We know from Plato’s Seventh Letter as well as from his extensive writings on political science (including the Republic, Statesman, and Laws) that he was always fascinated by politics and dreamed of founding an ideal, or at least a new and improved, kind of state. When he was about sixty years old, a golden opportunity presented itself.
The most powerful man in the Greek world was Dionysius, tyrant ruler of the city of Syracuse on the east coast of the island of Sicily. He had taken the reins of the government in 405 BCE and had, through a series of political machinations, military campaigns, threats, promises, and negotiations, gotten firm control of the city that defeated Athens in 415 and had expanded his influence over the whole of Magna Graecia, that is, the Greek-speaking cities of Sicily and southern Italy. He had to contend with the might of the Carthaginian Empire, controlled by Carthage, the Phoenician colony that became a mother city of an extensive series of colonies in the central and western Mediterranean, from north Africa to Spain. But he had held his own against that formidable foe and become the champion of Greek culture in the central Mediterranean. Indeed, he often sent troops and warships to help his friends and allies in the Peloponnesian in their ongoing conflicts with Athens and other city-states of Greece and Ionia.
Among other talents, Dionysius fancied himself a poet extraordinaire. He composed tragedies which he submitted to the great dramatic festivals in Athens. His contemporaries regarded him as a literary hack. But at the Lenaia Festival in Athens in January or February of 367, his play, The Ransom of Hector, won first prize. When word arrived from Athens, brought by a member of the chorus who hoped to profit from the good news, Dionysius was delighted. He hosted a great celebration in which the wine flowed freely and the tyrant imbibed copiously. According to one account, he drank himself to death; according to another, he was done in by a doctor’s ill-advised potion for his hangover.[1] In any case, the tyrant did not survive his triumph.[2]
Dion was a son of Hipparinus, a leading citizen of Syracuse and colleague of Dionysius.[3] As a young man Dion had met Plato on his first visit to Syracuse twenty years earlier, now began to work on the crown prince. Dionysius “the younger (ho neōteros),” the eldest son and heir now became Dionysius II. Lacking in the experience and ruthlessness of his father, Junior was a spoiled but insecure figure. Dion, the brother-in-law of Dad (Dionysius Senior had married Dion’s sister Aristomache—and on the same day had married another wife, Doris of Locri, not to be constrained by bourgeois mores),[4] and also, as it happened, his son-in-law. For the daughter of Senior and Aristomache, named Arete, who was Dion’s niece, was given to him in marriage.[5] This made Dion the brother-in-law of Junior as well as of Senior, and guaranteed that he would be an important player in the family soap-opera. (Junior married the sister of Arete, Sophrosune, making Dion his brother-in-law twice over. Both wives were named after virtues that only one of the husbands exhibited.)
Dion had been converted to Plato and Platonism since his meeting with the philosopher, and now saw in Junior the opportunity to make Plato’s visions of the ideal state real, in the present. Before he was corrupted by vices and hardened by power and violence, Dionysius Junior might be put on the path of virtue and wisdom, might be molded into a benevolent monarch who would rule by wisdom rather than by force, might make the powerful city of Syracuse a shining city on a hill for all Greece and the world to emulate.
If only the great Teacher could educate him in the ways of philosophy and wisdom.
[1] Diodorus Siculus 15.74.1-2; Plutarch Dion 6.2-3.
[2] We are told that an oracle had prophesied that he would die after vanquishing his betters; after his death it was said the oracle was fulfilled by his literary victory—perhaps a typical case of confirmation bias (Diodorus Siculus 15.74.3-4).
[3] Plutarch Dion 3.3; Diodorus Siculus 16.6.2.
[4] A first wife had died previously: Plutarch Dion 3.1-3.
[5] Plutarch Dion 6.1