Letters

Plato · a new plain-English translation from the Greek

Plato to Dionysius, greetings. Having spent so much time with you, and having been entrusted with the administration of your government more than anyone else, while you people reaped the benefits, I put up with the slanders, hard as they were to bear — for I knew that none of the harsher measures would be thought to have been done with my consent; all who shared in your government are witnesses for me, many of whom I fought for and freed from no small penalties. And though I safeguarded your city time and again as a man with full authority, I was sent off with less honor than you owe even a beggar you're dismissing and ordering to sail away, after I had spent so long a time in your company. Well then, from now on I will manage my own affairs in a more guarded, less trusting way, while you, being the kind of tyrant you are, will live alone. As for the fine gold you gave me for my journey home, Baccheius, who carries this letter, is bringing it back to you; it was not enough to cover my travel expenses, nor of any use for the rest of my life, and it would bring the greatest disgrace on you, the giver, and not much less on me if I took it — so I am not taking it. It plainly makes no difference to you whether you give or receive such a sum, so take it back and use it to court some other companion, the way you courted me — for I have been courted quite enough by you already. And here I might fittingly quote Euripides, that if some other trouble should ever befall you — you will wish such a man were standing at your side. I want to remind you too that most of the other tragic poets, when they bring on stage a tyrant dying at someone's hand, make him cry out—

"Friendless, wretched, I am dying!" — but no one has ever shown a man dying for want of gold. And that other verse seems to men of sense not badly put: "Bright gold is not the rarest treasure in a mortal's uncertain life, nor adamant, nor silver couches dazzling to the eye when set before men for judging, nor the rich, self-sufficient acres of the broad earth's teeming soil — nothing is worth so much as the understanding shared among good men." Farewell, and know how far you have fallen short of us in this, so that you may deal better with others in the future.

Plato to Dionysius, greetings. I heard from Archedemus that you think not only I but also my close associates ought to keep quiet and refrain from doing or saying anything ill of you — except that you make Dion the one exception. Now this claim, that Dion alone is exempt, implies that I do not control my own associates; for if I really did control the others, and you, and Dion, in this way, there would be more good for all of us and for the rest of the Greeks besides — or so I maintain. But as things stand, my greatness consists in this: I offer myself as someone who follows his own reasoning. And I say this because Cratistolus and Polyxenus have not told you anything sound — one of them, they say, claims to have heard at Olympia a number of people in my company speaking ill of you. Perhaps his hearing is sharper than mine, for I heard nothing of the kind. What you ought to do from now on, it seems to me, is this: whenever anyone says such a thing about any of us, send me a letter and ask me directly — for I will neither hesitate nor be ashamed to tell you the truth. As for how things actually stand between you and me, they are like this: there is hardly a Greek to whom we are unknown, so to speak, and our association together is no secret. Nor should it escape you that it will not be kept secret in time to come either, since those who have inherited the story are the kind of people they are, given that it was no small or quiet affair. What, then, am I saying just now? I will explain, starting from the beginning.

It is the nature of things that wisdom and great power tend to come together, and that they are forever pursuing each other, seeking each other out, and keeping company. And besides, people take pleasure in discussing such pairs, both talking about them themselves and hearing others do so, both in private gatherings and in poetry. Take, for instance, whenever people talk about Hiero and Pausanias the Spartan — they enjoy bringing up Simonides' company with them, what he did and said in their presence. And they are in the habit of celebrating Periander of Corinth and Thales of Miletus together, and Pericles and Anaxagoras, and again Croesus and Solon as wise men, and Cyrus as a man of power. And imitating this, the poets pair Creon with Teiresias, Polyeidus with Minos, Agamemnon with Nestor and Odysseus and Palamedes — and, as I see it, the earliest people paired Prometheus with Zeus in much the same way — showing some of these pairs falling into conflict with each other, others into friendship, and others sometimes into friendship and sometimes into conflict, singing of them now in harmony, now at odds. Now I say all this wanting to show one thing: that once we die, the talk about us will not fall silent either — so it is something we must attend to. It seems we are bound by nature to care about the time after us as well, since it happens that the most slavish natures give it no thought at all, while the most decent do everything they can to be well spoken of in later times. And this I take as evidence that the dead have some perception of what goes on here; for the best souls have a sense that this is so, while the most corrupt deny it — and the divinations of godlike men carry more authority than those of lesser men. I think, for my part, that the men of former times, concerning whom I speak, would have been very eager, if it were possible for them, to set right their own associations, so that better things might be said of them than are said now. This, then, is still within our power, god willing — if anything has not been done rightly in our past association, to set it right both in deed and in word. For I hold that concerning true philosophy, the reputation and account of it will be better if we conduct ourselves decently, and the opposite if we behave badly. And indeed, in giving our care to this we could do nothing more pious, nor, by neglecting it, anything more impious. Now I will state how this ought to be done, and where justice in the matter lies.

I came to Sicily with a reputation for surpassing others by far in philosophy, and I wanted, once in Syracuse, to have you as a witness to confirm this, so that philosophy might be honored by the general public too. But this turned out not to be a happy venture for me. I will not name the cause that most people would give, but rather this: you plainly did not fully trust me, but seemed to want somehow to send me away and summon others instead, and to inquire into what exactly my business was, suspicious of me, as it seemed to me — and there were many shouting about this, saying that you had come to despise me and were eager for other things. This much has been widely reported. What is right to do after all this, listen, so that I may also answer what you ask — how you and I ought to stand toward each other. If you have come to despise philosophy altogether, let it go; but if you have heard something better from someone else, or found it yourself, better than what came from me, honor that instead; but if what comes from me pleases you, then you must honor me above all. Now then, just as at the beginning, you take the lead and I will follow; for if I am honored by you, I will honor you in return, but if not, I will hold my peace. Moreover, if you honor me and take the lead in this, you will be seen as honoring philosophy, and the very fact that you examined the matter carefully will bring you great esteem among many as a lover of wisdom. But if I honor you while you do not honor me, I will seem to be admiring and chasing after wealth, and we both know that carries no fine name among anyone. To put it briefly: if you do the honoring, it is an ornament to us both; if I do, it is a reproach to us both. So much, then, for this matter. As for the little sphere, it is not in proper order; Archedemus will explain to you when he comes. And concerning that other matter, which is more precious and more divine than this, and which he must explain to you very carefully — the question you sent about, being at a loss over it. You say, according to what he reports, that you have not been given a sufficient demonstration about the nature of the First. I must speak to you in riddles, so that if anything should happen to this letter in the folds of sea or land, whoever reads it will not understand. It is this: around the King of all things everything exists, and everything is for his sake, and he is the cause of all that is good; and around a second, the things of a second order; and around a third, the things of a third order.

The human soul, then, longs to learn what these things are, looking to what is akin to itself, of which nothing it possesses is adequate. Concerning the King and the things I have named, there is nothing of that kind — that is what the soul next asks. "But what, then, is it?" This, son of Dionysius and Doris, is the question that is the cause of all evils — or rather, the birth-pang that arises over it in the soul; and unless someone rids himself of it, he will never truly attain the truth. You yourself once told me, in the garden under the laurels, that you had thought this out and that it was your own discovery. And I said that if this really seemed so to you, you had freed me of a great deal of argument. But I said I had never met anyone else who had discovered this, and that my own great labor had gone into just this question. You, perhaps, had heard it from someone, or perhaps by some divine chance you had set out toward it — but then you failed to bind fast the proofs of it, as though holding it securely; instead it flits about for you, now one way, now another, around the mere appearance of the thing, when it is nothing of the kind. And this has happened not to you alone — be assured that no one who first hears from me has any other experience than this at the start; some free themselves from it only with much trouble, others with less, and hardly anyone with little. Given that this is how things stand, we have pretty much discovered, in my opinion, what you asked in your letter — how we ought to stand toward each other. For since you are testing these matters, both by consorting with others and comparing them against what others say, and also on their own merits, now, if the test is a true one, these things will take root in you, and you will become at home both with them and with us. How, then, will this come about, and everything I have said? You did well just now in sending Archedemus, and in the future, once he has come to you and reported what I have said, other difficulties will perhaps occur to you afterward. Send Archedemus back to me again, then, if you judge rightly, and he will make the journey and come back once more; and if you do this two or three times and test thoroughly what has been sent from me, I would be surprised if what now troubles you does not seem very different then from now.

So take courage and act accordingly; for neither you nor Archedemus will ever conduct a finer or more god-pleasing traffic than this. Be careful, though, that this never falls into the hands of uneducated people; for in my opinion there is nothing more laughable to the many when they hear of these things, nor, on the other hand, anything more wondrous and inspiring to those of good natural gifts. Spoken of again and again, and heard over many years, it is refined only with much labor, the way gold is purified. But hear the remarkable thing about it. There are people who have heard these things, quite a few of them, capable of learning, capable of remembering, and of judging them thoroughly after testing them every way — men now old, who have heard them for no less than thirty years, and who say that what once seemed to them utterly unbelievable now appears most believable and clearest of all, while what once seemed most believable now appears the opposite. Bearing this in mind, then, be careful that you never come to regret having let out, unworthily, what you now hold. The greatest safeguard is not to write it down but to learn it by heart; for it is not possible for what is written not to leak out. That is why I myself have never written anything on these matters, and there is no treatise by Plato, nor will there ever be; what is now called by his name belongs to a Socrates grown young and fair. Farewell, and heed me — and after reading this letter now, many times over, burn it. So much for that. As for Polyxenus, you were surprised that I sent him to you; but about Lycophron too, and the others in your court, I have said the same thing all along and say it now: in the practice of dialectical discussion, both by nature and by method of argument, you far surpass them all, and none of them is refuted willingly, as some suppose, but against their will. And you seem, indeed, to have handled and rewarded them quite fairly. So much on that score, said at some length given the subject. As for Philistion, if you yourself have use for him, make full use of him; but if it can be managed, lend him to Speusippus and send him over. Speusippus needs you too; and Philistion has promised me that, if you release him, he will come eagerly to Athens.

You did well to release the man from the quarries. Your request about his household, and about Hegesippus son of Ariston, is a small thing to grant — you wrote to me that if anyone wrongs either him or them and you learn of it, you will not allow it to stand. And it is worth telling the truth about Lysicleides: alone among those who came back to Athens from Sicily, he has never changed his account of the time you and I spent together — he keeps speaking well of it, and puts the best face on what happened.

Plato to Dionysius, greetings — or would I hit the mark better if, following my own custom, I wrote 'do well,' the way I usually greet friends in my letters? For you, as those who were on pilgrimage at the time reported, addressed even the god at Delphi with that very flattering phrase, and wrote, so they say, 'Greetings, and keep living the pleasant life of a tyrant.' I would not urge even a human being to do that, let alone a god — not a god, because I would be commanding something against nature, since the divine is set apart from both pleasure and pain; and not a human being either, because pleasure and pain mostly breed harm, producing in the soul dullness, forgetfulness, folly, and arrogance. Let that be my word on the greeting; read it and take it however you like. Not a few people say you tell some of the envoys who visit you that once, when you were speaking of your intention to resettle the Greek cities in Sicily and lighten the burdens on the Syracusans by turning your rule from tyranny into kingship, I heard you and talked you out of it — even though you were, as you say, eager to do it — and that now I am teaching Dion to do these very things, and that through your own ideas we are stripping you of your rule. Whether you gain anything from talking this way, you know best yourself; but you certainly wrong me by saying the opposite of what actually happened. I have already been thoroughly slandered to the mercenaries and to the mass of the Syracusans by Philistides and many others, on the grounds that I stayed on in the citadel, and that whenever anything went wrong, the outsiders blamed it all on me, claiming that you did everything I told you to.

