Outraged thus in all the tenderest points, Dion took up with passionate resolution the design of avenging himself on Dionysius, and of emancipating Syracuse from despotism into liberty. During the greater part of his exile he had resided at Athens, in the house of his friend Kallippus, enjoying the society of Speusippus and other philosophers of the Academy, and the teaching of Plato himself when returned from Syracuse. Well supplied with money, and strict as to his own personal wants, he was able largely to indulge his liberal spirit towards many persons, and among the rest towards Plato, whom he assisted towards the expense of a choric exhibition at Athens.[170] Dion also visited Sparta and various other cities; enjoying a high reputation, and doing himself credit everywhere; a fact not unknown to Dionysius, and aggravating his displeasure. Yet Dion was long not without hope that that displeasure would mitigate, so as to allow of his return to Syracuse on friendly terms. Nor did he cherish any purposes of hostility, until the last proceedings with respect to his property and his wife at once cut off all hope and awakened vindictive sentiments.[171] He began therefore to lay a train for attacking Dionysius and enfranchising Syracuse by arms, invoking the countenance of Plato; who gave his approbation, yet not without mournful reserves; saying that he was now seventy years of age—that though he admitted the just wrongs of Dion and the bad conduct of Dionysius, armed conflict was nevertheless repugnant to his feelings, and he could anticipate little good from it—that he had labored long in vain to reconcile the two exasperated kinsmen, and could not now labor for any opposite end.[172]
But though Plato was lukewarm, his friends and pupils at the Academy cordially sympathized with Dion. Speusippus especially, the intimate friend and relative, having accompanied Plato to Syracuse, had communicated much with the population in the city, and gave encouraging reports of their readiness to aid Dion, even if he came with ever so small a force against Dionysius. Kallippus, with Eudemus (the friend of Aristotle), Timonides, and Miltas—all three members of the society at the Academy, and the last a prophet also—lent him aid and embarked in his enterprise. There were a numerous body of exiles from Syracuse, not less than one thousand altogether; with most of whom Dion opened communication, inviting their fellowship. He at the same time hired mercenary soldiers in small bands, keeping his measures as secret as he could.[173] Alkimenes, one of the leading Achæans in Peloponnesus, was warm in the cause (probably from sympathy with the Achæan colony Kroton, then under the dependence of Dionysius), conferring upon it additional dignity by his name and presence. A considerable quantity of spare arms, of every description, was got together, in order to supply new unarmed partisans on reaching Sicily. With all these aids Dion found himself in the island of Zakynthus, a little after Midsummer 357 B. C.; mustering eight hundred soldiers of tried experience and bravery, who had been directed to come thither silently and in small parties, without being informed whither they were going. A little squadron was prepared, of no more than five merchantmen, two of them vessels of thirty oars, with victuals adequate to the direct passage across the sea from Zakynthus to Syracuse; since the ordinary passage, across from Korkyra and along the Tarentine Gulf was impracticable, in the face of the maritime power of Dionysius.[174]
Such was the contemptible force with which Dion ventured to attack the greatest of all Grecian potentates in his own stronghold and island. Dionysius had now reigned as despot at Syracuse between ten and eleven years. Inferior as he personally was to his father, it does not seem that the Syracusan power had yet materially declined in his hands. We know little about the political facts of his reign; but the veteran Philistus, his chief adviser and officer, appears to have kept together the larger part of the great means bequeathed by the elder Dionysius. The disparity of force, therefore, between the assailant and the party assailed, was altogether extravagant. To Dion, personally, indeed, such disparity was a matter of indifference. To a man of his enthusiastic temperament, so great was the heroism and sublimity of the enterprise,—combining liberation of his country from a despot, with revenge for gross outrages to himself,—that he was satisfied if he could only land in Sicily with no matter how small a force, accounting it honor enough to perish in such a cause.[175] Such was the emphatic language of Dion, reported to us by Aristotle; who (being then among the pupils of Plato) may probably have heard it with his own ears. To impartial contemporary spectators, like Demosthenes, the attempt seemed hopeless.[176]
But the intelligent men of the Academy who accompanied Dion, would not have thrown their lives away in contemplation of a glorious martyrdom; nor were either they or he ignorant, that there existed circumstances, not striking the eye of the ordinary spectator, which materially weakened the great apparent security of Dionysius.
