By the time Plato departed the courtroom of Dionysius the Youthful in 361 BC, his relations with the Syracusan autocrat had turned frosty. Plato had spent many months on the courtroom in Sicily over the course of two visits spaced six years aside. He had been pursuing a outstanding objective: to present a infamous tyrant, essentially the most highly effective ruler within the Greek world, a philosophic schooling. However the challenge had totally failed and Plato had come to be seen as an enemy of the regime. Certainly, he was in mortal hazard; solely after a 3rd get together, the philosopher-statesman Archytas of Tarentum, had intervened from afar had he been given depart to return to Athens.
The ultimate, tense assembly between the sage and the tyrant was steeped in animosity, to guage by the account in Plato’s Third Letter. Some students contemplate this epistle, addressed by Plato to Dionysius however clearly meant for wider circulation, to be a pretend, concocted, maybe, by a forger to promote to a library; others, together with Robin Waterfield in his authoritative Plato of Athens (2023), take it to be real. The psychological depth of the letter’s account of this assembly, Plato’s final encounter with a debauched and alcoholic autocrat, is one good motive for doing so.
The assembly befell, in accordance with the letter, on the grounds of ‘the acropolis’, a fortified fortress that Dionysius used as each his palace and because the central command publish for his mercenary military, an unlimited pressure recruited from numerous non-Greek peoples of Sicily, Italy, and the Iberian peninsula. On his earlier go to to Syracuse in 367, Plato, at that time Greece’s most famed thinker, had been acquired in that fort with monumental fanfare, an honoured visitor whose presence introduced lustre to a extensively mistrusted regime. However as his relations with the tyrant soured, Plato had been compelled to relocate to poorer quarters, touchdown finally close to the barracks of the barbarian troops – a few of whom thought he was in search of, as a part of his reform programme, to get them dismissed, and subsequently needed him useless.
‘Do you keep in mind whenever you first arrived right here’, Dionysius asks Plato (in accordance with the letter’s account of that colloquy), referring to Plato’s go to six years earlier, ‘you suggested me to resettle the Greek cities?’ A part of Plato’s programme for reforming the regime had certainly concerned resettling Greeks in Sicilian cities that had, over previous many years, been deserted or relinquished to non-Greeks. Syracuse, in Plato’s eyes, stood on the western frontier of Hellenism, and on the success or failure of its regime rested the way forward for the Greek West.
Plato acknowledges his advocacy of resettlement, however turns the dialog in a unique route: ‘Was that my solely recommendation to you, or did I say something as well as?’ His level is obvious to Dionysius, who replies with a derisive giggle: ‘You informed me to get educated first after which do these items, or else not do them.’ The course of instruction Plato had supplied had began with reform of the tyrant’s habits; his ingesting, feasting, and sexual dalliances had badly diminished his standing. However this foundational lesson had not taken maintain. The ability of the ‘Syracusan tables’ – the phrase was proverbial on this period for riotous dwelling – had been too robust for Plato to beat, even with Dion, the ruler’s sober-minded brother-in-law, seconding his recommendation.
‘You will have a wonderful reminiscence’, Plato replies, content material at having set the document straight. However Dionysius is decided to maintain the higher hand. ‘You meant, I suppose, I ought to study geometry – or what?’ The sarcastic comment casts scorn on Plato and his Academy, an establishment that prized geometry as a option to practice the thoughts in abstractions. Plato had certainly introduced this coaching programme to Dionysius’ palace; the air there, in accordance with Plutarch’s Lifetime of Dion, grew to become thick with mud as courtiers traced polygons within the sand. However that early enthusiasm quickly wore off, and Plato’s recondite teachings, and his shut alliance with Dion, aroused distrust. A faction at courtroom that regarded the pair as a risk had begun mocking Plato and traducing Dion, lastly bringing concerning the latter’s banishment from Syracuse.
‘There was a lot I might have stated’ in response to this sneer, ‘however I didn’t say it’, Plato confides to Dionysius within the Third Letter, explaining some months later why on the time he had fallen silent and ended the dialog. His permission to depart Syracuse, he knew, might have been revoked had he spoken his thoughts.
Relations between the estranged trainer and scholar continued to deteriorate even after Plato’s departure. The Third Letter makes clear that Dionysius started utilizing Plato as a scapegoat in subsequent months, blaming him for his personal regime’s failure to repopulate Sicily’s cities. In a perverse twist of Plato’s insistence that self-reform ought to precede another initiatives, Dionysius made the case, when chatting with visiting ambassadors, that he had needed to revive the cities however Plato had prevented him. This effort at spin nettled Plato, who wrote the Third Letter partly as a way to rebut it.
Along with correcting the document of the previous, Plato additionally appears to be like forward within the Third Letter to coming occasions that, he sensed, would enable him to have the final giggle. As he should have identified when he wrote the letter, the exiled Dion was planning an armed invasion to drive Dionysius from energy and take management of Syracuse. The prospect that Dion, Plato’s devoted scholar, may oust Dionysius evidently gave Plato satisfaction. In a remark within the Third Letter, Plato hints at this prospect in vainglorious tones: ‘What you mocked then’ – on the time of their final colloquy – ‘has proved a actuality as an alternative of a dream’, he tells Dionysius. Dion would in reality quickly oust his brother-in-law, briefly placing Plato in the best; however factional variations cut up Dion’s ranks, an murderer ended his life, and Syracuse descended into chaos.
The complicated relations between Dionysius and Plato are explored in a number of of Plato’s letters, particularly the voluminous Seventh Letter. However within the Third Letter’s account of their parting phrases, we see that relationship vividly dramatised. Plato’s efforts to show a tyrant had clearly not borne fruit, and disasters lay forward for Syracuse.
James Romm is the creator of Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece’s Biggest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece (W.W. Norton, 2025).