But you yourself know perfectly well that of all political matters, I willingly took part with you in only a few, and that at the start, when I thought I might accomplish something more — a few small things, and I gave modest attention to the preambles to the laws, apart from whatever you or someone else added afterward, for I hear that some of you later reworked them; in any case both versions will be plain to anyone able to judge my style. But as I just said, I do not need to defend myself against slander before the Syracusans, or before whoever else you persuade by repeating this story — I need far more to defend myself against the earlier slander, and against this new one now growing bigger and fiercer than the first. I must make my defense on two counts: first, that I was right to avoid sharing in the city's affairs with you, and second, that this counsel, or this obstruction, which you say I gave when you meant to found Greek cities, was never mine. Hear first, then, the beginning of what I have to say about the first point. I came to Syracuse summoned by you and by Dion — Dion, a man I had already tested and who had long been my guest-friend, at a settled middle age, exactly the kind of man needed by anyone with even a little sense who was about to deliberate on matters as weighty as yours were then; you, on the other hand, were very young, with a great deal of inexperience in the things you needed to have already mastered, and you were quite unknown to me. After that, whether it was a man, a god, or some stroke of fortune, Dion was driven out along with you, and you were left alone. Do you think, then, that I could at that point have shared political affairs with you — having lost my sensible partner, and seeing the senseless one left behind among many worthless men, not ruling but thinking he ruled, while actually ruled by such men? In these circumstances what was I to do? Was it not necessary, as I in fact did, to let political matters go from then on, being wary of the slanders born of envy, and instead to try, though the two of you had become estranged and were at odds, to make you as much friends to each other as I possibly could?

Of this you yourself are witness, that I never once slackened in pressing exactly that. And with difficulty, but still, we came to an agreement: that I would sail home, since war held you both back, but that once peace came, Dion and I would return to Syracuse, and you would summon us. That is how things stood regarding my first journey to Syracuse and my safe return home. But the second time, once peace had come, you did not summon me according to our agreement — you wrote asking me alone to come, and said you would send for Dion later. Because of this I did not go, and I even fell out of favor with Dion over it, since he thought it better for me to go and comply with you. After that, a year later, a trireme arrived along with letters from you, and the letters began by saying that if I came, all of Dion's affairs would go exactly as I wished, but if I did not come, the opposite. I am ashamed to say how many letters came at that time, from you and from others because of you, out of Italy and Sicily, and from how many of my own household and acquaintances, all urging me to go and begging me by all means to obey you. It seemed to everyone, starting with Dion, that I ought to sail and not be soft about it. And yet I pointed out my age to them, and I insisted about you that you would not be able to hold out against those slandering us and wanting us at odds — for I saw then, and I see now, that great and overgrown fortunes, whether of private men or of monarchs, nourish all the more, the greater they are, slanderers in ever greater numbers, men who deal in pleasure joined with shameful harm, than which wealth and the power that comes with unchecked authority breed no greater evil. Nevertheless, I let all this go and came, reasoning that none of my friends should be able to blame me for their ruin, when it might have been avoided, because of my own laziness. And once I arrived — for you know everything that happened from that point on — I expected, of course, according to what the letters had promised, that you would first bring Dion home and restore our friendship, explaining that closeness which, had you trusted me in it then, things might well have turned out better than they have for you, for Syracuse, and for the rest of the Greeks, or so my judgment foretells.

Next, I expected that Dion's household would keep his property, and that those who had divided it among themselves — men you know well — would not keep the division. Beyond this, I thought that the yearly income he was accustomed to receive should be sent to him, and even more generously now that I was there, not less. Getting none of this, I asked to leave. After that you persuaded me to stay the year, saying that you would sell off all of Dion's property and send half of it to Corinth, leaving the rest for his son here. There is much I could say about promises you made and never kept, but I will cut it short given how many there are. For after selling all the property — without persuading Dion, though you had said you would not sell without his consent — you capped off, my astonishing friend, all your promises with the boldest stroke of all: you devised a scheme, neither honorable nor clever nor just nor useful, meant to frighten me into thinking I was ignorant of what was then going on, so that I would not even ask that the money be sent. For when you drove out Heracleides — an act neither the Syracusans nor I thought just, since together with Theodotes and Eurybius I had begged you not to do it — you seized on this as a sufficient pretext and said that you had long seen through me: that I cared nothing for you, only for Dion and Dion's friends and household, and that since Theodotes and Heracleides, being Dion's kin, were now under attack, I was scheming every way I could to keep them from paying the penalty. So much, then, for our political partnership, yours and mine; and if you saw any other estrangement growing in me toward you, you naturally suppose all of it came from this. Do not be surprised — I would rightly look base to any man of sense, if, swayed by the greatness of your power, I had betrayed an old friend and guest-friend suffering harm because of you, a man no worse than you, if I may put it that way, and had instead chosen you, the wrongdoer, and done whatever you commanded, plainly for the sake of money — for no one could claim any other cause for my change of heart, had I changed. But this is how things happened, and it is because of you that this wolfish counterfeit of friendship, this failure of partnership between us, came about.

This brings my account, almost without a break, to the very point I said I still had to defend myself on. Look closely now, and pay full attention, in case I seem to you to be lying anywhere and not telling the truth. I say that you, in the presence of Archedemus and Aristocritus in the garden, about twenty days before I sailed home from Syracuse, said the very things you now charge me with — that I cared more for Heracleides and everyone else than for you. And in front of these same men you asked me whether I remembered — from when I first arrived — urging you to resettle the Greek cities. I agreed that I remembered, and that I still think this the best course now. But I must also report, Dionysius, what was said next on that occasion. I asked you whether that was the only advice I was giving you, or something else besides; and you answered me, very angrily and, as you thought, quite scornfully — which is why that insult of yours has now turned from a dream into a waking reality — you said, laughing in a very put-on way, if I remember, that you told me to do all this, or not do it, only once I had been properly educated. I said you remembered perfectly. 'Educated in geometry, you mean?' you said. What I meant to say next I did not say, afraid that for the sake of one small remark my voyage home, which I was expecting, might narrow instead of opening wide before me. But the whole point of saying all this is just this: do not slander me by claiming I was the one who forbade you to resettle the Greek cities being ravaged by barbarians, or to relieve the Syracusans by turning tyranny into kingship. You could never truthfully charge me with anything less fitting to me than this; and beyond that, I could offer even clearer proof, should any adequate tribunal ever appear, that I urged these very things and you were the one unwilling to carry them out. And indeed it is not hard to state plainly that these things, had they been carried out, would have been the best course for you, for Syracuse, and for all Sicily. But, my good man, if you deny having said what you did say, I have my case; and if you admit it, then, thinking Stesichorus wise for what came after, imitate his recantation, and turn from falsehood back to the true account.

Plato to Dion of Syracuse, greetings. I think it has been clear the whole time how eager I was about the affairs that have come to pass, and how much effort I put into seeing them through to completion, for no reason more than my love of honor in noble things; for I hold it just that people who are truly good and act accordingly should meet with the reputation that fits them. As for the present, then, thank god, things stand well; but as for what is to come, the greatest struggle still lies ahead. For in courage and speed and strength, other people too might be thought to excel, but in truthfulness and justice and magnanimity, and in the good bearing that goes with all these, one would agree that those who lay claim to such things are rightly set apart from the rest. Now what I mean is obvious, but still we must remind ourselves that it is fitting for us to stand apart from other men more than grown men stand apart from children — men you surely know whom I mean. We must show ourselves to be exactly what we claim to be, especially since, god willing, it will be easy. For it has fallen to other men of necessity to wander over much ground if they are to become known; but your situation now is such that people from the entire inhabited world — if it is not too bold to say — are looking toward a single place, and within that place, above all, toward you. So, since you are watched by everyone, prepare to make that old Lycurgus look ancient news, and Cyrus too, and anyone else who has ever seemed to excel in character and statesmanship — especially since many, indeed almost everyone here, say there is a strong likelihood that once Dionysius is removed the whole business will collapse on account of your rivalry for honor, and Heracleides' and Theodotes' and the other associates'.

Above all, then, let there be no such man; but if one should arise after all, show yourself as one who heals him, and you would arrive at the best outcome. Perhaps this seems laughable to you, that I should say it, since you yourself are not ignorant of it; but I see even in the theaters how competitors are spurred on by children, let alone by friends whom one supposes to be urging them on earnestly out of goodwill. So now, carry on the contest yourselves, and if you need anything from us, write. Things here are much as they were when you were present. Write also about what has been accomplished by you, or what you happen to be doing, since we hear a great deal and know nothing. Even now letters have arrived from Theodotes and Heracleides at Sparta and Aegina, while we, as I said, hear a great deal about affairs there and know nothing. Bear in mind too that some think you fall somewhat short of the attentiveness that is called for; do not let it escape you that action itself depends in part on pleasing people, while self-will keeps company with isolation. Farewell.

Plato to Perdiccas, greetings. I advised Euphraeus, as you instructed, to spend his time attending to your affairs; and it is right that I should give you as well the counsel that is called guest-counsel and sacred counsel, both about the other matters you may put to me and about how Euphraeus ought to be employed just now. The man is useful in many ways, but the greatest is in the very thing you now lack, both because of your age and because young men do not have many advisers on this subject. There is, in fact, a kind of voice belonging to each form of government, as if to different living creatures — one voice for democracy, another for oligarchy, and yet another for monarchy. Very many people would claim to understand these voices, but apart from a few they fall far short of actually grasping them. Whichever government speaks its own proper voice toward gods and men, and makes its actions follow that voice, always flourishes and is preserved, but if it imitates another, it is destroyed.

In view of this, then, Euphraeus could prove especially useful to you, capable as he also is in other matters; for I expect that he, of all the men occupied with your pursuits, will be particularly able to help work out the reasoning proper to monarchy. If you make use of him for this, then, you will benefit yourself and be of the greatest help to him as well. But if someone, hearing this, should say: Plato, it seems, pretends to know what benefits a democracy, yet though he had the chance to speak in the assembly and give it the best advice, he never once stood up and spoke — to this one should reply that Plato came late to his own city and found the people already grown old and accustomed by earlier leaders to acting in many ways quite unlike his advice; since he would have been glad, above all things, to advise it as a father would, had he not thought he would risk it in vain and accomplish nothing further. And I think my own advice would fare the very same way. For if we should seem incurable, one might bid us a hearty farewell and have nothing further to do with advising me or my affairs. Farewell.

Plato to Hermeias and Erastus and Coriscus, greetings. It seems to me that some god is preparing a good fortune for you, if you receive it well, kindly and amply; for you live as neighbors to one another and have need of each other for the greatest benefits. For Hermeias, no abundance of horses nor any other alliance in war, nor even an increase of gold, could give him greater power for everything than friends who are steadfast and of sound character; while for Erastus and Coriscus, beyond that fine wisdom about the Forms, I say, old man that I am, they need in addition a wisdom that guards against wicked and unjust men, and some power of defense. For they are inexperienced in this, having spent so much of their lives with us, who are moderate and not wicked men; that is why I said they need these things, so that they may not be forced to neglect true wisdom while attending more than they should to the human and necessary kind.