First, there was the pronounced and almost unanimous discontent of the people of Syracuse. Though prohibited from all public manifestations, they had been greatly agitated by the original project of Dion to grant liberty to the city—by the inclinations even of Dionysius himself towards the same end, so soon unhappily extinguished—by the dissembling language of Dionysius, the great position of Dion’s wife and sister, and the second coming of Plato, all of which favored the hope that Dion might be amicably recalled. At length such chance disappeared, when his property was confiscated and his wife re-married to another. But as his energetic character was well known, the Syracusans now both confidently expected, and ardently wished, that he would return by force, and help them to put down one who was alike his enemy and theirs. Speusippus, having accompanied Plato to Syracuse and mingled much with the people, brought back decisive testimonies of their disaffection towards Dionysius, and of their eager longing for relief by the hands of Dion. It would be sufficient (they said) if he even came alone; they would flock around him, and arm him at once with an adequate force.[177]
There were doubtless many other messages of similar tenor sent to Peloponnesus; and one Syracusan exile, Herakleides, was in himself a considerable force. Though a friend of Dion,[178] he had continued high in the service of Dionysius, until the second visit of Plato. At that time he was disgraced, and obliged to save his life by flight, on account of a mutiny among the mercenary troops, or rather of the veteran soldiers among them, whose pay Dionysius had cut down. The men so curtailed rose in arms, demanding continuance of the old pay; and when Dionysius shut the gates of the acropolis, refusing attention to their requisitions, they raised the furious barbaric pæan or war shout, and rushed up to scale the walls.[179] Terrible were the voices of these Gauls, Iberians, and Campanians, in the ears of Plato, who knew himself to be the object of their hatred, and who happened to be then in the garden of the acropolis. But Dionysius, no less terrified than Plato, appeased the mutiny, by conceding all that was asked, and even more. The blame of this misadventure was thrown upon Herakleides, towards whom Dionysius conducted himself with mingled injustice and treachery—according to the judgment both of Plato and of all around him.[180] As an exile, he brought word that Dionysius could not even rely upon the mercenary troops, whom he treated with a parsimony the more revolting as they contrasted it with the munificence of his father.[181] Herakleides was eager to coöperate in putting down the despotism at Syracuse. But he waited to equip a squadron of triremes, and was not ready so soon as Dion; perhaps intentionally, as the jealousy between the two soon broke out.[182]
The second source of weakness to Dionysius lay in his own character and habits. The commanding energy of the father, far from being of service to the son, had been combined with a jealousy which intentionally kept him down, and cramped his growth. He had always been weak, petty, destitute of courage or foresight, and unfit for a position like that which his father had acquired and maintained. His personal incompetency was recognized by all, and would probably have manifested itself even more conspicuously, had he not found a minister of so much ability, and so much devotion to the dynasty, as Philistus. But in addition to such known incompetency, he had contracted recently habits which inspired every one around him with contempt. He was perpetually intoxicated and plunged in dissipation. To put down such a chief, even though surrounded by walls, soldiers, and armed ships, appeared to Dion and his confidential companions an enterprise noway impracticable.[183]
Nevertheless, these causes of weakness were known only to close observers; while the great military force of Syracuse was obvious to the eyes of every one. When the soldiers, mustered by Dion at Zakynthus, were first informed that they were destined to strike straight across the sea against Syracuse, they shrank from the proposition as an act of insanity. They complained of their leaders for not having before told them what was projected; just as the Ten Thousand Greeks in the army of Cyrus, on reaching Tarsus, complained of Klearchus for having kept back the fact that they were marching against the Great King. It required all the eloquence of Dion, with his advanced age,[184] his dignified presence, and the quantity of gold and silver plate in his possession, to remove their apprehensions. How widely these apprehensions were felt, is shown by the circumstance, that out of one thousand Syracusan exiles, only twenty-five or thirty dared to join him.[185]
