Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.5, 1865).djvu/300

 292 DION them to refresh themselves, and take their rest, he em- ployed his own men all night, and by morning had finished his line of palisade ; so that both the enemy and the citizens wondered, when day returned, to see the work so far advanced in so short a time. Burying there- fore the dead, and redeeming the prisoners, who were near two thousand, he called a public assembly, where Heraclides made a motion that Dion should be declared general with full powers at land and sea. The better cit- izens approved well of it, and called on the people to vote it so. But the mob of sailors and handicraftsmen would not yield that Heraclides should lose his command of the navy ; believing him, if otherwise an ill man, at any rate to be more citizenlike than Dion, and readier to comply with the people. Dion therefore submitted to them in this, and consented Heraclides should continue admiral. But when they began to press the project of the redistri- bution of lands and houses, he not only opposed it, but repealed all the votes they had formerly made upon that account, which sensibly vexed them. Heraclides, there- fore, took a new advantage of him, and, being at Messene, harangued the soldiers and ships' crews that sailed with him, accusing Dion that he had a design to make himself absolute. And yet at the same time he held private cor- respondence for a treaty with Dionysius by means of Pha- rax the Spartan. Which when the noble citizens of Syracuse had intimation of, there arose a sedition in the army, and the city was in great distress and want of pro- visions ; and Dion now knew not what course to take, being also blamed by all his friends for having thus forti- fied against himself such a perverse and jealous and utterly corrupted man as Heraclides was. Pharax at this time lay encamped at Neapolis, in the territory of Agrigentum. Dion, therefore, led out the Syracusans, but with an intent not to engage him till he