This latter power, it seems to me, Hermeias has acquired partly by nature, in matters he has not yet had experience of, and partly by skill through experience. What, then, am I saying? To you, Hermeias, who have had more experience of Erastus and Coriscus than they of you, I say and declare and bear witness that you will not easily find characters more trustworthy than these neighbors of yours; I advise you, then, by every just means to hold fast to these men, not counting it a side matter. And to Coriscus and Erastus in turn I advise holding fast to Hermeias, and trying, by holding fast to one another, to arrive at a single web of friendship. And if any of you should ever seem to be loosening this bond — for human affairs are never wholly secure — send here to me and my circle a letter accusing the fault; for I think that words coming from us here, framed with justice and respect, would be more likely than any incantation to knit and bind you back together into your former friendship and fellowship, provided whatever was undone has not turned out to be something great. If all of us, both we and you, practice philosophy, each as far as he is able and as circumstance allows, then what has just been prophesied will hold true. But what will happen if we do not do this, I will not say; for I foresee a good outcome, and I say that we shall make all these things turn out well, if god is willing. This letter all three of you must read, best of all together, but if not, then two at a time, sharing it as far as possible as often as you can, and you must treat it as a covenant and binding law, which is just, swearing by that god who is the leader of all things that are and are to be, and by the lord and father of that leader and cause, whom, if we truly practice philosophy, we shall all come to know clearly, so far as is possible for happy men.

Plato to the household and companions of Dion, greetings. You wrote to me that I ought to consider your purpose the same as Dion's, and indeed you urged me to share in it, so far as I am able, in deed and in word.

As for me, if you truly hold the same judgment and desire that he held, I agree to share in it; but if not, I shall have to deliberate many times over. What his judgment and desire were, I could tell you not by conjecture but as one who knows clearly. For when I first arrived at Syracuse, being about forty years old, Dion was of the age Hipparinus is now, and the conviction he held then he kept holding to the end — that the Syracusans ought to be free, living under the best laws; so it is no wonder if some god should also bring this young man to share the same conviction about government as that man held. What the manner of its coming about was is not unworthy of being heard by young and old alike, and I will try to relate it to you from the beginning; for now is the fitting occasion. When I was young, I once felt what many feel: I thought that as soon as I became my own master, I would go straight into the public affairs of the city. And certain turns of the city's fortunes happened to fall out for me in this way. The constitution then in place was denounced by many, and a change came about; and of this change fifty-one men took the lead as rulers, eleven in the city and ten in the Piraeus — each group in charge of the market and whatever needed managing in the towns — while thirty were established as rulers over everything with absolute power. Some of these happened to be relatives and acquaintances of mine, and indeed they invited me at once to join them, as if this were fitting work for me. And I felt nothing surprising for a young man: I thought they would manage the city by leading it from some unjust way of life to a just manner, so that I attended closely to what they would do. And watching these men, in a short time, make the previous government look like gold by comparison — among other things, they sent an older friend of mine, Socrates, whom I would hardly be ashamed to call the most just man of that time, along with others, after one of the citizens, to bring him by force to be put to death, so that he might be made complicit in their affairs whether he wished it or not —

he would not be persuaded, and risked suffering anything rather than become a partner in their unholy acts. Seeing all this, and other things of the sort no less serious, I was disgusted and withdrew myself from the evils of that time. Not long after, the rule of the Thirty fell, and with it that whole government; and again, though more slowly, the desire to engage in public and political affairs drew me back. There were, even in that troubled time, many things happening that one might be disgusted by, and it was no wonder that in the upheavals some took harsher vengeance on certain enemies than was fitting — though those who returned then in fact showed a great deal of moderation. But by some chance, certain men in power brought our companion Socrates here into court, laying against him a most unholy charge, and one that suited Socrates least of all men: some brought the charge of impiety, others voted to condemn, and they put to death the very man who, at the time of that unholy summons, had refused to take part in bringing in one of the friends then in exile, when those exiles were themselves suffering misfortune. As I considered these things, and the men engaged in public affairs, and the laws and customs too, the more I examined them and the further I advanced in age, the harder it appeared to me to manage public affairs rightly. For it was not possible to act without trusted friends and companions — and these were not easy to find ready-made, since our city was no longer governed by the customs and practices of our fathers, while to acquire new ones was impossible with any ease — and the very letter of the laws and customs was being corrupted and was worsening at an astonishing rate, so that I, who at first had been full of eagerness to engage in public affairs, when I looked at all this and saw things being swept along every which way, ended up growing dizzy,

And while I never stopped examining whether some better course might emerge, both on these very points and on the whole matter of government, I kept holding off from actually doing anything, always waiting for the right occasion, until in the end I realized that all the cities of today are badly governed, every one of them: the state of their laws is nearly incurable without some extraordinary combination of preparation and luck. So I was forced to say, in praise of true philosophy, that only from it can one see clearly what is just, both in politics and in private life; and that the human race will not stop suffering evils until either the class of those who philosophize rightly and truly comes into political power, or those who hold power in cities come, by some divine allotment, to practice philosophy in earnest. Holding this conviction, I went to Italy and Sicily when I first arrived there. And once there, the life called happy in that country did not please me in the least — a life stuffed with Italian and Syracusan tables, filled twice a day, never sleeping alone at night, and all the other habits that go along with such a life. No one raised from youth in these practices could ever become wise, however remarkable his nature — such a mixture would not permit it — nor could he ever come close to being temperate; and the same holds for the rest of virtue as well. No city could ever be at peace under its laws if its people think they must spend everything to excess, and then, once done, believe they should do nothing at all except toil away at feasts, drinking bouts, and the pursuit of sex. Such cities are bound to keep cycling endlessly through tyrannies, oligarchies, and democracies, and those who hold power in them will never so much as tolerate hearing the name of a just and equal constitution. With these thoughts added to what I already believed, I crossed over to Syracuse — by chance, perhaps, though it looks now as though some higher power was then setting in motion the beginning of everything that has since happened concerning Dion and the affairs of Syracuse. And I fear there may be still more to come, unless you now listen to me as you did not the first time I gave you advice.

How, then, do I claim that my arrival in Sicily at that time was the beginning of it all? When I spent time with Dion, who was young then, and explained to him in discussion what seemed to me the best things for people, urging him to put them into practice, I failed, I think, to notice that I was in effect engineering the overthrow of a tyranny, without realizing it myself. Dion, being remarkably quick to learn — both in general and especially in response to the arguments I made at that time — took to them so eagerly and so thoroughly that no young man I had ever met came close; and he chose to live the rest of his life differently from most Italians and Sicilians, having come to value virtue more highly than pleasure and every other luxury. Because of this he lived a life more burdensome to those who followed the ways of tyranny, right up to the death of Dionysius the elder. After that he came to think that this conviction, which he himself had come to hold through right argument, should not remain in him alone; he noticed it arising in others too — not many, but some — and he judged that Dionysius the younger might, with the gods' help, become one of them. And if that came about, he believed his own life and the lives of all the Syracusans would turn out to be blessed beyond measure. Beyond this he thought it essential that I come to Syracuse as quickly as possible by any means, to share in the work, remembering how easily our own time together had brought him to desire the finest and best kind of life. If he could accomplish the same thing now in Dionysius, as he was attempting, he had great hopes of establishing a happy and genuinely good life throughout the whole country, without bloodshed, deaths, or the evils that have now occurred. Reasoning rightly along these lines, Dion persuaded Dionysius to send for me, and he himself begged me, in letter after letter, to come as quickly as possible by any means, before others could get to Dionysius and turn him toward some other, lesser life. His plea, to put it briefly though it deserves a longer account, ran like this: 'What greater occasion,' he said, 'could we ever wait for than the one now placed before us by some divine stroke of fortune?'

He went through the extent of his power in Italy and Sicily and his own influence within it, the youth of Dionysius, and how strong his enthusiasm was, he said, for philosophy and education; he pointed out that his own nephews and relatives could easily be won over to the kind of life and argument I always spoke of, and were most capable of drawing Dionysius in as well — so that if ever there was hope of philosophers and the rulers of great cities turning out to be one and the same people, it was now. These were his appeals, and many others like them in great number. As for my own judgment, I had real fear about how things would turn out with these young men — the desires of people like that move quickly and often pull against themselves — but I knew Dion's character, that his soul was by nature steady and already at a reasonably mature age. So as I weighed it, uncertain whether I should go and comply or not, I nonetheless came down on the side that if anyone was ever going to try to carry out in practice what had been thought through about laws and government, now was the time to attempt it; if I could persuade just this one man thoroughly, I would have achieved everything good. With this reasoning and this resolve I set out from home — not for the reasons some imagined, but chiefly out of shame before myself, for fear I might seem to myself to be nothing but words, a man who would never willingly lay a hand to any deed, and that I might risk betraying, first of all, my bond of guest-friendship and comradeship with Dion, who was truly in no small danger. Suppose he had suffered some harm, or been driven out by Dionysius and his other enemies and come to us as a fugitive, and asked, 'Plato, I have come to you in exile, not because I need hoplites or cavalry to fight off my enemies, but because I need words and persuasion — the very things you, I knew better than anyone, were able to use to turn young men toward the good and the just, and toward friendship and fellowship with one another. It is for want of these, on your part, that I now leave Syracuse behind and stand here. My own disgrace matters less to you; but philosophy, which you are always praising, and which you say is treated with contempt by the rest of humankind — has it not now been betrayed, so far as it depended on you, along with me?'

And if we had happened to be living in Megara, you would surely have come to help me in what I asked, or you would have thought yourself the most worthless of men. But now, do you imagine that by pointing to the length of the journey and the size of the voyage and the effort involved, you will ever escape the reputation of cowardice? Far from it. Had such things been said to me, what dignified answer could I have given? None. So I went, and reasonably so, and as justly as a man possibly could, abandoning my own pursuits here, which were not without honor, to place myself under a tyranny that seemed unfitting both for what I taught and for me. By going I freed myself in the eyes of Zeus, guardian of guests, and kept the calling of philosophy free of reproach — reproach it would have deserved had I grown soft and, out of cowardice, taken on some share of shame. And once there — there is no need to draw this out — I found everything around Dionysius full of factional strife and slander directed at Dion before the tyrant. I defended him as far as I was able, though I could do little; and after about the fourth month, Dionysius, accusing Dion of plotting against his rule, put him on a small boat and threw him out in disgrace. After that all of us who were Dion's friends were afraid that he might accuse one of us in turn and punish us as accomplices in Dion's supposed plot. A rumor even went around Syracuse that I had been put to death by Dionysius as the cause of everything that had happened. Dionysius, noticing all of us in this state of alarm and fearing something worse might come of our fear, took everyone back in a friendly manner; he reassured me in particular, urged me to take heart, and pleaded with me to stay in every way, since it did him no good at all for me to flee from him, whereas my staying — this is exactly why he made such a show of pleading. We know that the pleading of tyrants is mixed with compulsion; and it was by contriving just this that he kept me from sailing away, bringing me instead up to the citadel and settling me there, from which no ship's captain could have taken me out, not even if Dionysius had not been actively blocking it, let alone against his wishes — no, not even if he himself had sent orders that whoever wished should take me away.

