The prophetic persuasion under which this unhappy man perished, that divine vengeance would soon overtake his destroyer, was noway borne out by the subsequent reality. The power and prosperity of Dionysius underwent abatement by his war with the Carthaginians in 383 B. C., yet remained very considerable even to his dying day. And the misfortunes which fell thickly upon his son the younger Dionysius, more than thirty years afterwards, though they doubtless received a religious interpretation from contemporary critics, were probably ascribed to acts more recent than the barbarities inflicted on Phyton. But these barbarities, if not avenged, were at least laid to heart with profound sympathy by the contemporary world, and even commemorated with tenderness and pathos by poets. While Dionysius was composing tragedies (of which more presently) in hopes of applause in Greece, he was himself furnishing real matter of history, not less tragical than the sufferings of those legendary heroes and heroines to which he (in common with other poets) resorted for a subject. Among the many acts of cruelty, more or less aggravated, which it is the melancholy duty of an historian of Greece to recount, there are few so revolting as the death of the Rhegine general; who was not a subject, nor a conspirator, nor a rebel, but an enemy in open warfare—of whom the worst that even Dionysius himself could say, was, that he had persuaded his countrymen into the war. And even this could not be said truly; since the antipathy of the Rhegines towards Dionysius was of old standing, traceable to his enslavement of Naxos and Katana, if not to causes yet earlier—though the statement of Phyton may very probably be true, that Dionysius had tried to bribe him to betray Rhegium (as the generals of Naxos and Katana had been bribed to betray their respective cities), and was incensed beyond measure at finding the proposition repelled. The Hellenic war-practice was in itself sufficiently cruel. Both Athenians and Lacedæmonians put to death prisoners of war by wholesale, after the capture of Melos, after the battle of Ægospotami, and elsewhere. But to make death worse than death by a deliberate and protracted tissue of tortures and indignities, is not Hellenic; it is Carthaginian and Asiatic. Dionysius had shown himself better than a Greek when he released without ransom the Krotoniate prisoners captured at the battle of Kaulonia; but he became far worse than a Greek, and worse even than his own mercenaries, when he heaped aggravated suffering, beyond the simple death-warrant, on the heads of Phyton and his kindred.