Dionysius had not only talents to organize, and boldness to make good, a despotism more formidable than anything known to contemporary Greeks, but also systematic prudence to keep it unimpaired for thirty-eight years. He maintained carefully those two precautions which Thucydides specifies as the causes of permanence to the Athenian Hippias, under similar circumstances—intimidation over the citizens, and careful organization, with liberal pay among his mercenaries.[98] He was temperate in indulgencies; never led by any of his appetites into the commission of violence.[99] This abstinence contributed materially to prolong his life, since many a Grecian despot perished through desperate feelings of individual vengeance provoked by his outrages. With Dionysius, all other appetites were merged in the love of dominion, at home and abroad; and of money as a means of dominion. To the service of this master-passion all his energies were devoted, together with those vast military resources which an unscrupulous ability served both to accumulate and to recruit. How his treasury was supplied, with the large exigencies continually pressing upon it, we are but little informed. We know however that his exactions from the Syracusans were exorbitant;[100] that he did not hesitate to strip the holiest temples; and that he left behind him a great reputation for ingenious tricks in extracting money from his subjects.[101] Besides the large garrison of foreign mercenaries by whom his orders were enforced, he maintained a regular body of spies, seemingly of both sexes, disseminated among the body of the citizens.[102] The vast quarry-prison of Syracuse was his work.[103] Both the vague general picture, and the fragmentary details which come before us, of his conduct towards the Syracusans, present to us nothing but an oppressive and extortionate tyrant, by whose fiat numberless victims perished; more than ten thousand according to the general language of Plutarch.[104] He enriched largely his younger brothers and auxiliaries; among which latter, Hipparinus stood prominent, thus recovering a fortune equal to or larger than that which his profligacy had dissipated.[105] But we hear also of acts of Dionysius, indicating a jealous and cruel temper, even towards near relatives. And it appears certain that he trusted no one, not even them;[106] that though in the field he was a perfectly brave man, yet his suspicion and timorous anxiety as to every one who approached his person, were carried to the most tormenting excess, and extended even to his wives, his brothers, his daughters. Afraid to admit any one with a razor near to his face, he is said to have singed his own beard with a burning coal. Both his brother and his son were searched for concealed weapons, and even forced to change their clothes in the presence of his guards, before they were permitted to see him. An officer of the guards named Marsyas, having dreamt that he was assassinating Dionysius, was put to death for this dream, as proving that his waking thoughts must have been dwelling upon such a project. And it has already been mentioned that Dionysius put to death the mother of one of his wives, on suspicion that she had by incantations brought about the barrenness of the other—as well as the sons of a Lokrian citizen named Aristeides, who had refused, with indignant expressions, to grant to him his daughter in marriage.[107]
Such were the conditions of existence—perpetual mistrust, danger even from the nearest kindred, enmity both to and from every dignified freeman, and reliance only on armed barbarians or liberated slaves—which beset almost every Grecian despot, and from which the greatest despot of his age enjoyed no exemption. Though philosophers emphatically insisted that such a man must be miserable,[108] yet Dionysius himself, as well as the great mass of admiring spectators, would probably feel that the necessities of his position were more than compensated by its awe-striking grandeur, and by the full satisfaction of ambitious dreams, subject indeed to poignant suffering when wounded in the tender point, and when reaping insult in place of admiration, at the memorable Olympic festival of 384 B. C., above-described. But the Syracusans, over whom he ruled, enjoyed no such compensation for that which they suffered from his tax-gatherers—from his garrison of Gauls, Iberians, and Campanians, in Ortygia—from his spies—his prison—and his executioners.
Nor did Syracuse suffer alone. The reign of the elder Dionysius was desolating for the Hellenic population generally, both of Sicily and Italy. Syracuse became a great fortress, with vast military power in the hands of its governor, “whose policy[109] it was to pack all Sicily into it;” while the remaining free Hellenic communities were degraded, enslaved, and half depopulated. On this topic, the mournful testimonies already cited from Lysias and Isokrates, are borne out by the letters of the eye-witness Plato. In his advice, given to the son and successor of Dionysius, Plato emphatically presses upon him two points: first, as to the Syracusans, to transform his inherited oppressive despotism into the rule of a king, governing gently and by fixed laws; next, to reconstitute and repeople, under free constitutions, the other Hellenic communities in Sicily, which at his accession had become nearly barbarised and half deserted.[110] The elder Dionysius had imported into Sicily large bodies of mercenaries, by means of whom he had gained his conquests, and for whom he had provided settlements at the cost of the subdued Hellenic cities. In Naxos, Katana, Leontini, and Messênê, the previous residents had been dispossessed and others substituted, out of Gallic and Iberian mercenaries. Communities thus transformed, with their former free citizens degraded into dependence or exile, not only ceased to be purely Hellenic, but also became far less populous and flourishing. In like manner Dionysius had suppressed, and absorbed into Syracuse and Lokri, the once autonomous Grecian communities of Rhegium, Hipponium, and Kaulonia, on the Italian side of the strait. In the inland regions of Italy, he had allied himself with the barbarous Lucanians; who, even without his aid, were gaining ground and pressing hard upon the Italiot Greeks on the coast.