No merchant, and none of the officials stationed at the country's points of departure, would have let me pass through alone without seizing me at once and bringing me straight back to Dionysius — especially since word had already gone round, quite the opposite of what it had been before, that Dionysius was showing me remarkable favor. And what was the truth of it? I must tell it plainly. His favor did grow, as time went on, more from our being together and coming to know each other's character and temper; but he wanted me to praise him rather than Dion, and to regard him as a friend far more than Dion, and he competed for this with remarkable eagerness. Yet the one way this could have come about most honorably, if it was going to come about at all — by learning and listening to arguments about philosophy and growing close to me through them — this he shrank from, afraid of what his slanderers were saying, lest he be hindered somehow and Dion's whole plan be brought to completion. I endured all of it, holding to the same purpose I had come with, in the hope that he might somehow come to desire the philosophic life; but he won out against me in his resistance. And so the first period of my residence and stay in Sicily came about, for all these reasons. After that I went abroad and came back again, at Dionysius's urgent and repeated summons; why I did so, and all that I did, as being reasonable and just, I will explain later, once I have first advised you on what must be done given what has now happened — this for the sake of those who keep asking what I wanted in coming a second time, so that these secondary matters do not get treated by me as if they were the main business. So here is what I say: to a man who is ill and living on a harmful regimen, an adviser must first tell him, above all, to change his way of life; if he is willing to listen, one may then go on to give the rest of the advice, but if he is not, I would consider a man who walks away from giving such advice to be a real man and a true physician, and one who stays and keeps giving it to be no man at all, and no craftsman. The same holds for a city too, whether it has one ruler or many: if the government, moving along a right and proper path, asks advice on some fitting matter, then it is the mark of good sense to give that advice.

As for those who step entirely outside the right kind of constitution and are unwilling to set even a foot on its path, but instruct their adviser to leave the constitution alone and not disturb it — on pain of death if he does — and bid him instead serve their wishes and desires and advise them how these might come about most easily and quickly and last forever, such a man, if he complies with advice of that sort, I would consider unmanly, while the one who refuses to comply I would call a real man. Holding this view myself, whenever someone consults me about some matter of real importance concerning his own life — say, the acquiring of money, or the care of his body or soul — if it seems to me that he lives his daily life in some reasonable way, or that he would be willing to follow advice about the things he brings to me, I give my advice eagerly and don't stop merely to satisfy some formal obligation. But if he doesn't consult me at all, or if it's clear that he won't follow my advice in any way, I don't go to such a person uninvited to offer counsel, and I certainly wouldn't force it on him even if he were my own son. To a slave I might give advice, and even press it on him against his will; but a father or mother I don't think it right to coerce, unless they're gripped by some disease of madness. If they're living according to some settled way of life that pleases them but not me, I shouldn't alienate them by pointless scolding, nor yet should I flatter them and serve their wants by supplying satisfactions for desires which, embracing them myself, I wouldn't want to live by. In just the same way a sensible man ought to think and live regarding his own city: he should speak up, if the way it's governed doesn't seem good to him, provided he isn't going to speak in vain or get himself killed for speaking; but he shouldn't use force on his fatherland to bring about a change of constitution when the best one cannot come about without banishing and slaughtering men — rather, he should keep quiet and pray for good things, both for himself and for the city. This, then, is the manner in which I would advise you, and in which Dion and I advised Dionysius as well: to live one's daily life, first of all, so as to become as much as possible master of oneself, and to acquire trustworthy friends and companions, so that he might not suffer what his father suffered,

who, having taken over many large cities of Sicily that had been devastated by the barbarians, was unable to resettle them and establish in each a government of loyal companions — not from anywhere among strangers, nor even from brothers whom he himself had raised from boyhood, whom he had made rulers out of private citizens and rich men out of poor ones. Of these he could win over not a single one to a genuine share in his rule, by persuasion, teaching, favors, or kinship, and so he turned out seven times worse than Darius, who, trusting not brothers whom he himself had raised but only men who had shared with him in overthrowing the Mede and the eunuch, divided all of Sicily's equivalent into seven parts, each larger than any single share, and used these partners as trustworthy men who did not attack either him or one another, and showed the model of what a good lawgiver and king ought to be — for by establishing laws he has preserved the Persian empire even to this day. Consider further the Athenians: they did not found the many Greek cities they took over — cities already invaded by barbarians but still inhabited — yet they preserved their empire for seventy years by having friendly men in each of those cities. But Dionysius, having gathered all Sicily into one city, and trusting no one out of his own so-called cleverness, barely survived — for he was poor in loyal, trustworthy friends, and there is no greater sign of virtue or vice than whether a man has such friends or lacks them. This is exactly what Dion and I advised Dionysius, since, given how things had turned out for him through his father, he had grown up without any contact with education and without the fellowship proper to his station. Our first advice, having started from this point, was that he should acquire other friends among his own kin and age-mates who were in harmony with him regarding virtue, and above all that he should become a friend to himself — for in this respect he was astonishingly lacking. We did not put it so plainly, since that would not have been safe, but we hinted at it, arguing that in this way every man would save both himself and those he came to lead, while turning away from this path he would bring about the opposite of everything. And if he went the way we described, and made himself a man of sense and self-control, then were he to resettle the depopulated cities of Sicily and bind them together with laws and constitutions so that they were loyal to him and to one another against the incursions of the barbarians, he would not merely double his father's empire but multiply it many times over —

for, once this had been achieved, it would be entirely possible to enslave the Carthaginians far more thoroughly than they had been enslaved after the time of Gelon, rather than, as things now stand, having his own father agree to pay them tribute. These were the words we spoke and the counsel we pressed, we who were plotting against Dionysius, as such talk was reported to have spread from many quarters — talk which, once it gained the upper hand with Dionysius, led to Dion's banishment and threw us into fear. But to compress into a short space matters that took no short time to unfold: Dion came from the Peloponnese and Athens and admonished Dionysius through actual deeds. And once he had freed the city and restored it to the Syracusans twice over, they then treated Dion just as Dionysius had treated him, at the very time he was trying, by educating and raising him, to make him a king worthy of the office and to share with him his whole life. But those who slandered Dion, saying that in doing everything he did at that time he was plotting for the tyranny, made it so that Dionysius, bewitched in mind by education, would neglect his rule and hand it over to Dion, while Dion would seize it for himself and drive Dionysius from power by trickery. This slander won out then, and a second time among the Syracusans, in a victory both strange and shameful for those responsible for it. Those who now call on me regarding the present situation must hear how it happened. I came, an Athenian, a companion of Dion and his ally, to the tyrant, so as to bring about friendship in place of war; but struggling against the slanderers, I was defeated. When Dionysius tried, with honors and money, to make me his own, so that I might serve as witness and friend lending respectability to Dion's banishment, he failed entirely in this. Later, when Dion returned home, he took on two brothers from Athens, friends made not through philosophy but through that circle of so-called companionship most people have, which men cultivate by playing host, and by initiating and being initiated into mysteries; and indeed these two, who had helped bring him home, became his companions out of this circle and out of the service they rendered toward his return.

When they came to Sicily, once they perceived that Dion had been slandered among the Sicilians he had freed as plotting to become tyrant, they not only betrayed their companion and guest-friend, but became virtually the murderers themselves, standing armed alongside the actual killers as their accomplices. As for the shameful and impious act itself, I neither pass over it nor say anything more about it — for many others make it their business to sing of these things, and will continue to do so in time to come. But I do want to lift from the Athenians the charge people bring against them, that these two men brought shame on the city; for I say that the other man too was an Athenian, the one who did not betray this same Dion, though he could have taken money and many other honors. He had not become Dion's friend through some vulgar attachment, but through a partnership rooted in a free education — and it is this alone that a man of sense ought to trust, rather than kinship of body and soul. So the two who killed Dion did not become worthy of reproach to the city, as though they had ever been men of any account. All this has been said for the sake of advising Dion's friends and kinsmen. And I have some further advice to add to this, speaking now for the third time to you three the same counsel and the same argument: do not enslave Sicily, or any other city, to human masters — that is my advice — but to laws. For it is better for neither the enslavers nor the enslaved, for themselves and for their children's children and their descendants; the attempt is utterly ruinous, and it is the mark of small and unfree souls to be fond of snatching such gains, men who know nothing of what is good and just, whether for the future or the present moment, in matters divine or human. These are the things I first attempted to persuade Dion of, second Dionysius, and now third, you. And do listen to me, for the sake of Zeus the Savior, third in the toast, and then look to Dionysius and Dion: of these, the one who did not listen lives now dishonorably, while the one who did listen died honorably; for whatever a man suffers in reaching after the finest things, both for himself and for his city, is altogether right and good.

For none of us is by nature immortal, and even if one of us should happen to be, he would not thereby be happy, as most people think; for nothing good or bad worth mentioning belongs to things without soul, but this will happen to each soul either while it is joined with a body or when separated from it. We must truly always trust the ancient and sacred accounts, which reveal to us that the soul is immortal, and has judges, and pays the greatest penalties, whenever it is released from the body; wherefore we ought to consider it a lesser evil to suffer great wrongs and injustices than to commit them. The man who loves money and is poor in soul neither listens to this, nor, if he does hear it, does he, laughing at it as he supposes, shamelessly snatch from every side whatever he thinks he can, like some beast, to eat or drink, or to provide himself, in that slavish and graceless business wrongly called the pleasure of Aphrodite, with satisfaction to the point of glutting himself — blind, and not seeing what impiety attends his plunder in every case, an evil that must always follow each act of wrongdoing, which the wrongdoer is forced to drag along with him, both while wandering above the earth and after returning beneath it, on a journey utterly dishonored and wretched in every way. It was by saying these and other such things that I tried to persuade Dion, and I would be perfectly justified in feeling anger, in some way quite similar, at both his killers and at Dionysius; for both, one might say, have done the greatest harm to me and to virtually everyone else — the killers, by destroying a man who wished to make use of justice, and Dionysius, by refusing throughout his whole reign to make any use of justice at all, though he held the greatest power, in which, had philosophy and power truly come together in the same place, shining sufficiently through all mankind, both Greek and barbarian, it would have established in everyone the true belief that no city and no man could ever be happy who does not pass his life under justice together with wisdom, whether by possessing it in himself or by being nurtured and rightly educated under the rule of righteous men. This is the harm Dionysius did; all else would be small harm to me compared to this. But the man who killed Dion does not know that he has done the very same thing as Dionysius did.