After a magnificent sacrifice to Apollo, and an ample banquet to the soldiers in the stadium at Zakynthus, Dion gave orders for embarkation in the ensuing morning. On that very night the moon was eclipsed. We have already seen what disastrous consequences turned upon the occurrence of this same phænomenon fifty-six years before, when Nikias was about to conduct the defeated Athenian fleet away from the harbor of Syracuse.[186] Under the existing apprehensions of Dion’s band, the eclipse might well have induced them to renounce the enterprise; and so it probably would, under a general like Nikias. But Dion had learnt astronomy; and what was of not less consequence, Miltas, the prophet of the expedition, besides his gift of prophecy, had received instruction in the Academy also. When the affrighted soldiers inquired what new resolution was to be adopted in consequence of so grave a sign from the gods, Miltas arose and assured them that they had mistaken the import of the sign, which promised them good fortune and victory. By the eclipse of the moon, the gods intimated that something very brilliant was about to be darkened over: now there was nothing in Greece so brilliant as the despotism of Dionysius at Syracuse; it was Dionysius who was about to suffer eclipse, to be brought on by the victory of Dion.[187] Reassured by such consoling words the soldiers got on board. They had good reason at first to believe that the favor of the gods waited upon them, for a gentle and steady Etesian breeze carried them across midsea without accident or suffering, in twelve days, from Zakynthus to Cape Pachynus, the south-eastern corner of Sicily and nearest to Syracuse. The pilot Protus, who had steered the course so as exactly to hit the cape, urgently recommended immediate disembarkation, without going farther along the south-western coast of the island; since stormy weather was commencing, which might hinder the fleet from keeping near the shore. But Dion was afraid of landing so near to the main force of the enemy. Accordingly, the squadron proceeded onward, but were driven by a violent wind away from Sicily towards the coast of Africa, narrowly escaping shipwreck. It was not without considerable hardship and danger that they got back to Sicily, after five days; touching the island at Herakleia Minoa westward of Agrigentum, within the Carthaginian supremacy. The Carthaginian governor of Minoa, Synalus (perhaps a Greek in the service of Carthage), was a personal acquaintance of Dion, and received him with all possible kindness; though knowing nothing beforehand of his approach, and at first resisting his landing through ignorance.
Thus was Dion, after ten years of exile, once more on Sicilian ground. The favorable predictions of Miltas had been completely realized. But even that prophet could hardly have been prepared for the wonderful tidings now heard, which ensured the success of the expedition. Dionysius had recently sailed from Syracuse to Italy, with a fleet of eighty triremes.[188] What induced him to commit so capital a mistake, we cannot make out; for Philistus was already with a fleet in the Gulf of Tarentum, waiting to intercept Dion, and supposing that the invading squadron would naturally sail along the coast of Italy to Syracuse, according to the practice almost universal in that day.[189] Philistus did not commit the same mistake as Nikias had made in reference to Gylippus,[190]—that of despising Dion because of the smallness of his force. He watched in the usual waters, and was only disappointed because Dion, venturing on the bold and unusual straight course, was greatly favored by wind and weather. But while Philistus watched the coast of Italy, it was natural that Dionysius himself should keep guard with his main force at Syracuse. The despot was fully aware of the disaffection which reigned in the town, and of the hopes excited by Dion’s project; which was generally well known, though no one could tell how or at what moment the deliverer might be expected. Suspicious now to a greater degree than ever, Dionysius had caused a fresh search to be made in the city for arms, and had taken away all that he could find.[191] We may be sure too that his regiment of habitual spies were more on the alert than ever, and that unusual rigor was the order of the day. Yet, at this critical juncture, he thought proper to quit Syracuse with a very large portion of his force, leaving the command to Timokrates, the husband of Dion’s late wife; and at this same critical juncture Dion arrived at Minoa.