If we examine the results of the warfare carried on by Dionysius against the Carthaginians, from the commencement to the end of his career, we shall observe, that he began by losing Gela and Kamarina, and that the peace by which he was enabled to preserve Syracuse itself, arose, not from any success of his own, but from the pestilence which ruined his enemies; to say nothing about traitorous collusion with them, which I have already remarked to have been the probable price of their guarantee to his dominion. His war against the Carthaginians in 397 B. C., was undertaken with much vigor, recovered Gela, Kamarina, Agrigentum, and Selinus, and promised the most decisive success. But presently again the tide of fortune turned against him. He sustained capital defeats, and owed the safety of Syracuse, a second time, to nothing but the terrific pestilence which destroyed the army of Imilkon. A third time, in 383 B. C., Dionysius gratuitously renewed the war against Carthage. After brilliant success at first, he was again totally defeated, and forced to cede to Carthage all the territory west of the river Halykus, besides paying a tribute. So that the exact difference between the Sicilian territory of Carthage—as it stood at the beginning of his command and at the end of his reign—amounts to this: that at the earlier period it reached to the river Himera—at the later period only to the river Halykus. The intermediate space between the two comprehends Agrigentum with the greater part of its territory; which represents therefore the extent of Hellenic soil rescued by Dionysius from Carthaginian dominion.
CHAPTER LXXXIV.
SICILIAN AFFAIRS AFTER THE DEATH OF THE ELDER DIONYSIUS — DIONYSIUS THE YOUNGER — AND DION.
The Elder Dionysius, at the moment of his death, boasted of having left his dominion “fastened by chains of adamant;” that is, sustained by a large body of mercenaries,[111] well trained and well paid—by impregnable fortifications on the islet of Ortygia—by four hundred ships of war—by immense magazines of arms and military stores—and by established intimidation over the minds of the Syracusans. These were really “chains of adamant”—so long as there was a man like Dionysius to keep them in hand. But he left no successor competent to the task; nor indeed an unobstructed succession. He had issue by two wives, whom he had married both at the same time, as has been already mentioned. By the Lokrian wife, Doris, he had his eldest son named Dionysius, and two others; by the Syracusan wife Aristomachê, daughter of Hipparinus, he had two sons, Hipparinus and Nysæus—and two daughters, Sophrosynê and Aretê.[112] Dionysius the younger can hardly have been less than twenty-five years old at the death of his father and namesake. Hipparinus, the eldest son by the other wife, was considerably younger. Aristomachê his mother had long remained childless; a fact which the elder Dionysius ascribed to incantations wrought by the mother of the Lokrian wife, and punished by putting to death the supposed sorceress.[113]
The offspring of Aristomachê, though the younger brood of the two, derived considerable advantage from the presence and countenance of her brother Dion. Hipparinus, father of Dion and Aristomachê, had been the principal abettor of the elder Dionysius in his original usurpation, in order to retrieve his own fortune,[114] ruined by profligate expenditure. So completely had that object been accomplished, that his son Dion was now among the richest men in Syracuse,[115] possessing property estimated at above one hundred talents (about £23,000). Dion was, besides, son-in-law to the elder Dionysius, who had given his daughter Sophrosynê in marriage to his son (by a different mother) the younger Dionysius; and his daughter Aretê, first to his brother Thearides—next, on the death of Thearides, to Dion. As brother of Aristomachê, Dion was thus brother-in-law to the elder Dionysius, and uncle both to Aretê his own wife and to Sophrosynê the wife of the younger Dionysius; as husband of Aretê, he was son-in-law to the elder Dionysius, and brother-in-law (as well as uncle) to the wife of the younger. Marriages between near relatives (excluding any such connection between uterine brother and sister) were usual in Greek manners. We cannot doubt that the despot accounted the harmony likely to be produced by such ties between the members of his two families and Dion, among the “adamantine chains” which held fast his dominion.
Apart from wealth and high position, the personal character of Dion was in itself marked and prominent. He was of an energetic temper, great bravery, and very considerable mental capacities. Though his nature was haughty and disdainful towards individuals, yet as to political communion, his ambition was by no means purely self-seeking and egoistic, like that of the elder Dionysius. Animated with vehement love of power, he was at the same time penetrated with that sense of regulated polity, and submission of individual will to fixed laws, which floated in the atmosphere of Grecian talk and literature, and stood so high in Grecian morality. He was moreover capable of acting with enthusiasm, and braving every hazard in prosecution of his own convictions.
Born about the year 408 B. C.,[116] Dion was twenty-one years of age in 378 B. C., when the elder Dionysius, having dismantled Rhegium and subdued Kroton, attained the maximum of his dominion, as master of the Sicilian and Italian Greeks. Standing high in the favor of his brother-in-law Dionysius, Dion doubtless took part in the wars whereby this large dominion had been acquired; as well as in the life of indulgence and luxury which prevailed generally among wealthy Greeks in Sicily and Italy, and which to the Athenian Plato appeared alike surprising and repulsive.[117] That great philosopher visited Italy and Sicily about 387 B. C., as has been already mentioned. He was in acquaintance and fellowship with the school of philosophers called Pythagoreans; the remnant of that Pythagorean brotherhood, who had once exercised so powerful a political influence over the cities of those regions—and who still enjoyed considerable reputation, even after complete political downfall, through individual ability and rank of the members, combined with habits of recluse study, mysticism, and attachment among themselves. With these Pythagoreans Dion also, a young man of open mind and ardent aspirations, was naturally thrown into communication by the proceedings of the elder Dionysius in Italy.[118] Through them he came into intercourse with Plato, whose conversation made an epoch in his life.