I know clearly, as clearly as one human being can affirm anything about another, that if Dion had held power, he never would have turned it to any other shape of rule than this: first he would have set Syracuse, his own homeland, shining and free, once he had cleared away her slavery, and then, once she stood established in freedom, he would have used every device to array her citizens under laws that were fitting and best of all. Next he would have set his heart on settling all Sicily and freeing it from the barbarians, driving some out and subduing others more easily than Hieron had done. And with all this accomplished through a man just, brave, self-controlled, and philosophical, the same opinion about virtue would have taken hold among ordinary people that would have taken hold, had Dionysius been persuaded, and saved -- one might almost say -- the whole human race. But as it is, some divinity or some avenging spirit fell upon him with lawlessness, godlessness, and, worst of all, the reckless daring of ignorance -- the root from which every evil takes hold in every soul and sprouts, and later brings forth for those who bred it the bitterest fruit -- and this same thing overturned and destroyed everything a second time. Now, for the sake of a good omen, let us speak well of the third attempt. All the same, I advise you, his friends, to imitate Dion in his devotion to his homeland and in the disciplined way he lived, and, under better auspices, to try to bring to completion the things he wished for -- and what those were you have heard clearly from me. Whoever among you cannot live in the Dorian manner, according to your ancestral ways, but instead pursues the life of Dion's murderers and the ordinary run of Sicilian living, him you should neither invite in nor suppose that he could ever do anything trustworthy or sound. The rest you should invite to join in settling and giving equal law to all Sicily, drawing on Sicily itself and on the whole of the Peloponnese together, and you need not fear even Athens, for there too are men who surpass all others in virtue and who hate the reckless daring of those who murder their own guest-friends. But if all this must wait until later, and the many, many kinds of civil strife springing up every day press hard upon you now, then every man to whom some divine fortune has granted even a small share of right judgment ought to know this: there is no rest from evils for those caught in civil strife until the victors in the battles, the banishments, and the killings put an end to nursing their grudges and turning to vengeance against their enemies,

and, mastering themselves, establish laws held in common, laid down no more for their own pleasure than for that of the defeated, and compel obedience to those laws by the two forms of constraint, reverence and fear -- fear, because they show by their strength that they are the stronger; reverence, because they show themselves superior in mastering their own pleasures and more willing and able to be servants of the law. There is no other way for a city torn by civil strife ever to find rest from its evils; rather, civil strife, hatred, enmity, and distrust are bound forever to arise again and again among such cities as long as they remain in that condition toward themselves. So the victors, whenever they truly desire safety, must always choose out from among themselves the best men in Greece that they can learn of -- first, older men, men who have wives and children at home, and as many ancestors as possible who were good and well known, and men who all possess sufficient property. For a city of ten thousand men, fifty such men are enough. These men they should summon from their own homes with entreaties and the highest honors, and once summoned and bound by oath, they should beg and instruct them to lay down laws that give no greater share to the victors than to the defeated, but equal and common rights to the whole city. And once the laws are laid down, everything depends on this: if the victors show themselves more submissive to the laws than the defeated, then everything will be full of safety and prosperity and an escape from every evil; but if not, then let no one call on me or any other partner against the man who will not obey what has now been laid down. For these things are sisters to what Dion and I once undertook together, meaning well toward Syracuse -- these are the second attempt. But the first attempt was what we first tried to accomplish together with Dionysius himself, for the common good of all, until some fortune stronger than men scattered it. Now try, with better luck, to bring these very things to pass, by good fortune and some divine chance. Let this stand as my counsel and my letter, and as the account of my first visit to Dionysius. As for the later journey and voyage, how reasonably and fittingly it came about, whoever cares to hear may go on to what follows.

The first period of my stay in Sicily, then, ran its course, as I said, before I gave any counsel to Dion's household and companions. After that I persuaded Dionysius, however I managed it, to let me go. When peace came -- for there was war in Sicily at the time -- we came to an agreement, both of us. Dionysius said he would summon Dion and me back again once he had made his rule more secure, and he asked that Dion think of what had happened not as exile but as a change of residence; and I agreed to come back on these terms. When peace came, he summoned me, but asked that Dion wait one more year, while insisting that I come by all means. Dion for his part urged and begged me to sail; indeed a great deal of talk was coming out of Sicily to the effect that Dionysius had once again become remarkably eager for philosophy, which is why Dion pressed me so earnestly not to refuse the summons. I knew well enough how often such things happen with young men quick to learn who catch a glimpse of some worthwhile subject, yet all the same it seemed safer to me at that time to let both Dion and Dionysius go their own way, and I made enemies of them both by answering that I was an old man and that none of what was now being done matched what had been agreed. It seems that after this Archytas went to Dionysius before I arrived -- for before I left I had made ties of hospitality and friendship between Archytas and the people of Tarentum and Dionysius -- and there were also others in Syracuse who had heard something from Dion, and others still who had picked up scraps of philosophical talk at second hand. These people, it seems, tried to discuss such matters with Dionysius themselves, as though Dionysius had heard everything I had ever thought. Now he is not by nature untalented when it comes to the power of learning, and he is remarkably eager for honor; so he was probably pleased by what was said to him, and ashamed to be seen as someone who had learned nothing while I was staying there. This made him at once long to hear things more clearly and pushed him on further out of ambition. The reasons why he had not heard these things during my earlier stay I explained in what I said just above --

Well then, once I had gotten safely home and had refused his second invitation, as I just said, it seems that Dionysius became altogether anxious that people might think I looked down on his nature, his character, and his way of living, now that I had come to know them, and that this was why I no longer wished to visit him -- as though out of distaste. I am bound to tell the truth and put up with it, if anyone, upon hearing what actually happened, should look down on my philosophy and judge that the tyrant had the better sense. Dionysius sent, for the third time, a trireme for me to make my journey easy, and he sent Archedemus, one of those who had been with Archytas and whom he supposed I valued most highly among the people in Sicily, along with other acquaintances of mine there. All of them brought me the same report, that Dionysius had made astonishing progress toward philosophy. He also sent a very long letter, knowing how I stood with Dion and how eager Dion in turn was for me to sail and come to Syracuse; the whole letter was framed from the start with all this in mind, and it said, in effect this -- 'Dionysius to Plato' -- and after the customary greetings, he said nothing further before this: that if I now let myself be persuaded to come to Sicily, first of all matters concerning Dion would proceed exactly as I myself wished -- and I know you will wish for what is reasonable, and I will agree to it -- but if not, none of Dion's affairs, whether concerning other matters or concerning himself, would go as I would want. That is what he said; the rest would take too long to relate and is beside the point now. Other letters kept arriving too, from Archytas and the people of Tarentum, praising Dionysius's devotion to philosophy and warning that if I did not come now, I would utterly ruin the friendship they had built with Dionysius through me, a friendship of no small importance for their political affairs. Given this kind of summons at that time, with the people of Sicily and Italy pulling me one way and the people of Athens all but pushing me out with their pleading, the same argument came round again: that I must not betray Dion, nor my guest-friends and companions in Tarentum,

and it occurred to me that there was nothing strange in a young man, quick to learn, catching wind at second hand of matters worth discussing and being seized with a longing for the best life. I thought I ought to put this to the clear test, to see which way things really stood, and that I must on no account betray it, nor make myself the cause of so grave a reproach, if these things really had been said as reported to me. So I set out, wrapping myself in this reasoning -- though full of fears and, it seems, none too happy in my forebodings. Well then, coming for the third time, I did at least accomplish this, that I made it back home safely once again by good fortune, and for this, next to god, thanks are owed to Dionysius, since when many wished to destroy me he stopped them and granted some measure of respect to my situation. When I arrived, I thought I ought first to get proof of one thing: whether Dionysius really had caught fire with philosophy, as with a flame, or whether all that talk that had reached Athens had come to nothing. Now there is a way of testing such things that is not ignoble but truly fitting for tyrants, especially tyrants surrounded by people full of secondhand chatter -- and this I noticed in Dionysius as soon as I arrived, that he had been affected by it a great deal. One must show such people that the whole undertaking is possible, and through how much labor and how much toil it comes. For the one who hears it, if he is truly a philosopher, suited to the task and worthy of it, being touched by something divine, thinks he has heard of a wondrous road, one he must now strain every nerve to follow, and that life is not worth living if he does otherwise. From then on, straining himself and the one who guides him along the road, he does not let up until he has either brought everything to its end, or gained the power to guide himself without need of the one who showed him the way. Living by this resolve and according to these principles, such a man goes on, whatever business he may be engaged in, always and above all holding fast to philosophy and to that daily regimen which will make him most quick to learn, most retentive of memory, and most able to reason soberly within himself; the opposite way of life he goes on hating to the end. But those who are not truly philosophers, only tinged with opinions -- like men whose bodies are merely sunburnt -- once they see how many subjects there are to learn, how great the labor, and how disciplined and fitting the daily regimen the task demands, judge it difficult and impossible for themselves, and so prove unable even to practice it,

Some of them convince themselves that they have heard enough of the whole and need no further effort at all. This, then, is the test that proves clear and safest against the self-indulgent, those incapable of hard work: the man who shows the way can never be blamed—only the pupil himself, for failing to practice everything the subject demands. In this way, then, what was said to Dionysius on that occasion was said. I did not go through everything, nor did Dionysius ask me to; he pretended he already knew many things, the most important ones, and had a sufficient grasp of them, thanks to garbled versions he had picked up from others. Later, I hear, he even wrote about what he heard then, putting it together as if it were a treatise of his own, containing nothing of what he actually heard—but of this I know nothing. I do know that certain others have written on these same matters; but who they are, they themselves do not know. This much, at any rate, I can declare about all who have written or will write claiming knowledge of the things I take seriously, whether they say they heard it from me or from others or discovered it themselves: it is impossible, in my judgment, that they understand anything of the matter. There is no writing of mine on these subjects, nor will there ever be. For it cannot be put into words like other studies; rather, out of long companionship with the thing itself, out of living with it, suddenly—like light kindled from a leaping flame—it is born in the soul and from then on feeds itself. And yet this much I do know: if these things were to be written or spoken, they would best be spoken by me; and if they were written badly, no one would be more pained than I. If I thought they could be adequately written down and spoken for the many, what finer work could I have done in my life than to write something of great benefit to mankind and bring the nature of things into the light for all?

But I do not think the attempt to speak of these matters is a good thing for men, except for those few who are able to discover the truth for themselves with a small hint. Of the rest, it would fill some with a misplaced contempt, in no graceful way, and others with a lofty, empty hope, as though they had learned something solemn. Still longer thoughts about these matters have come into my mind; perhaps what I am saying would be clearer once they are said. There is a true argument that stands against anyone who dares to write anything at all about such things—an argument I have stated often before, but it seems it must be stated now as well. For each thing that exists there are three things through which knowledge of it must come; the knowledge itself is a fourth; and as a fifth one must posit the thing itself, that which is knowable and truly is. First is the name; second, the definition; third, the image; fourth, the knowledge. If you want to grasp what I am now saying, take a single example and think of all things in the same way. There is something called a circle, whose name is the very word we have just uttered. Second comes its definition, composed of nouns and verbs: 'that which is everywhere equidistant from its extremities to its center' would be the definition of the thing that bears the names round, spherical, circle. Third is what is drawn and erased, turned on the lathe and destroyed—none of which happens to the circle itself, which all these concern, because it is other than they. Fourth is knowledge, intelligence, and true opinion about these things; and this whole must be set down as one thing again, residing not in sounds nor in bodily shapes but in souls—by which it is clearly different both from the nature of the circle itself and from the three mentioned before. Of these, intelligence comes nearest the fifth in kinship and likeness; the others stand farther off. The same holds for straight and curved shape alike, for color, for the good and the beautiful and the just, for every body whether crafted or naturally born—fire, water, and all such things—for every living creature, for character in souls, and for all doings and sufferings. For unless a man somehow grasps the four of these, he will never be a complete partaker of knowledge of the fifth.

Besides all this, these four attempt to show the quality of each thing no less than its being, because of the weakness of language. For this reason no man of sense will ever dare to commit his thoughts to language—least of all to language that cannot be moved, which is the fate of what is written in fixed characters. But here again you must learn what I am now saying. Every circle that is drawn in practice or turned on a lathe is full of the opposite of the fifth, for it touches the straight at every point; whereas the circle itself, we say, contains in itself neither more nor less of the contrary nature. And we say that none of their names is fixed for any of them; nothing prevents what are now called round things from being called straight and the straight round, and they will hold no less firmly for those who make the change and use the opposite names. The same account holds of the definition too: since it is composed of nouns and verbs, nothing about it is fixed with sufficient firmness. And there is an endless story about each of the four, how unclear it is—but the greatest point is what we said a little earlier: there being two things, the being and the quality, when the soul seeks to know not the quality but the what, each of the four holds out to the soul, in word and in deed, the thing it is not seeking, presenting in every case what is said and shown as easily refuted by the senses, and so fills practically every man with total perplexity and confusion. Now in matters where, through bad rearing, we are not even accustomed to seek the truth, and any image put before us suffices, we do not become laughingstocks to one another—the questioned to the questioners—though the four could be tossed about and refuted. But wherever we compel a man to answer and reveal the fifth, anyone who wishes and is able to overturn him prevails, and makes the man expounding, whether in speeches or writings or answers, appear to most of his hearers to know nothing of what he undertakes to write or say—the audience sometimes unaware that it is not the soul of the writer or speaker being refuted, but the nature of each of the four, which is flawed by birth. Only the movement through all of them, passing up and down to each in turn, barely begets knowledge of a well-natured thing in a well-natured man.

