The mystic turn of imagination, the sententious brevity, and the mathematical researches of the Pythagoreans, produced doubtless an imposing effect upon Dion; just as Lysis, a member of that brotherhood, had acquired the attachment and influenced the sentiments of Epaminondas at Thebes. But Plato’s power of working upon the minds of young men was far more impressive and irresistible. He possessed a large range of practical experience, a mastery of political and social topics, and a charm of eloquence, to which the Pythagoreans were strangers. The stirring effect of the Sokratic talk, as well as of the democratical atmosphere 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.[119] 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. [119] See a remarkable passage, Plato, Epist. vii p. 328 F. The conception of a free community—with correlative rights and duties belonging to every citizen, determined by laws and protected 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 philosophers 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 performance of his duties as a citizen; a subject which Plato (as we see by his dialogues) did not simply propound with the direct enforcement of a preacher, but touched with the quickening and pungent effect, and reinforced with the copious practical illustrations, of Sokratic dialogue.