Page:History of Greece Vol X.djvu/458

 436 HISTORY OP GREECE Such was the first stage of what we may term the despot's progress, successfully consummated. The pseudo-demagogue Dio- countervailed by stronger substantive grounds than those which Ast has urged. Among the total number of thirteen letters, those relating to Dion and Dionysius (always setting aside the first letter) that is the second, third, fourth, seventh, eighth, and thirteenth, are the most full of allusions to fact and details. Some of them go very much into detail. Now had they been the work of a forger, it is fair to contend that he could hardly avoid laying himself more open to contradiction than he has done, on the score of inaccuracy and inconsistency with the supposed situation. I have already mentioned one inaccuracy which I take to be a fault of memory, both conceivable and pardonable. Ast mentions another, to disprove the authenticity of the eighth letter, respecting the son of Dion. Plato, in this eighth letter, speaking in the name of the deceased Dion, recommends the Syracusans to name Dion's son as one of the members of a tripartite kingship, along with Hipparinus (son of the elder Dionysius) and the younger Dionysius. This (contends Ast, p. 523) cannot be correct, be- cause Dion's son died before his father. To make the argument of Ast complete, we ought to be sure that Dion had only one son ; for which there is doubtless the evidence of Plutarch, who after having stated that the son of Dion, a youth nearly grown up, threw himself from the roof of the house and was killed, goes on to say that Kallippus, the political enemy of Dion, founded upon this misfortune a false rumor which he circulated, wf 6 Aiuv unais yeyovuf lyvuite TOV Aiovvaiov KaTielv 'A;ro/lAoparj?f Kai Tfoieiadai diadoxov (Plutarch, Dion. c. 55, 56: compare also c. 21, TOV iraidiov). But since the rumor was altogether false, we may surely imag- ine that Kallippus, taking advantage of a notorious accident which had just proved fatal to the eldest son of Dion, may have fabricated a false statement about the family of Dion, though there might be a younger boy at home. It is not certain that the number of Dion's children was famil- iarly known among the population of Syracuse ; nor was Dion himself in the situation of an assured king, able to transfer his succession at once to a boy not yet adult. And when we find in another chapter of Plutarch's Life of Dion (c. 31), that the son of Dion was called by Timaeus, Aretteus, and by Timonides, Hipparinus, this surely affords some presumption that there were two sons, and not one son called by two different names. I cannot therefore admit that Ast has proved the eighth Platonic lettei to be inaccurate in respect to matter of fact. I will add that the letter does not mention the name of Dion's son (though Ast says that it calls him Hip- parinus) ; and that it does specify the three partners in the tripartite king- ship suggested (though Ast says that it only mentioned two). Most of Ast's arguments against the authenticity of the letters, however, &re founded, not upon alleged inaccuracies of fact, but upon what he main- tains to be impropriety and meanness of thought, childish intrusion of