Herakleides gained extraordinary popularity among the Syracusans by his courageous and patriotic conduct. But Dion saw plainly that he could not, consistently with his own designs, permit such free opposition any longer. Many of his adherents, looking upon Herakleides as one who ought not to have been spared on the previous occasion, were ready to put him to death at any moment; being restrained only by a special prohibition which Dion now thought it time to remove. Accordingly, with his privity, they made their way into the house of Herakleides, and slew him.[258]
This dark deed abolished all remaining hope of obtaining Syracusan freedom from the hands of Dion, and stamped him as the mere successor of the Dionysian despotism. It was in vain that he attended the obsequies of Herakleides with his full military force, excusing his well-known crime to the people, on the plea, that Syracuse could never be at peace while two such rivals were both in active political life. Under the circumstances of the case, the remark was an insulting derision; though it might have been advanced with pertinence as a reason for sending Herakleides away, at the moment when he before spared him. Dion had now conferred upon his rival the melancholy honor of dying as a martyr to Syracusan freedom; and in that light he was bitterly mourned by the people. No man after this murder could think himself secure. Having once employed the soldiers as executioners of his own political antipathies, Dion proceeded to lend himself more and more to their exigencies. He provided for them pay and largesses, great in amount, first at the cost of his opponents in the city, next at that of his friends, until at length discontent became universal. Among the general body of the citizens, Dion became detested as a tyrant, and the more detested because he had presented himself as a liberator; while the soldiers also were in great part disaffected to him.[259]
The spies and police of the Dionysian dynasty not having been yet reëstablished, there was ample liberty at least of speech and censure; so that Dion was soon furnished with full indications of the sentiment entertained towards him. He became disquieted and irritable at this change of public feeling;[260] angry with the people, yet at the same time ashamed of himself. The murder of Herakleides sat heavy on his soul. The same man whom he had spared before when in the wrong, he had now slain when in the right. The maxims of the Academy which had imparted to him so much self-satisfaction in the former act, could hardly fail to occasion a proportionate sickness of self-reproach in the latter. Dion was not a mere power-seeker, nor prepared for all that endless apparatus of mistrustful precaution, indispensable to a Grecian despot. When told that his life was in danger, he replied that he would rather perish at once by the hands of the first assassin, than live in perpetual diffidence, towards friends as well as enemies.[261]
One thus too good for a despot, and yet unfit for a popular leader, could not remain long in the precarious position occupied by Dion. His intimate friend, the Athenian Kallippus, seeing that the man who could destroy him would become popular with the Syracusans as well as with a large portion of the soldiery, formed a conspiracy accordingly. He stood high in the confidence of Dion, had been his companion during his exile at Athens, had accompanied him to Sicily, and entered Syracuse by his side. But Plato, anxious for the credit of the Academy, is careful to inform us, that this inauspicious friendship arose, not out of fellowship in philosophy, but out of common hospitalities, and especially common initiation in the Eleusinian mysteries.[262] Brave and forward in battle, Kallippus enjoyed much credit with the soldiery. He was conveniently placed for tampering with them, and by a crafty stratagem, he even insured the unconscious connivance of Dion himself. Having learnt that plots were formed against his life, Dion talked about them to Kallippus, who offered himself to undertake the part of spy, and by simulated partnership to detect as well as to betray the conspirators. Under this confidence, Kallippus had full licence for carrying on his intrigues unimpeded, since Dion disregarded the many warnings which reached him.[263] Among the rumors raised out of Dion’s new position, and industriously circulated by Kallippus—one was, that he was about to call back Apollokrates, son of Dionysius, as his partner and successor to the despotism—as a substitute for the youthful son who had recently perished. By these and other reports, Dion became more and more discredited, while Kallippus secretly organized a wider circle of adherents. His plot however did not escape the penetration of Aristomachê and Aretê; who having, first addressed unavailing hints to Dion, at last took upon them to question Kallippus himself. The latter not only denied the charge, but even confirmed his denial, at their instance, by one of the most solemn and terrific oaths recognized in Grecian religion; going into the sacred grove of Demeter and Persephonê, touching the purple robe of the goddess, and taking in his hand a lighted torch.[264]
Inquiry being thus eluded, there came on presently the day of the Koreia:—the festival of these very Two goddesses in whose name and presence Kallippus had forsworn. This was the day which he had fixed for execution. The strong points of defence in Syracuse were confided beforehand to his principal adherents while his brother Philostrates[265] kept a trireme manned in the harbor ready for flight in case the scheme should miscarry. While Dion, taking no part in the festival, remained at home, Kallippus caused his house to be surrounded by confidential soldiers, and then sent into it a select company of Zakynthians, unarmed, as if for the purpose of addressing Dion on business. These men, young and of distinguished muscular strength, being admitted into the house, put aside or intimidated the slaves, none of whom manifested any zeal or attachment. They then made their way up to Dion’s apartment, and attempted to throw him down and strangle him. So strenuously did he resist, however, that they found it impossible to kill him without arms; which they were perplexed how to procure, being afraid to open the doors, lest aid might be introduced against them. At length one of their number descended to a back-door, and procured from a Syracusan without, named Lykon, a short sword; of the Laconian sort, and of peculiar workmanship. With this weapon they put Dion to death.[266] They then seized Aristomachê and Aretê, the sister and wife of Dion. These unfortunate women were cast into prison, where they were long detained, and where the latter was delivered of a posthumous son.
