[104] Plutarch, De Fortunâ Alexandr. Magni, p. 338 B. What were the crimes of Dionysius which Pausanias had read and describes by the general words Διονυσίου τὰ ἀνοσιώτατα—and which he accuses Philistus of having intentionally omitted in his history—we cannot now tell (Pausan. i. 13, 2: compare Plutarch, Dion, c. 36). An author named Amyntianus, contemporary with Pausanias, and among those perused by Photius (Codex 131), had composed parallel lives of Dionysius and the Emperor Domitian. [105] Plato, Epistol. vii. p. 332 A; Aristotel. Politic. v. 5, 6. [106] Plato, Epistol. vii. p. 332 D. Διονύσιος δὲ εἰς μίαν πόλιν ἀθροίσας πᾶσαν Σικελίαν ὑπὸ σοφίας, ~πιστεύων οὐδενὶ, μόγις ἐσώθη~, etc. This brief, but significant expression of Plato, attests the excessive mistrust which haunted Dionysius, as a general fact; which is illustrated by the anecdotes of Cicero, Tuscul. Disput. v. 20, 23; and De Officiis, ii. 7; Plutarch, Dion, c. 9; Diodor. xiv. 2. The well-known anecdote of Damoklês, and the sword which Dionysius caused to be suspended over his head by a horsehair, in the midst of the enjoyments of the banquet, as an illustration how little was the value of grandeur in the midst of terror—is recounted by Cicero. [107] Plutarch, Dion, c. 3; Plutarch, Timoleon, c. 6. 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 exemption. Though philosophers emphatically insisted that such a man must be miserable,[108] yet Dionysius himself, as well as the great mass of admiring spectators, would probably feel that the necessities of his position were more than compensated by its 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 memorable Olympic festival of 384 B. C., above-described. But the Syracusans, over whom he ruled, enjoyed no such compensation for that which they suffered from his tax-gatherers—from his garrison of Gauls, Iberians, and Campanians, in Ortygia—from his spies—his prison—and his executioners. [108] This sentiment, pronounced by Plato, Isokratês, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, etc., is nowhere so forcibly laid out as in the dialogue of Xenophon called _Hiero_—of which indeed it forms the text and theme. Whoever reads this picture of the position of a Grecian τύραννος, will see that it was scarcely possible for a man so placed to be other than a cruel and oppressive ruler.