Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.5, 1865).djvu/304

 296 DION. afiliirs ; and Plato, as we said before, rebuked him, and wrote to tell hira that self-will keeps house with solitude. But certainly his natural temperament was one that could not bend to complaisance ; and, besides, he wished to work the Syracusans back the other way, out of their present excess of license and caprice. Heraclides began again to set up against him, and, being invited by Dion to make one of the Council, refused to come, saying he would give his opinion as a private citizen in the public assembly. Next he complained of Dion because he had not demolished the citadel, and be- cause he had hindered the people from throwing down Dionysius's tomb and doing despite to the dead ; more- over he accused him for sending to Corinth for counsel- lors and assistants in the government, thereby neglecting and slighting his fellow-citizens. And indeed he had sent messages for some Corinthians to come to him, hoping by their means and presence the better to settle that consti- tution he intended; for he designed to suppress the unlimited democratic government, which indeed is not a goverirment, but, as Plato calls it, a market-place of governments,* and to introduce and establish a mixed polity, on the Spartan and Cretan model, between a com- monwealth and a monarchy, wherein an aristocratic body should preside, and determine all matters of greatest consequence ; for he saw also that the Corinthians were chiefly governed by something like an oligarchy, and the people but little concerned in public business. 557. — In the absolutely democratic directed hither to this mart and state of things there is no fixed form magazine of governments, where of government at all ; every man he may find every variety of rule is his own government ; so that of life and conduct. A public rule the philosophic inquirer in search of life and conduct is what Plato of the best form of polity should cer- means by government.
 * See the Republic, book vii., p. tainly, says Plato in his irony, be