the young ruler and the urgent solicitations of second visit to Sicily. Dion, who represented that now at last the moment had come to call an ideal state into actual existence. ideal state. It was the vision of a "dreamer dreaming greatly"; and that a Serious statesman of Dion's practical experience and knowledge of human intention to nature should have allowed himself to be guided by such a dream form an may seem strange to us; to us to whom the history of hundreds of societies throughout a period of more than two thousand years has brought disillusion. It has indeed seemed so curious that some have concluded that Dion was throughout plotting to dethrone Dionysius, that the philosophical scheme was part of the plot, and Plato an unconscious tool of the conspiracy. But the good faith of Dion seems assured. We must remember that a state founded on philosophical principles was a new idea, which was not at all likely to seem foredoomed to failure to any one who was enamoured of philosophy; for such a state had never been tried, and consequently there was no example of a previous failure. On the contrary, there was the example of Sparta as a success. The political speculators of those days always turned with special predilection to Sparta, as a well-balanced state, and it was believed that her constitution and discipline had been called into being and established for all time by the will and fiat of a single extraordinarily wise lawgiver. Why then should not Dionysius and Dion, under the direction of Plato, do for Syracuse what Lycurgus had done for Lacedaemon? And Dion doubtless thought that his own experience would enable him to adjust the demands of speculation to the rude realities of existence. No welcome could have been more honourable and flattering than that which Plato received. He engaged the respect and admiration of Dionysius, and the young tyrant was easily brought to regard tyranny as a vile thing and to cherish the plan of building up a new constitution. The experiment would probably have been tried, if Plato, in dealing with his pupil, had acted otherwise than he did. The nature of Dionysius was one of those natures which are susceptible of impressions and capable of enthusiasm, but incapable |