Page:History of Greece Vol XI.djvu/84

 38 HISTORY OF GREECE. phei in which Plato had been brought up, had developed all the communicative aptitude of his mind ; and great as that aptitude appears in his remaining dialogues, there is ground for believing that it was far greater in his conversation ; greater perhaps in 387 B. c., when he was still mainly the Sokratic Plato than it became in later days, after he had imbibed to a certain extent the mysticism of these Pythagoreans. 1 Brought up as Dion had been at the court of Dionysius accustomed to see around him only slavish deference and luxurious enjoyment unused to open speech or large philosophical discussion he found in Plato a new man exhibited, and a new world opened before him. The conception of a free community with correlative rights and duties belonging to every citizen, determined by laws and pro- tected or enforced by power emanating from the collective entity called the City stood in the foreground of ordinary Grecian morality reigned spontaneously in the bosoms of every Grecian festival crowd and had been partially imbibed by Dion, though not from his own personal experience, yet from teachers, sophists, and poets. This conception, essential and fundamental with phi- losophers as well as with the vulgar, was not merely set forth by Plato with commanding powers of speech, but also exalted with Improvements and refinements into an ideal perfection. Above all, it was based upon a strict, even an abstemious and ascetic, canon, as to individual enjoyment; and upon a careful training both of mind and body, qualifying each man for the due perform- ance of his duties as a citizen ; a subject which Plato (as we see hy his dialogues) did not simply propound with the direct enforce- ment of a preacher, but touched with the quickening and pungent effect, and reinforced with the copious practical illustrations, of Sokratic dialogue. As the stimulus from the teacher was here put forth with con- summate efficacy, so the predisposition of the learner enabled it to take full effect. Dion became an altered man both in public sen- timent and in individual behavior. He recollected that twenty years before, his country Syracuse had been as free as Athens. He learnt to abhor the iniquity of the despotism by which her liberty had been overthrown, and by which subsequently the lib- 1 See a remarkable passage, TJato, Epist. vii p. 328 F.