But if a man's nature is bad—and such is the condition of most souls with regard to learning and to what are called morals—or if it has been corrupted, not even Lynceus could make such men see. In a word, neither quickness of learning nor memory will ever give the power to one who has no kinship with the subject, for it does not take root at all in alien natures. So those who have no natural affinity and kinship with the just and with everything else that is beautiful—even if they learn quickly and remember other things well—and likewise those who have the kinship but learn slowly and forget, none of these will ever learn the truth of virtue to the extent possible, nor of vice. For these must be learned together, and the false and the true of the whole of being together, through all that rubbing and long time I spoke of at the beginning. Only when each of them—names and definitions, sights and perceptions—is rubbed hard against the others, tested in kindly refutations, using question and answer without envy, does understanding of each blaze out, and intelligence, straining to the very limit of human power. Therefore every serious man will beware of ever writing about the things that are serious, and casting them among men into envy and confusion. From this, in one word, one must recognize: whenever one sees a man's written compositions, whether the laws of a lawgiver or writings of any other kind, these were not his most serious concerns—if he himself is serious—for those lie stored in the fairest region he possesses. But if he really did set these down in writing as his serious concerns, then surely 'not the gods, but mortals themselves have destroyed his wits.' Whoever has followed this tale and wandering account will know well that whether it was Dionysius who wrote something about the highest and first things of nature, or someone lesser or greater, he had, on my account, neither heard nor learned anything sound about what he wrote. Otherwise he would have revered these things as I do, and would never have dared to fling them out into discord and unseemliness. He did not write it as an aid to memory—there is no danger anyone will forget it, once he has grasped it with his soul, for it lies in the briefest compass of all things—

but out of shameful ambition, if he wrote at all, whether claiming it as his own or as proof that he shared in a culture he did not deserve, loving the reputation that would come from the sharing. Now if this happened to Dionysius from our single meeting, it may be so; but how it happened, 'Zeus knows,' as the Theban says. For I went through it, as I said, once only, and never again afterward. Whoever cares to discover how things really went in this business must next consider why we did not go through it a second and a third time and more often. Does Dionysius, having heard it only once, think he knows, and know sufficiently, either by his own discovery or by earlier learning from others? Or does he think what was said is worthless? Or, the third possibility, that it is beyond him, too great, and that he would truly be unable to live devoting himself to wisdom and virtue? If he thinks it worthless, he will be at war with many witnesses who say the opposite, judges who would carry far more authority on such matters than Dionysius. If he thinks he discovered or learned it, and that it is worth the training of a free soul, how could he—unless he were an extraordinary person—have so casually dishonored the leader and master of these things? How he dishonored him, I shall tell. Not long after this, though before he had let Dion keep his own property and enjoy the income, he now no longer allowed Dion's trustees to send it to the Peloponnese, as though he had completely forgotten his letter; the property, he said, belonged not to Dion but to Dion's son, his own nephew, whose legal guardian he was. This was what had been done up to that point in that time. After these events I had seen with precision Dionysius's appetite for philosophy, and I had a right to be indignant, whether I wished it or not. It was summer by then, and the ships were sailing. It seemed I ought not to be angry at Dionysius more than at myself and those who had forced me to come a third time into the strait by Scylla, 'to measure once again destructive Charybdis,' but to tell Dionysius that it was impossible for me to stay while Dion was being treated with such contempt.

He tried to talk me out of it and begged me to stay, thinking it wouldn't look good for him if I went off in such a hurry as a messenger of these very events. When he couldn't persuade me, he said he would arrange passage for me himself. As for me, I had boarded one of the merchant ships and was planning to sail off on my own, in a rage, thinking I ought to put up with anything if I were prevented, since it was plain that I was doing no wrong but was being wronged. But when he saw that nothing would induce me to stay, he devised a scheme to keep the ships from sailing that season. He came to me the next day and made a plausible speech: let Dion and Dion's affairs, he said, be put out of the way between you and me, so we stop quarreling about them so often. For your sake I'll do the following for Dion. I'll allow him to take back his property and live in the Peloponnese, not as an exile but with the right to travel here too whenever it seems good to him, to me, and to you his friends together, provided he isn't plotting against me. You and your household, and Dion's people here, shall stand as guarantors of this, and he shall provide you security in return. As for the money he receives, let it be deposited in the Peloponnese or Athens with whomever you all agree on; let Dion have the income from it, but let him not have power to withdraw it without your consent. I don't fully trust him to act justly toward me if he has free use of that money—it isn't a small sum—but I trust you and your people more. Consider whether this pleases you, and stay on these terms for this year, and in the summer go off taking this money with you; and I know well that Dion will be very grateful to you for arranging this on his behalf. Hearing this speech I was upset, but all the same, after thinking it over, I said I would tell him the next day what I had decided about it. That was our agreement then. Afterward, left to myself, I deliberated, in great turmoil. The thought that led my deliberation was this: come now, suppose Dionysius intends to do none of what he says, and once I've left, he writes to Dion in persuasive terms, urging him and many others of his own people, the very things he's now saying to me—that he himself was willing, but I was unwilling to do what he proposed, and altogether neglected Dion's affairs—

and besides all this, suppose he's unwilling to send me off, giving no orders to any ship captain, and lets it be plainly seen by everyone that he doesn't want me to sail—will anyone then be willing to take me aboard as a passenger setting out from Dionysius's own house? For I was living, among my other troubles, in the garden around the palace, from which not even the doorkeeper would have let me go without an order sent to him from Dionysius. But if I wait out the year, I'll be able to write to Dion telling him where I stand and what I'm doing; and if Dionysius does anything of what he says, my conduct won't have been altogether ridiculous—for Dion's estate, reckoned fairly, is worth no less than a hundred talents perhaps—but if things turn out as they now seem likely to, I'm at a loss what I'll do with myself; still, it's probably necessary to labor on for one more year and try to expose Dionysius's schemes by their actual results. Having decided this, the next day I told Dionysius that I had resolved to stay; but I insisted, I said, that you not treat me as having authority over Dion, but that you send along with me letters to him making clear what has now been decided, and ask whether this satisfies him, and if not, whether he wants something else and requests it, and that you write this as quickly as possible, and that you make no new moves at all concerning him in the meantime. This was said, this we agreed on, more or less as I've now told it. The ships sailed off after this, and it was no longer possible for me to sail, when Dionysius brought up the point that half of Dion's estate ought to belong to Dion, and the other half to his son; he said he would sell it, and once it was sold, give half to me to take to Dion, and leave the other half for the boy, since that was the most just arrangement. Struck by what he said, I thought it quite absurd to argue any further, but still I said that we ought to wait for a letter from Dion and write him this proposal in turn. He, right after this, quite recklessly sold off the whole estate, however and to whomever he wished, and said not a word to me at all about it, and I likewise no longer discussed Dion's affairs with him at all; for I no longer thought I was accomplishing anything by it.

Up to this point, then, I had been helped along by philosophy and by friends. After this, Dionysius and I went on living together, I looking outward like a bird longing to fly off somewhere, he scheming how he might shake me off without giving back anything of Dion's; but we still called ourselves friends, in the eyes of all Sicily. Dionysius tried to cut the pay of the older mercenaries, against his father's custom, and the soldiers, angry, gathered together in a body and refused to allow it. He tried to force the issue by shutting the gates of the acropolis, but they made straight for the walls, raising some kind of foreign war cry; at this Dionysius, thoroughly frightened, granted everything, and even more, to the peltasts who had gathered then. A rumor soon spread that Heraclides was responsible for all this; hearing it, Heraclides kept himself out of the way, hidden, while Dionysius sought to seize him. At a loss, he sent for Theodotes and met him in the garden—I happened to be walking in the garden at that time too—and the rest of what they said I neither know nor overheard, but what Theodotes said to Dionysius in my presence I do know and remember. Plato, he said, I am persuading Dionysius here that, if I can bring Heraclides to a meeting with us about the charges now brought against him, then, should it be decided he ought not live in Sicily, I ask that he be allowed to take his son and wife and sail off to the Peloponnese, and live there doing Dionysius no harm, drawing the income from his own property. I have sent for him before, and I will send for him again now, whether he responds to my earlier summons or to this one; and I ask and beg of Dionysius that if anyone comes upon Heraclides, whether in the countryside or here, no other harm come to him, but only that he leave the country, until Dionysius decides otherwise. Do you agree to this? he said, turning to Dionysius. I agree, he said; even if he shows up right at your own house, he'll suffer no harm beyond what's now been said.

On the day after that, toward evening, Eurybius and Theodotes came to me in a remarkable state of agitation, and Theodotes said, Plato, you were there yesterday when Dionysius made those promises to me and to you about Heraclides? Of course I was, I said. Well now, he said, peltasts are running all around looking to seize Heraclides, and he's likely somewhere near here; but come with us to Dionysius, by every means. So we went and came into his presence, and the two of them stood there weeping in silence, while I said: these men are afraid you're going to do something rash against Heraclides, against what you agreed to yesterday; for it seems to me he must have somehow become obviously aware that you've turned against him. Hearing this he blazed up and went through every color a man shows in a rage; Theodotes fell before him, took his hand, wept, and begged him to do nothing of the kind. I broke in to comfort him: take heart, Theodotes, I said; Dionysius won't dare to act otherwise than what was agreed yesterday. And he, looking at me in a thoroughly tyrannical way, said: I made no agreement with you, small or great. By the gods, I said, you did make just this agreement—not to do what this man is now begging you not to do. And having said this I turned and walked out. After this he hunted Heraclides, while Theodotes sent messengers urging Heraclides to flee. Dionysius sent out Tisias with peltasts in pursuit, but Heraclides, it was said, escaped into Carthaginian territory by the narrowest margin of a day. After this, the long-standing plot of Dionysius not to give back Dion's money seemed to him to have a plausible excuse for hostility toward me, and first he sent me out of the acropolis, finding a pretext that the women needed to hold a ten-day sacrifice in the garden where I was living; he ordered me to stay outside that whole time at Archedemus's house. While I was there, Theodotes sent for me and spoke at length, indignant and full of complaints against Dionysius over what had happened; and Dionysius, hearing that I had gone to Theodotes, made this another pretext for his quarrel with me, one akin to the earlier one, and sent someone to ask me whether I had really been meeting with Theodotes at his summons. I said, absolutely. He said: tell him, then, that you're doing no good at all by always valuing Dion and Dion's friends above himself. This was said, and he no longer summoned me back into the residence, as though it were now clear that I was a friend of Theodotes and Heraclides, and his enemy, and he thought I bore him no goodwill, because Dion's money had all slipped away.

