The young Dionysius was not only profoundly impressed with the superior wisdom and suggestive resource of Dion, but also grateful for his generous offer of pecuniary as well as personal support.[132] In all probability Dion actually carried the offer into effect, for to a man of his disposition, money had little value except as a means of extending influence and acquiring reputation. The war with Carthage seems to have lasted at least throughout the next year,[133] and to have been terminated not long afterwards. But it never assumed those perilous proportions which had been contemplated by the council as probable. As a mere contingency, however, it was sufficient to inspire Dionysius with alarm, combined with the other exigencies of his new situation. At first he was painfully conscious of his own inexperience; anxious about hazards which he now saw for the first time, and not merely open to advice, but eager and thankful for suggestions, from any quarter where he could place confidence. Dion, identified by ancient connection as well as by marriage with the Dionysian family—trusted, more than any one else, by the old despot, and surrounded with that accessory dignity which ascetic strictness of life usually confers in excess—presented every title to such confidence. And when he was found not only the most trustworthy, but the most frank and fearless, of councillors, Dionysius gladly yielded both to the measures which he advised and to the impulses which he inspired. [132] Plutarch, Dion, c. 7. Ὁ μὲν οὖν Διονύσιος ὑπερφυῶς τὴν μεγαλοψυχίαν ἐθαύμασε καὶ τὴν προθυμίαν ἠγάπησεν. [133] Dionysius II. was engaged at war at the time when Plato first visited him at Syracuse, within the year immediately after his accession (Plato, Epistol. iii. p. 317 A). We may reasonably presume that this was the war with Carthage. Compare Diodorus (xvi. 5), who mentions that the younger Dionysius also carried on war for some little time, in a languid manner, against the Lucanians; and that he founded two cities on the coast of Apulia in the Adriatic. I think it probable that these two last-mentioned foundations were acts of Dionysius I., not of Dionysius II. They were not likely to be undertaken by a young prince of backward disposition, at his first accession.