Thus perished Dion, having lived only about a year after his expulsion of the Dionysian dynasty from Syracuse—but a year too long for his own fame. Notwithstanding the events of those last months, there is no doubt that he was a man essentially differing from the class of Grecian despots: a man, not of aspirations purely personal, nor thirsting merely for multitudes of submissive subjects and a victorious army—but with large public-minded purposes attached as coördinate to his own ambitious views. He wished to perpetuate his name as the founder of a polity, cast in something of the general features of Sparta; which, while it did not shock Hellenic instincts, should reach farther than political institutions generally aim to do, so as to remodel the sentiments and habits of the citizens, on principles suited to philosophers like Plato. Brought up as Dion was from childhood at the court of the elder Dionysius, unused to that established legality, free speech, and habit of active citizenship, from whence a large portion of Hellenic virtue flowed—the wonder is how he acquired so much public conviction and true magnanimity of soul—not how he missed acquiring more. The influence of Plato during his youth stamped his mature character; but that influence (as Plato himself tells us) found a rare predisposition in the pupil. Still, Dion had no experience of the working of a free and popular government. The atmosphere in which his youth was passed was that of an energetic despotism; while the aspiration which he imbibed from Plato was, to restrain and regularize that despotism, and to administer to the people a certain dose of political liberty, yet reserving to himself the task of settling how much was good for them, and the power of preventing them from acquiring more.
How this project—the natural growth of Dion’s mind, for which his tastes and capacities were suited—was violently thrust aside through the alienated feelings of the younger Dionysius—has been already recounted. The position of Dion was now completely altered. He became a banished, ill-used man, stung with contemptuous antipathy against Dionysius, and eager to put down his despotism over Syracuse. Here were new motives apparently falling in with the old project. But the conditions of the problem had altogether changed. Dion could not overthrow Dionysius without “taking the Syracusan people into partnership” (to use the phrase of Herodotus[267] respecting the Athenian Kleisthenes)—without promising them full freedom, as an inducement for their hearty coöperation—without giving them arms, and awakening in them the stirring impulses of Grecian citizenship, all the more violent because they had been so long trodden down.[268] With these new allies he knew not how to deal. He had no experience of a free and jealous popular mind in persuasion, he was utterly unpractised: his manners were haughty and displeasing. Moreover, his kindred with the Dionysian family exposed him to antipathy from two different quarters. Like the Duke of Orleans (Égalité) at the end of 1792, in the first French Revolution—he was hated both by the royalists, because, though related to the reigning dynasty, he had taken an active part against it—and by sincere democrats, because they suspected him of a design to put himself in its place. To Dion, such coalition of antipathies was a serious hindrance; presenting a strong basis of support for all his rivals, especially for the unscrupulous Herakleides. The bad treatment which he underwent both from the Syracusans and from Herakleides, during the time when the officers of Dionysius still remained masters in Ortygia, has been already related. Dion however behaved, though not always with prudence, yet with so much generous energy against the common enemy, that he put down his rival, and maintained his ascendency unshaken, until the surrender of Ortygia.
That surrender brought his power to a maximum. It was the turning-point and crisis of his life. A splendid opportunity was now opened, of earning for himself fame and gratitude. He might have attached his name to an act as sublime and impressive as any in Grecian history, which, in an evil hour, he left to be performed in after days by Timoleon—the razing of the Dionysian stronghold, and the erection of courts of justice on its site. He might have taken the lead in organizing, under the discussion and consent of the people, a good and free government, which, more or less exempt from defect as it might have been, would at least have satisfied them, and would have spared Syracuse those ten years of suffering which intervened until Timoleon came to make the possibility a fact. Dion might have done all that Timoleon did—and might have done it more easily, since he was less embarrassed both by the other towns in Sicily and by the Carthaginians. Unfortunately he still thought himself strong enough to resume his original project. In spite of the spirit, kindled partly by himself, among the Syracusans—in spite of the repugnance, already unequivocally manifested, on the mere suspicion of his despotic designs—he fancied himself competent to treat the Syracusans as a tame and passive herd; to carve out for them just as much liberty as he thought right, and to require them to be satisfied with it; nay, even worse, to defer giving them any liberty at all, on the plea, or pretence, of full consultation with advisers of his own choice.
Through this deplorable mistake, alike mischievous to Syracuse and to himself, Dion made his government one of pure force. He placed himself in a groove wherein he was fatally condemned to move on from bad to worse, without possibility of amendment. He had already made a martyr of Herakleides, and he would have been compelled to make other martyrs besides, had his life continued. It is fortunate for his reputation that his career was arrested so early, before he had become bad enough to forfeit that sympathy and esteem with which the philosopher Plato still mourns his death, appeasing his own disappointment by throwing the blame of Dion’s failure on every one but Dion himself.