After this I lived outside the acropolis among the mercenaries; and various people came to me, among them the men serving in the ranks who were from Athens, my fellow citizens, and reported that I had been slandered among the peltasts, and that some were threatening to kill me if they caught me anywhere. So I devised the following plan for safety. I sent to Archytas and my other friends in Tarentum, telling them the situation I was in; they, on some pretext of an embassy from their city, sent a thirty-oared ship and one of their own number, Lamiscus, who came and pleaded with Dionysius on my behalf, saying that I wished to leave, and that he should by no means act otherwise. Dionysius agreed and sent me off with travel money, and as for Dion's money, I no longer asked for it, nor did anyone give it back. Arriving in the Peloponnese, at Olympia, I found Dion attending the festival and told him what had happened; calling Zeus to witness, he at once urged me and my household and friends to prepare to take revenge on Dionysius, for having betrayed us as guests—so he put it and so he meant it—and for having unjustly driven him out and exiled him. Hearing this, I told him to call on our friends if they wished, but as for me, I said: you, along with the others, in a way made me by force a messmate, housemate, and partner in sacred rites with Dionysius, who perhaps, on the word of many slanderers, thought I was plotting with you against him and his rule, and yet he did not kill me, but held back out of respect. So I'm no longer of an age to fight alongside almost anyone, and I belong to both of you in common, if ever you should want, out of friendship, to do each other some good; but as for evil, so long as you desire it, call on others. I said this because I had come to hate the whole wandering misadventure over Sicily; but disregarding this, and not yielding to my attempts at reconciliation, they themselves became responsible for all the troubles that have now occurred, none of which, so far as human affairs go, would ever have happened if Dionysius had given the money back to Dion, or even been fully reconciled with him—for I could easily have restrained Dion, both by will and by ability—but as it is, having rushed at each other, they have filled everything with troubles.

And yet Dion held exactly the wish that I would say I myself, or any other reasonable man, ought to hold concerning his own power, his friends, and his city: to become great in influence and honor by doing good with the greatest power in the greatest affairs. But a man does not do this if he makes himself, his companions, and his city rich by plotting and gathering conspirators while he himself is poor and not master of himself, beaten by cowardice before his own pleasures — if he then kills those who hold property, calls them his enemies, divides their wealth among his fellow-conspirators and friends, and urges them to see that no one accuses him of being poor. The same holds for a man who is honored by his city for doing it this kind of good — handing out by decree what belongs to the few to the many, or, if he stands at the head of a great city ruling many smaller ones, distributing the wealth of the smaller cities to his own city unjustly. In this way neither Dion nor anyone else would ever willingly go after a power that brings ruin on himself and his family forever — but rather toward a constitution and a framework of the most just and best laws, one not achieved through the fewest possible deaths and murders. This is exactly what Dion was doing now, choosing to suffer unholy acts rather than commit them first, taking every precaution not to suffer them — and still he stumbled, right at the peak of overcoming his enemies, though nothing amazing happened to him. For a holy man, in matters of unholiness, prudent and sound of mind, could never be wholly deceived in his soul about such things — but it would not be amazing if he suffered the fate of a good ship's captain, one who would hardly fail to notice an ordinary storm coming, but who might fail to notice — and be overwhelmed by force before he noticed — a storm of extraordinary and unexpected magnitude. This same thing brought Dion down: he was not at all unaware that the men who ruined him were bad, but he failed to grasp just how great a height of ignorance and of general depravity and greed they had reached — and by that failure he was brought down and now lies dead, having wrapped Sicily in boundless grief.

As for what comes after what I have just said, the advice I have to give has been said, more or less, and let it stand as said. As for why I brought up my second voyage to Sicily, I thought it necessary to explain it because of how strange and unaccountable the events were. But if what I have now said appears to anyone more reasonable, and if someone thinks it gives an adequate account of what happened, then what I have said now will have been moderate and sufficient for our purposes.

Plato, to the household and companions of Dion, wishing you well. I will try, as far as I am able, to go through with you the things which, if you set your mind on them, would truly bring you well-being. I hope to be giving advice that serves not only you, though it serves you most of all, but second, all the people of Syracuse, and third, even your enemies and opponents — except any of them who has committed an unholy act, for such things are incurable and can never be washed clean. Consider now what I am saying. Throughout Sicily, now that tyranny has been dissolved, the whole struggle is over this very question: some want to take back power again, others want to put a final end to the escape from tyranny. Now the advice that generally seems right to most people in matters like this is that one should recommend whatever will do the greatest harm to enemies and the greatest good to friends. But it is in no way easy to do great harm to others without also suffering a great deal in return oneself. One need not go far to see this clearly — just look at what has happened here, around Sicily itself, with some attempting to act and others defending themselves against those acting. These events could serve you, whenever you tell the story, as sufficient lessons for others. Of such things there is no shortage. But as for what would actually benefit everyone alike, both enemies and friends, or at least cause the least harm to both, that is neither easy to see nor, having seen it, easy to carry out — and such advice, such an undertaking in words, is more like a prayer.

Let it then be entirely a prayer — for one ought always to begin and think everything from the gods — and may it be fulfilled, expressing to us some such account as this: at present a single kinship has ruled continuously over both you and your enemies, ever since the war began — the very kinship your fathers established when they had come to the utmost extremity, at the time when the gravest danger arose for Greek Sicily of being utterly overturned and barbarized by the Carthaginians. For at that time they chose Dionysius, as a young man skilled in war, for the tasks of the war fitting to him, and as counselor and elder, Hipparinus — naming them, for the salvation of Sicily, absolute rulers, as they say, tyrants. And whether one wishes to credit this to divine fortune and a god, or to the virtue of the rulers, or to both together along with the citizens of that time as the cause of their salvation — let it be however one supposes; salvation, at any rate, is what came to those who lived then. Given, then, that this is how things stood, it is surely right to feel gratitude toward those who saved everyone. But if in the time since, the tyranny has misused the city's gift wrongly, for some of this it has already paid the penalty, and for some it should still pay. What penalties, then, would necessarily be just, given the present circumstances? If you were able easily to escape them, without great dangers and hardships, or they were able easily to seize back power again, then it would not even be possible to give the advice about to be given. But as things stand, both of you need to consider and recall how many times each side has come to hope that you were nearly there, lacking, so you thought, only some small thing to bring everything to pass as you wished — and how this small thing, each time, turns out to be the cause of great and countless evils, and no end is ever reached, but an old ending that seems final always joins onto a new beginning growing out of it — and by this cycle both the whole tyrannical line and the whole democratic party risk perishing utterly, and, if things go as is likely and as one would pray against, Sicily as a whole risks becoming empty of the Greek tongue, turned over to some Phoenician or Oscan dominion and power. Against this, all Greeks must apply, with all eagerness, a remedy.

If someone has something more correct and better than what I am about to say, let him bring it forward, and he will most rightly be called a friend of the Greeks. But what seems to me the case at present, I will try to set out, using complete frankness and a kind of shared, just reasoning. I am speaking, in a way, as an arbitrator addressing two parties — the man who has ruled as tyrant and the man who has been ruled by a tyrant — offering to each alike my old advice. And even now my counsel would be this: for every tyrant, to flee both the name and the deed itself, and to change, if it is at all possible, into kingship. It is possible, as a wise and good man showed in practice — Lycurgus, who, seeing his own kinsmen in Argos and Messenia pass from kings into the power of tyrants, and ruin both themselves and their cities, each pair alike, and fearing for his own city and family together, brought in as a remedy the rule of the elders and the binding check of the ephors upon kingly power, as a saving measure — so that for so many generations now it has been preserved with good repute, since law became master, king over men, rather than men being tyrants over laws. This same counsel of mine now urges everyone: those who long for tyranny should turn away and flee, in utter flight, from that insatiable and mindless notion of human happiness, and should try instead to change into the form of a king, and become servant to kingly laws, thereby gaining the greatest honors from willing men and from the laws themselves. And to those who pursue free ways of life and flee the yoke of servitude as an evil, I would advise them to be on guard, lest, through some untimely insatiable hunger for freedom, they fall into the sickness of their ancestors, which those men suffered through excessive lack of rule, using an unmeasured passion for freedom. For the Sicilian Greeks before the rule of Dionysius and Hipparinus lived, as they thought, in happiness — indulging themselves, and at the same time ruling their own rulers. They even stoned to death the ten generals who came before Dionysius, condemning them by no lawful judgment at all, so that they might be slave to no one, whether by justice or by law, as master, but be free in every way, entirely — and from this their tyrannies arose for them.

For slavery and freedom, each carried to excess, are wholly bad, while in due measure both are wholly good; measured servitude is service to god, unmeasured servitude is service to men; and god is law to men of sound mind, while pleasure is law to the mindless. Since this is how these things stand by nature, I urge Dion's friends to declare to all the Syracusans this advice — his and mine together, held in common. I will speak as an interpreter of what he, were he still alive and able, would say to you now. What counsel, then, one might ask, does Dion's advice reveal to us concerning the present situation? This: Above all else, Syracusans, accept laws that do not appear to you to turn your minds toward money-making and wealth out of desire, but rather, since there are three things — soul, body, and, third, possessions — that make the virtue of the soul the most honored, second the virtue of the body, placed beneath that of the soul, and third and last the honor of wealth, in service to both body and soul. And the ordinance that brings this about would rightly stand for you as law, truly making happy those who follow it; whereas the doctrine that calls the wealthy happy is itself a wretched doctrine — a mindless notion fit for women and children — and it makes those who are persuaded by it just as wretched. That what I urge is true, you will know by experience if you put to the test what is now being said about laws — for that is the truest touchstone in all such matters. And having accepted such laws, since danger now grips Sicily, and you neither hold power sufficiently nor are held down decisively either, it would perhaps be both just and advantageous for all of you to cut a middle path — granting to those who shrink from the harshness of one-man rule relief from it, and to those who still long for that rule, a share in it — whose ancestors once, and this is the greatest thing, saved the Greeks from the barbarians, so that it is even possible now to hold discourse about government at all; for had they been swept away, no word, no hope whatsoever would have remained anywhere. Let there now be, then, freedom for the one side together with kingly rule, and for the other, kingly rule accountable to law — with the laws as masters over the other citizens and over the kings themselves, should they do anything unlawful.

And over and above all this, with honest and sound judgment, together with the gods, set up a king — first, my own son, in return for a twofold favor, the one from me and the one from my father — for he freed the city from barbarians in that earlier time, and I have now twice freed it from tyrants, of which you yourselves have been witnesses. Second, make king the man who bears the same name as my father, son of Dionysius, in gratitude for his present help and for his righteous character — for he, born son of a tyrant father, willingly frees the city, thereby gaining for himself and his line honor that lasts forever, in place of a tyranny that is unjust and lasts only a day. Third, you must invite to become king of Syracuse — willingly, of a willing city — the man now commanding the enemy camp, Dionysius son of Dionysius, should he be willing to pass willingly into the form of a king, fearing the turns of fortune, and taking pity on his fatherland, on the neglect of its temples and its tombs, lest through sheer contentiousness he lose everything utterly and become a source of delight to the barbarians. Having these three as kings — whether you grant them Spartan-style power or take it away by mutual agreement — establish them in some such manner as has been described to you before, but hear it again even now. If the line of Dionysius and Hipparinus is willing, for the salvation of Sicily, to put an end to the evils now present, receiving honors for themselves and their descendants both now and hereafter, then on these terms summon — as was said before — whatever envoys they are willing to accept as authorities over the reconciliation, whether drawn from here, or from abroad, or both, and as many as they agree to. Let these men, once arrived, first establish laws and a constitution of the sort in which it is fitting for kings to have authority over sacred matters and whatever else belongs to men who have once been benefactors, and let them appoint, as rulers over war and peace, law-guardians numbering thirty-five, together with the people and the council. Let there be different courts for different matters, but let the thirty-five preside over cases of death and exile; and in addition, let there be chosen judges from among those who have held office the previous year, one from each office, the man judged best and most just; and let these men judge, for the coming year, all cases involving death, imprisonment, and the removal of citizens.

