Page:History of Greece Vol XI.djvu/77

 CHARACTER OF DIONYSIUS. 5] field he was a perfectly brave man, yet his suspicion and timorous anxiety as to every one who approached his person, were carried to the most tormenting excess, and extended even W his wives, his brothers, his daughters. Afraid to admit any one with a razor near to his face, he is said to have singed his own beard with a burning coal. Both his brother and his son were searched for concealed weapons, and even forced to change their clothes in the presence of his guards, before they were permitted to see him. An officer of the guards named Marsyas, having dreamt that he was assassinating Dionysius, was put to death for this dream, as proving that his waking thoughts must have been dwelling upon such a project. And it has already been mentioned that Diony sius put to death the mother of one of his wives, on suspicion thai she had by incantations brought about the barrenness of the oth er as well as the sons of a Lokrian citizen named Aristeides, who had refused, with indignant expressions, to grant to him hif daughter in marriage. 1 Such were the conditions of existence perpetual mistrust, danger even from the nearest kindred, enmity both to and from every dignified freeman, and reliance only on armed barbarians or liberated slaves which beset almost every Grecian despot, and from which the greatest despot of his age enjoyed no exemp- tion. Though philosophers emphatically insisted that such a man must be miserable, 2 yet Dionysius himself, as well as the great mass of admiring spectators, would probably feel that the neces- sities of his position were more than compensated by itd awe- striking grandeur, and by the full satisfaction of ambitious dreams ; subject indeed to poignant suffering when wounded in the tender point, and when reaping insult in place of admiration, at the me- morable Olympic festival of 384 B. c., above-described. But the caused to be suspended over his head by a horsehair, in the midst of tho enjoyments of the banquet, as an illustration how little was the value ol grandeur in the midst of terror is recounted by Cicero. 1 Plutarch, Dion, c. 3 ; Plutarch, Timoleon, c. 6. tarch, etc., is nowhere so forcibly laid out as in the dialogue of Xenophon called IJiero of which indeed it forma t'ue text and theme. Whoever reads this picture of the position of a (jiccian ripavvo^, will see that it wa scarcely possible for a man so placed cr. Do other than a cruel and oppici ive rulot
 * This sentiment, pronounced by Plato, Isokrates, Cicero, Seneca, Plu-