It appears to me that the facts which Diodorus has stated are nearly all correct, but that he has misdated them, referring to 388 B. C., or Olymp. 98—what properly belongs to 384 B. C., or Olymp. 99. Very possibly Dionysius may have sent one or more chariots to run in the former of the two Olympiads; but his signal efforts, with his insulting failure brought about partly by Lysias, belong to the latter.
Dionysius of Halikarnassus, to whom we owe the citation from the oration of Lysias, does not specify to which of the Olympiads it belongs.
[73] Diodor. xv. 7. διὸ καὶ ποιήματα γράφειν ὑπεστήσατο μετὰ πολλῆς σπουδῆς, καὶ τοὺς ἐν τούτοις δόξαν ἔχοντας μετεπέμπετο, καὶ προτιμῶν αὐτοὺς συνδιέτριβε, καὶ τῶν ποιημάτων ἐπιστάτας καὶ διορθωτὰς εἶχεν.
The Syracusan historian Athanis (or Athenis) had noticed some peculiar phrases which appeared in the verses of Dionysius: see Athenæus, iii. p. 98.
[74] Thucyd. vi. 16. Οἱ γὰρ Ἕλληνες καὶ ὑπὲρ δύναμιν μείζω ἡμῶν τὴν πόλιν ἐνόμισαν, τῷ ἐμῷ διαπρεπεῖ τῆς Ὀλυμπιάζε θεωρίας (speech of Alkibiadês).
[75] See a striking passage in the discourse called Archidamus (Or. vi. s. 111, 112) of Isokrates, in which the Spartans are made to feel keenly their altered position after the defeat of Leuktra: especially the insupportable pain of encountering, when they attended the Olympic festival, slights or disparagement from the spectators, embittered by open taunts from the reëstablished Messenians—instead of the honor and reverence which they had become accustomed to expect.
This may help us to form some estimate of the painful sentiment of Dionysius, when his envoys returned from the Olympic festival of 384 B. C.
[76] There are different statements about the precise year in which Plato was born: see Diogenes Laert. iii. 1-6. The accounts fluctuate between 429 and 428 B. C.; and Hermodorus (ap. Diog. L. iii. 6) appears to have put it in 427 B. C.: see Corsini, Fast. Attic. iii. p. 230; Ast. Platon’s Leben, p. 14.
Plato (Epistol. vii. p. 324) states himself to have been about (σχεδὸν) forty years of age when he visited Sicily for the first time. If we accept as the date of his birth 428 B. C., he would be forty years of age in 388 B. C.
It seems improbable that the conversation of Plato with Dion at Syracuse (which was continued sufficiently long to exercise a marked and permanent influence on the character of the latter), and his interviews with Dionysius, should have taken place while Dionysius was carrying on the Italian war or the siege of Rhegium. I think that the date of the interview must be placed after the capture of Rhegium in 387 B. C. And the expression of Plato (given in a letter written more than thirty years afterwards) about his own age, is not to be taken as excluding the supposition that he might have been forty-one or forty-two when he came to Syracuse.