The king in such matters must not be allowed to act as judge, any more than a priest may involve himself in bloodshed, imprisonment, or exile. This is what I intended to bring about for you while I lived, and what I still intend now, and had I prevailed over our enemies then, with your help, had foreign furies not stood in the way, I would have established things just as I planned, and afterward, had my designs been carried into action, I would have resettled the rest of Sicily as well, taking from the barbarians the land they now hold except for those who fought for our common freedom against the tyranny, and restoring the earlier inhabitants of the Greek regions to their ancient ancestral homes. This same course I now urge upon all of you together to consider, to carry out, and to press upon everyone else, and to regard as a common enemy anyone unwilling. Nor is this impossible. What lies within the reach of two minds, and is readily found by careful reasoning to be best, only someone lacking sense would judge impossible. I mean the two minds of Hipparinus, son of Dionysius, and of my own son. If these two come to agreement, I think all the rest of the Syracusans who care for the city will approve as well. Give honor and prayer to all the gods, and to all else that ought to be honored alongside the gods, and by persuasion and invitation, both gently and by every means, do not let friends and rivals alike hold back, until what has now been said by us, like a divine dream appearing to men awake, is brought to clear and fortunate completion.

Plato to Archytas of Tarentum, greetings. Archippus and Philonides and their party have come to us, bringing the letter you gave them, and reporting what you had to say. The matters concerning the city they managed without difficulty—indeed they were not especially troublesome—and they related to us what came from you, saying that you are somewhat vexed at being unable to free yourself from public business.

That doing one's own work is the most pleasant thing in life, especially when one chooses to do work such as yours, is plain to nearly everyone. But you must also bear this in mind: none of us is born for himself alone. Our birth is shared in part by our country, in part by our parents, in part by our other friends, and much is also owed to the circumstances that happen to seize hold of our lives. When our country itself calls us to public service, it would perhaps be strange to refuse; for at the same time it happens that we leave the field open to inferior men, who do not come to public affairs from the best motives. On these matters, then, enough has been said. As for Echecrates, we are looking after him now and will continue to do so in the future, both for your sake and for his father Phrynion's, and for the young man's own sake.

Plato to Aristodorus, greetings. I hear that you are, and have always been, one of Dion's closest companions, showing the wisest character among those devoted to philosophy. For what is steadfast, trustworthy, and sound—this I say is true philosophy, while the other skills and cleverness aimed at other ends I think are rightly called mere accomplishments. Farewell, and remain in the character you now hold.

Plato to Laodamas, greetings. I wrote to you before that it would make a great difference to everything you speak of if you yourself came to Athens. Since you say this is impossible, the next best thing was whether I or Socrates might come, as you proposed. But as it stands Socrates is troubled by his strangury, and it would be unseemly for me to come there and not accomplish what you ask. As for myself, I do not have much hope that this could happen—the reasons would require another long letter to explain fully—and besides, at my age I am no longer fit in body to wander about and face the dangers one meets by land and sea, and nowadays all journeys are full of danger.

I can, however, offer advice to you and to the founders of the colony—advice which, Hesiod says, would seem trivial coming from me to state, but is hard to grasp. If it is possible for a constitution ever to be well established by the laying down of laws, of whatever kind, without there being some authority in the city charged with overseeing the daily conduct of life, so that it remains disciplined and manly among both slaves and free—those who think otherwise are mistaken. And this can only happen if there are already men worthy of holding such authority; but if instruction is still needed, then, as I see it, you have neither anyone to teach nor anyone to be taught, and for the rest you must pray to the gods. Indeed nearly all earlier cities were founded in just this way, and only afterward came to be governed well, once, through the convergence of great events—in war and in other undertakings—a man both noble and good arose in such circumstances, possessed of great power. Before that stage is reached you must be eager and must strive, yet you should think of things as I describe them, and not act foolishly by supposing that something can be easily accomplished. Good fortune to you.

Plato to Archytas of Tarentum, greetings. The notes you sent us we received with wonderful delight, and we admired their author as much as possible; the man seemed to us worthy of those ancient forebears. For these men are said to be the Myrioi—those who were among the Trojans driven out under Laomedon—good men, as the traditional story shows. As for the notes in my keeping, about which you wrote, they are not yet in good enough shape, but such as they are I have sent them to you. On the matter of safekeeping we are of one mind, so there is no need to urge it further. (This letter is disputed as not Plato's.)

Plato to Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, greetings. Let this be the opening of my letter, and at the same time a token that it comes from me. Once, when you were entertaining the young men of Locri, reclining far from me, you got up and came over to me, and in friendly spirit said something rather fine, which struck me—and the man reclining beside you, one of the handsome ones, said at the time: no doubt, Dionysius, you gain a great deal in wisdom from Plato—and you replied: and in many other things too, since even from the very act of sending for him, the fact that I sent for him, I gained benefit at once. This, then, must be preserved, so that the benefit we gain from one another may keep on increasing. And now, working toward just that end, I am sending you the Pythagorean treatises and the divisions, and also a man whom, as we agreed at the time, you and Archytas—if Archytas has indeed come to you—could make good use of. His name is Helicon, by birth from Cyzicus, a pupil of Eudoxus and thoroughly skilled in everything of his master's; he has also kept company with one of Isocrates' pupils and with Polyxenus, one of Bryson's associates. And what is rare besides these qualities, he is neither unpleasant to meet nor does he seem malicious, but would rather strike one as light-hearted and good-natured. I say this with some caution, since I am giving my opinion of a human being, not a trivial creature but one prone to change, except in a very few respects and a very few people. In this case too, out of caution and some distrust, I made my own inquiries, meeting him myself and asking about him among his fellow citizens, and no one had anything bad to say of the man. Look into it yourself as well, and be careful. Best of all, if you have any leisure at all, learn from him and pursue philosophy in other matters too; if not, have someone else instructed by him, so that, learning at your leisure, you may improve and gain good repute, so that the benefit owed to me may not go to waste for you. So much, then, for that.

As for the things you wrote asking me to send, I have had the statue of Apollo made, and Leptines is bringing it to you—a young and skilled craftsman; his name is Leochares. He had another piece in his workshop that seemed to me quite fine, so I bought it, wishing to give it to your wife, since she looked after me, both in health and in sickness, in a manner worthy of both of us. Give it to her, then, unless you decide otherwise. I am also sending twelve jars of sweet wine for the children, and two of honey. We came too late for the storing of the dried figs, and the myrtle berries that were put away have spoiled; but we will take better care another time. Leptines will tell you about the plants. For these purposes, and for certain contributions to the city, I took money from Leptines, telling him what seemed to me the most seemly and truthful account, namely that the money we spent on the Leucadian ship, some sixteen minas, was rightfully ours; so I took that sum, and having taken it I both used some myself and sent the rest on to you. Now hear how matters stand concerning money, both yours in Athens and my own. I will use your money, as I told you before, just as I use that of my other close friends, drawing on it as sparingly as I can, only for what seems to me necessary, just, or fitting, both to me and to whoever I am borrowing from. As it happens, this is my situation now. I have four grandnieces, daughters of the nieces who died at the time when I was not wearing the victor's crown, though you urged me to—one now of marriageable age, one eight years old, one just past three, and one not yet a year old. These I must see given in marriage, I and my close friends, to whichever of them I live to see grown; for those I do not, let them fare as they may. And whichever of them come to have fathers wealthier than I am need not be provided for by me; but as things stand now I am the best-off among them, and I also arranged the marriages of their mothers, along with others and along with Dion. One, then, is being married to Speusippus, being his sister's daughter. For her nothing more than thirty minas is needed; that is the modest dowry we set for ourselves. And further, if my mother should die, no more than ten minas would be needed for building her tomb.

As for these matters, my own necessary expenses stand roughly as I have described for now; but if any other expense arises, private or public, on account of my coming to you, then, as I said before we must do, I will strive to keep the expense as small as possible, and whatever I cannot manage, let it be your outlay. Now I turn to what I have to say about the spending of your own money in Athens. First, if I should need to spend anything on a chorus or something of that sort, you have no foreign friend, as far as we supposed, who would provide it; and further, if anything matters greatly to you yourself, such that spent promptly it would do good, but if not spent, and instead delayed until someone comes from you, it would do harm—besides the difficulty, such a thing would also be shameful for you. I looked into this myself, sending Erastus to Andromedes the Aeginetan, from whom you told me to take whatever I might need, since he is your family friend, wanting also to send the other, larger things you had written about. He gave a reasonable and very human answer, that having previously spent money for your father he had barely gotten it back, and that now he would give a little, but no more. So I took the money from Leptines instead; and Leptines deserves praise for this, not simply because he gave it, but because he gave it readily, and in everything else concerning you, in word and deed, he was plainly devoted, showing himself a true friend. For I must report such things, and their opposite too, whatever each person shows himself to be toward you as it appears to me. On the matter of the money, then, I will speak frankly to you; that is only right, and besides I have experience of your affairs. Those who report to you from time to time are unwilling to report what they think would count as an expense, for fear of becoming unpopular; accustom them, then, and compel them, to tell you both this and everything else. You must know everything as far as possible, and be the judge, and not shrink from knowing. This will be the best thing for you with a view to your rule; for spending rightly and repaying rightly, both in other matters and in the very acquisition of wealth, you yourself say is a good thing, and will go on saying so. So do not let those who claim to care for you set you against other people; for this brings you neither good nor honor in reputation, only the appearance of being hard to deal with. Next I will speak about Dion. On the rest I cannot yet speak until the letters come from you, as you said; but on the matters you told me not to mention to him, I neither mentioned them nor discussed them, though I tried to gauge whether he would take it hard or easily if they came about, and it seemed to me he would be considerably distressed if they did happen. In everything else concerning you, in word and in deed, Dion seems to me moderate.

Let us give Cratinus, Timotheus's brother and a friend of mine, a set of light infantry armor, and to Cebes's daughters three linen tunics reaching to the ankles -- not the expensive Amorgian kind, but the linen ones made in Sicily. You know the name Cebes well enough: he appears in the Socratic dialogues alongside Simmias, conversing with Socrates in the discourse on the soul -- a man devoted and well-disposed to all of us. Now, about the code we use for letters, both the ones I send seriously and the ones I don't, I think you remember it, but think it over anyway and pay close attention: there are many people urging me to write, and it isn't easy to turn them down openly. A god presides over the serious letter, but the lesser gods preside over the other kind. The ambassadors kept asking me to write to you, and reasonably so -- everywhere they praise you and me most enthusiastically, and not least Philagros, who at the time had a weak hand. And Philaides too, arriving from the Great King, spoke about you; if it wouldn't make the letter too long I would have written down what he said, but as it is, ask Leptines about it. If you send the armor, or anything else I've asked for, send it either through someone of your own choosing, or else give it to Terillus; he's one of those who are always sailing back and forth, a good friend of ours, and a man of taste where philosophy is concerned too. He's a relative of Teiso, who was the city magistrate at the time we sailed away. Farewell, and keep at philosophy, and urge the other young men to do the same, and greet the ball-players for me, and give instructions to Aristocritus and the others that if any word or letter comes to you from me, they should see to it that you learn of it as quickly as possible, and remind you to attend to what's written in it. And now don't neglect to pay Leptines back the money -- pay it back as soon as you can, so that others, seeing how you treat him, will be more eager to serve us as well. Iatrocles, the man freed by me along with Myronides, is now sailing with those sent from me; find him some paid position, since he's well-disposed toward you, and if you need anything, make use of him. And keep this letter, or a copy of it, safe, and be the same man yourself.

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